THE IDIOT BOX
Monday, June 1st, 2015
If you could live your life in sitcom land and just forget about war, poverty, homelessness, and the complexities of human sexuality, would you?
Playwright Michael Elyanow poses this question in his very funny, very smart The Idiot Box, back for only its second L.A. production ever, and a highly entertaining one at that as staged by Theatre 68 at the NoHo Arts Center.
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ENTROPY
Monday, May 25th, 2015
It cost Warner Brothers a hundred million dollars to make Gravity. It’s probably cost Theatre Of NOTE one or two ten-thousandths of that to stage Entropy, and believe me, the latest from NOTE is a lot more fun than that Oscar-winning Alfonso Cuarón flick. A whole lot more fun.
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PETER AND THE STARCATCHER
Thursday, May 21st, 2015
Imagination reigns supreme as South Coast Repertory presents Peter And The Starcatcher, fabulous news indeed for those who may have missed the play’s Broadway National Tour or for those like this reviewer who simply couldn’t resist a second chance to spend a couple of hours with Peter Pan in his pre-Neverland days.
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MUD BLUE SKY
Monday, May 11th, 2015
If three middle-aged flight attendants spending the night with a 17-year-old high school boy in a Chicago hotel room sounds like the setup for a 1960s sex farce à la Boeing-Boeing, think again. Marisa Wegrzyn’s Mud Blue Sky, the latest from The Road Theatre Company, turns out to be not just a laugh-out-loud comedy but a touching look at friendship, parenting, life choices, sisterhood, loneliness, growing older, and coming of age in the 21st Century.
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SAMSARA
Sunday, May 10th, 2015
A 30something NoCal couple hire a surrogate in faraway India to give birth to the child neither is biologically capable of conceiving in Lauren Yee’s imaginative, funny, at times overly cutesy, but ultimately quite moving Samsara, now getting a splendidly acted and directed West Coast Premiere at Anaheim Hills’ Chance Theater.
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AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS
Saturday, May 9th, 2015
It took legendary Hollywood producer Mike Todd around $50,000,000 in today’s currency to bring science fiction writer Jules Verne’s Around The World In Eighty Days to the Todd-AO 70mm big screen back in 1958.
Actors Co-op does the same in 2015 with maybe about one-half-percent the budget, and I defy anyone to find the Co-op’s supremely imaginative, endlessly inventive small-stage revival any less entertaining than its Hollywood blockbuster predecessor.
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BUYER & CELLAR
Monday, April 20th, 2015
“Mem’ries” light the corners of struggling actor Alex More’s mind, but they are neither “misty” nor “water-colored” given that the divinely heavenly boss-from-hell whom Alex is “rememb’ring” in Jonathan Tolins’ hilarious Buyer & Cellar, now getting an absolutely fabulous San Diego Premiere at The Old Globe, is none other Barbra herself, no family name required.
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FIGARO
Friday, April 10th, 2015
The very first West Coast staging of a 2012 World Premiere may not be what folks expect from A Noise Within given the company’s usual slate of Shakespeare, Shaw, Racine, Moliere, and other long-deceased playwrights, but that is precisely what California’s Home For The Classics now offers its audiences in Charles Moray’s Figaro, the frothiest, funniest, most farcical romp I’ve yet seen at ANW.
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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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