TIMESHARE
Monday, January 11th, 2016RECOMMENDED
A ragtag sales staff’s attempts to convince would-be buyers to take a chance on the proverbial “deal of a lifetime” add up to a series of wild-and-wacky Act One vignettes till a pre-intermission plot twist sends Steve B. Green’s World Premiere comedy Timeshare into darker, somewhat less successful territory.
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YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU
Friday, January 8th, 2016
Glendale Centre Theatre welcomes in 2016 with a terrifically directed and performed 80th-anniversary revival of You Can’t Take It With You, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedic look at the charmingly eccentric Vanderhoff/Sycamore clan, a multigenerational family residing together in perfect, if oddball, harmony in a large New York City home circa 1936.
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ANOTHER ANTIGONE
Monday, January 4th, 2016RECOMMENDED
A.R. Gurney’s smartly comic look at university life (and the Greek classics) circa the late 1980s gets a welcome if imperfect revival at The Group Rep, one that could benefit from a more assured directorial vision and a more credible female lead performance.
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WHO KILLED SANTA?
Friday, December 25th, 2015
The white-bearded Fat Man In Red has been candy-caned to death and it’s up to the audience to decide who amongst five iconic Christmas characters “dunit” in Neil Haven’s Avenue Q-inspired, R-rated Who Killed Santa?, a Milwaukee perennial since 2008 now making its West Coast debut at Theatre 68, and while those who insist upon sophistication, refinement, and wit may want to look elsewhere for their holiday entertainment, Haven’s cult smash does what it sets out to do. It makes you laugh.
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THE JEW WHO SAVED CHRISTMAS
Tuesday, December 15th, 2015RECOMMENDED
The jokes may be broad, the characters stereotypical, and performances far from nuanced, but Andy Shultz’s The Jew Who Saved Christmas!, the latest from Zombie Joes Underground Theatre Group, does precisely what a comedy is supposed to do—it makes you laugh.
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CASH ON DELIVERY
Monday, December 7th, 2015
The words “Oh what a tangled web we weave” have rarely been truer than they are about out-of-work landlord Eric Swan, whose multiple attempts to deceive the British Department Of Social Security are about to be found out in Michael Cooney’s side-splitting farce Cash On Delivery, now getting a sensationally performed big-stage revival at the El Portal Theatre, directed by (and co-starring) none other than Cooney’s celebrated playwright dad Ray.
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A VERY DIE HARD CHRISTMAS
Sunday, December 6th, 2015
One of America’s most beloved holiday movie classics is back … and live on stage in Theatre Unleashed’s West Coast Premiere of Josh Carson’s A Very Die Hard Christmas, the Bruce Willis megasmash as seen through a Saturday Night Live lens, with puppets and songs thrown in for hilarious measure.
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RIO HONDO
Saturday, December 5th, 2015
Earlier this year in their brilliantly spoofy Entropy, playwright Bill Robens and Theatre Of NOTE managed somehow to stage a gazillion-dollar Hollywood space-travel epic inside a 40something-seat theater. Robens and NOTE now work the same magic on that most American of movie genres—the Western—in their World Premiere comedy Rio Hondo, to my knowledge the very first L.A. theater production presented “in CinemaStage” and one that no horse opera lover will want to miss.
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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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