CHINGLISH
Wednesday, February 6th, 2013
“East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” … because if so, complications will surely ensue as they do in David Henry Hwang’s hilarious (and eye-opening) Chinglish, freshly arrived at South Coast Repertory from Berkeley Rep with its entire creative team and virtually its entire cast intact.
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FALLEN ANGELS
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013
The Pasadena Playhouse has come up with a surefire recipe for crowd-pleasing comedy. Start with a script by a master playwright, hire a cast of crackerjack comedic whizzes, surround them with a production that looks as smashing as Broadway’s best, and above all, entrust the entire project to director Art Manke, who has taken an early Noël Coward gem and turned it into a hilarious hit that would do Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance proud.
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PLAZA SUITE
Sunday, January 27th, 2013
Neil Simon was the reigning King Of Broadway when his Plaza Suite opened at the Plymouth Theatre on Valentine’s Day, 1968. Only two years before, Simon’s Sweet Charity, The Star-Spangled Girl, The Odd Couple, and Barefoot in the Park were all four playing simultaneously on the Great White Way, and Plaza Suite, the next Simon comedy to open in New York ran over a thousand performances and on into the next decade.
It’s this still rib-tickling, still relevant collection of three short plays, each of them unfolding in Suite 719 of New York’s posh and pricey Plaza Hotel, that the Morgan-Wixson Theatre now revives to near perfection in a production blessed by inspired direction and a pair of sensational lead performances.
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AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS
Saturday, January 26th, 2013
Imagine you wanted to dramatize one of science fiction writer Jules Verne’s greatest novels, one which imagined a journey around the world circa 1872 in a then unimaginable eighty days with stops in Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York, and then back to London, an adventure that would include dozens of characters along the way, onboard train and ship and atop elephant, and involve a daring rescue, a visit to a Chinese opium den, an Apache attack, and one unexpected delay after another.
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CHAPTER TWO
Friday, January 25th, 2013
Love’s more wonderful the second time around for widowed novelist George Schneider in Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, or at least it would be if memories of his beloved late wife Barbara didn’t get in the way of starting afresh with actress Jennie Malone.
Simon’s 1977 gem arrives at Laguna Playhouse as fresh and funny as ever, the absence of the Internet, cell phones, and social media making it a delightful period piece as do mentions of As The World Turns, Merv Griffin, and Fresca.
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BOEING-BOEING
Monday, January 21st, 2013
Theatergoers wanting to start off the New Year with a good laugh—or a thousand of them—are hereby advised to head on over to the La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts where McCoy Rigby Entertainment is opening its 2013 season with Marc Camoletti’s saucy, sexy French farce Boeing-Boeing.
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THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT
Wednesday, January 16th, 2013
The play with arguably the most unprintable title in Broadway history now gets its West Coast Premiere at South Coast Repertory, once again providing mainstream publications, broadcast media, and SCR with the following dilemma—how to write or talk about a comedy whose title New York publications censored as either The ___________ With the Hat or The [Expletive] With the Hat or The Mother With The Hat (say what?), and whose “official” title is for most media the still unprintable The Motherf**cker With the Hat. Perhaps that’s why, despite the star power of Bobby Cannavale, Chris Rock, and Annabella Sciorra in the original New York cast and a total of six Tony nominations, popular playwright Stephen Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Broadway debut closed after a grand total of 28 previews and 112 performances.
Fortunately for South Coast Rep, The Motherfucker With The Hat (there, I’ve written it and will write it again) has generated enough buzz (it was the 8th most produced play in the U.S. last year) that even lacking name stars, that buzz—plus the rave reviews this sensational production has already generated—is likely to keep every one of the Julianne Argyros Stage’s 336 seats filled throughout its three-week run.
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HEAVEN CAN WAIT
Friday, January 11th, 2013
Jennifer Garner did it in 13 Going On 30. Robert Downey Jr. did it in Chances Are. Ellen Barkin did it in Switch. Warren Beatty did it in Heaven Can Wait, and before him Robert Montgomery in Here Comes Mr. Jordan.
What all these movie stars did was suddenly find themselves occupying someone else’s body in that ever popular genre—the body-switch flick.
Glendale native Tommy Kearney now returns to his home turf in Glendale Centre Theatre’s tiptop revival of Harry Segall’s 1930s body-switch gem Heaven Can Wait, adapted for the screen as both Here Comes Mr. Jordan and Heaven Can Wait, and if for no other reason than to see Kearney’s star-making performance as pugilist Joe Pendleton, this is one production comedy lovers won’t 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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