Author Archive

LAUGHTER ON THE 23RD FLOOR

Neil Simon takes us back to 1953 when Sid Caesar’s Your Show Of Shows ruled the airwaves in Laughter On The 23rd Floor, his 1993 Broadway valentine to TV’s early years now getting a sensationally directed and performed Toluca Lake revival at The Garry Marshall Theatre.
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CABARET

USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory once again rivals the finest intimate professional theater in town with its all-around smashing student-performed, student-directed, student-designed revival of the 1966 Kander and Ebb classic Cabaret.
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THE BOOK OF MORMON

Six years into touring the U.S. and still going strong, The Book Of Mormon pays its third visit to the Segerstrom Center For Arts with an absolutely fabulous, almost entirely new cast, the 2011 Best Musical Tony winner continuing to entertain and delight audiences with its distinctive mix of raunch and romance, hilarity and heart.
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HENRY V

Those who insist on three-plus hours of Shakespeare may well get their knickers in a twist over the sixty-some minutes chopped from Julia Rodriguez-Elliott and Geoff Elliott’s excitement-packed Henry V now on show at Pasadena’s A Noise Within. Not this reviewer, who welcomes not just its refreshingly brief two-hours-and-change running time but its multitude of action movie-ready thrills.
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LITTLE WOMEN, THE MUSICAL

Santa Monica’s venerable Morgan-Wixson Theatre once again blurs the lines between community and professional theater with the best performed of the more than half-dozen big-and-small-stage Little Women, The Musicals I’ve seen.
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AN UNDIVIDED HEART

Pedophile Catholic priests and toxic waste-dumping chemical plants form the backdrop of Yusuf Toropov’s An Undivided Heart, a Circle X. Theatre Co./Echo Theater Company World Premiere that despite occasional tonal inconsistency and lack of clarity proves a powerful indictment of church-and-corporation-sanctioned abuse.
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BINGO HALL

A high school boy navigating unrequited feelings for a female best friend while making college plans either to stay close to home or to travel thousands of miles away is a tale, if not as old as time, at least as ancient as the John Hughes 1980s, but it feels fresh and new when the high schooler in question has only ever known life on a New Mexico Indian reservation in Dillon Chitto’s World Premiere comedy Bingo Hall.
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DAMN YANKEES

Inland Valley Repertory Theatre serves up midweek musical entertainment at Claremont’s Candlelight Pavilion with its revival of the 1955 Broadway smash Damn Yankees.
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