BABY EYES
Tuesday, October 16th, 2018Playwright Donald Jolly takes us back to 1950s Baltimore via Ancient Greece in Baby Eyes, a Playwrights’ Arena World Premiere that scores points for ambitious intentions if not for its campy mix of ancient myth, Greek tragedy, ’50s melodrama, and men in drag.
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GLORIA
Tuesday, September 25th, 2018
The office banter amongst the millennials who toil for a New Yorker-style magazine in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Gloria may be catty, querulous, gossipy, back-stabbing, and hilarious as all get-out, but the 33-year-old playwright has far more than edgy cable sitcom humor on his mind in his 2015 off-Broadway hit, a ripped-from-today’s-headlines gut-puncher of an Echo Theater Company West Coast Premiere.
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CRY IT OUT
Tuesday, July 17th, 2018
You don’t have to be a stay-at-home nursing mom to fall in love with Molly Smith Metzler’s Cry It Out, but if you are, this one’s especially for you, and it’s about time.
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ARRIVAL & DEPARTURE
Monday, July 16th, 2018
A deaf New York film professor and a hearing-impaired bookkeeper fall head over heels into adulterous love in Arrival & Departure, playwright Stephen Sachs’ 21st-century updating of Noel Coward’s über-romantic cinematic classic Brief Encounter, a compelling, excitingly staged, terrifically acted Fountain Theatre World Premiere whose script could still use some work.
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THE HUMANS
Wednesday, June 27th, 2018
Laughter and fears go hand in hand at Thanksgiving dinner in Stephen Karam’s justifiably honored Best Play Tony-winner The Humans, now playing at the Ahmanson with its Tony-winning stars Jayne Howdyshell and Reed Birney (and all but one of its original Broadway ensemble members) intact.
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MEXICAN DAY
Saturday, June 16th, 2018
Following the hallucinogenic surrealism of Plunge and the real-time fireworks of Tar, playwright Tom Jacobson concludes his mammoth Bimini Bath Trilogy with no less than an old-fashioned 1940s-style screwball comedy (with dramatic overtones) called Mexican Day, like its predecessors an enthralling, enlightening look at 20th-century L.A. history.
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CLYBOURNE PARK
Monday, June 11th, 2018
White flight circa 1959 and urban gentrification five decades later fuel Bruce Norris’s button-pushing, political-correctness-be-damned comedy Clybourne Park, winner of both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play, the finest production I’ve seen at Laguna Playhouse and one of the year’s very best.
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RED SPEEDO
Monday, May 28th, 2018
Obie-winning Tony-nominated playwright Lucas Hnath (The Christians, A Doll’s House, Part 2) takes on Sex, Drugs, and Olympic Sports in Red Speedo, the theatrical equivalent of a Raging Waters thrill ride now getting a gold-medal Southern California Premiere at the Road on Magnolia.
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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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