Author Archive
‘S WONDERFUL
Sunday, April 6th, 2014
Take forty classic George Gershwin tunes, round up five stellar triple-threats to perform them, tie the three dozen-plus songs together into five mini-musicals with the wispiest of plots, add some snappy choreography from an up-and-coming Broadway whiz kid, back the whole thing up with a terrific seven-piece orchestra, and you’ve got ‘S Wonderful: The New Gershwin Musical, the latest charmer from Music Theatre West.
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ALTAR BOYZ
Saturday, April 5th, 2014
The Christian boy band known as the Altar Boyz have returned to L.A. for the first time in five years in a no-frills production that proves that even without a fancy set, pricy costumes, and surround sound, entertainment value can remain high when performances sparkle under a director as imaginative as Kristin Towers-Rowles.
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GRAND HOTEL
Friday, April 4th, 2014
Broadway buffs are hereby advised. You’ve got this weekend and next to catch what may well be the only big-stage, big-cast revival you’ll ever see of the multiple Tony-winning Grand Hotel.
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THE LAST ACT OF LILKA KADISON
Thursday, April 3rd, 2014
The ghosts of the past return to haunt an 87-year-old Jewish widow—and to make magic in more ways than one—as the Falcon Theatre treats L.A. audiences to the West Coast Premiere of The Last Act Of Lilka Kadison, yet another gem from one of L.A.’s finest Equity houses.
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DOCTOR ANONYMOUS
Tuesday, April 1st, 2014NOT RECOMMENDED
The gay liberation movement may have started in earnest with the 1969 Stonewall riots, but homosexuality was still deemed a “curable” mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association in 1972 when a masked Dr. John E. Fryer addressed the annual APA conference as “Dr. H. Anonymous,” beginning his speech with the simple words “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.”
A year later homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Inspired by Fryer’s speech, psychiatrist/playwright Guy Fredrick Glass has written Doctor Anonymous, now getting its World Premiere at the Zephyr Theatre, and though several of its actors rise above the material, neither their performances nor a topnotch production design can mask Doctor Anonymous’s many serious flaws.
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FLOYD COLLINS
Monday, March 31st, 2014
In the early days of 1925, decades before Baby Jessica and O.J. and Monica Lewinsky and Nancy & Tonya and Watergate and Laci Peterson and Patty Hearst and Jon Benet and Octomom and Iran Contra and countless other 20th Century media circuses, a young Kentucky cave explorer named Floyd Collins became trapped in a narrow crawlway over fifty feet underground. Efforts to rescue him ignited a media frenzy, aided and abetted by the recent advent of broadcast radio that helped spread the news across the country.
Inspired by the two-week-long efforts to save Collins from a subterranean grave (and the carnival atmosphere that surrounded the rescue mission), Adam Guettel and Tina Landau wrote the 1996 Lucille Lortel/Obie Award-winning Floyd Collins, one of the most powerful musicals of the past two decades and one which La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts has now given an intimate “ONSTAGE” production that proves a brilliant follow-up to last year’s smash Spring Awakening.
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IN THE HEIGHTS
Saturday, March 29th, 2014
The Tony-winning Best Musical of 2008 with its original Tony-winning choreography and orchestrations, its original Tony-nominated Broadway scenic and costume designs, and a cast of some of Southern California’s finest triple-threats… All of this adds up to the very first Broadway-scale L.A.-adjacent regional production of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s In The Heights, one of the finest Cabrillo Music Theatre productions ever.
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A STEADY RAIN
Friday, March 28th, 2014
Two superb actors stand in for the proverbial “cast of thousands” to make for as thrillingly visual a ninety minutes of edge-of-your-seat theater as you’d get in any big-screen blockbuster, as the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble presents the Los Angeles Premiere of Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain under Jeff Perry’s electric direction.
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Since 2007, Steven Stanley's StageSceneLA.com has spotlighted the best in Southern California theater via reviews, interviews, and its annual StageSceneLA Scenies.
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