THE MONGOOSE
Monday, March 7th, 2016NOT RECOMMENDED
Acting, direction, and design are all Grade A in The Mongoose, but what on earth prompted The Road Theatre Company to give Will Arbery’s head-scratcher of a script the go-ahead?
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PAST TIME
Saturday, February 20th, 2016
Stepping inside someone else’s skin may be just what Grandpa James and Grandson Chris need to make their respective romantic lives click in Padraic Duffy’s deliciously quirky, often side-splittingly funny, ultimately heartwarming (albeit somewhat over-padded) World Premiere comedy Past Time, now playing at Sacred Fools’ excitingly refurbished digs on Hollywood’s Theatre Row.
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CRIERS FOR HIRE
Thursday, February 18th, 2016
A trio of SoCal Filipinas earning extra cash by weeping and wailing at funerals may provide the title (and the hook) for Giovanni Ortega’s Criers For Hire, but it’s the play’s mother-daughter reunion and its look at a teenage girl’s coming-of-age in a new land that give Ortega’s delightful, charming World Premiere comedy its emotional heart and punch.
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PRIVATE EYES
Sunday, January 17th, 2016
Reality and fiction. Truth and lies. Has any playwright had more fun fooling (and delighting and engaging) an audience than Steven Dietz does in Private Eyes, the best straight-play production I’ve seen at Santa Monica’s venerable community theater, the Morgan-Wixson, and one that easily holds its own against the top professional houses in town.
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DEN OF THIEVES
Saturday, January 16th, 2016
Organized crime meets a quartet of disorganized would-be criminals to wild and wacky effect in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Den Of Thieves, now getting a hilarious 20th-anniversary revival by 2Cents Theatre Group.
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THE MADWOMAN IN THE VOLVO
Wednesday, January 13th, 2016RECOMMENDED
Solo queen Sandra Tsing Loh has arrived at South Coast Rep with a couple of guest actresses in tow for The Madwoman In The Volvo, an autobiographical look at menopause and infidelity more likely to appeal to female theatergoers forty-five and older than to those who don’t fit this specific demographic.
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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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