BRILLIANT TRACES
Saturday, February 25th, 2012
A bedraggled young woman barges into a seemingly deserted Alaska cabin in the midst of a raging snowstorm, a frenzied look on her face, a torn, filthy wedding dress hanging off her like a grubby old rag. Suddenly becoming aware of a blanket-hooded figure seated on the cabin’s sole bed, she launches into a stream-of-consciousness monolog describing in detail how she kept from getting frostbite on the way from a dead car to the stranger’s cabin following days upon days of near nonstop driving, with only rare pauses for gas, a pee, a candy bar, or a Coke. Eventually, the combination of sugar withdrawal (“This is a Mars bars tremble,” she explains when she can’t get her hands to stop shaking) and multiple swigs from a whiskey bottle left conveniently atop the stranger’s kitchen table, the young woman crumples gracefully to the floor in a faint. Only then does the stranger rise and reveal himself to be a handsome, bearded young man with an unconscious woman in the middle of his house.
Thus begins Cindy Lou Johnson’s utterly riveting comedy-drama Brilliant Traces, now being revived (and quite terrifically so) at Hollywood’s Lounge Theatre.
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PRIVATE LIVES
Friday, February 24th, 2012
Noël Coward’s Private Lives is back for its third L.A.-area production in a scant six months, but only the first to present Coward’s still-fresh-at-72 romcom classic up close and personal—adroitly directed by Jules Aaron and spiffily acted by a topnotch cast of five at Burbank’s 98-seat Grove Theatre Center.
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THREE YEAR SWIM CLUB
Thursday, February 16th, 2012
In the time-honored tradition of fact-based underdog sports tales like Hoosiers, We Are Marshall, and the recent Moneyball, East West Players now presents the Mainland Premiere of Three Year Swim Club, Lee Tonouchi’s crowd-pleasing true story of a Hawaiian swim coach and the ragtag band of Maui plantation kids he is bound and determined to send to the 1940 Olympics.
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ELEMENO PEA
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
Blue collar meets upper crust in of Elemeno Pea, Molly Smith Metzler’s hilarious, perceptive culture clash comedy, now making its West Coast debut at South Coast Repertory.
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TWENTIETH CENTURY
Monday, February 6th, 2012
Screwball comedy is in expert hands as the Sierra Madre Playhouse revives Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Twentieth Century, tweaked by Ken Ludwig to give the 1930s piece a 21st Century sensibility while maintaining all the classic elements of screwball.
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GOD OF CARNAGE
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
Long Beach’s International City Theater trumps the competition with its 2012 season opener of Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning Best Play of 2009 God Of Carnage, a production which, while not technically its West Coast Premiere (Center Theatre Group got that honor by merely importing the Broadway team), nonetheless merits true event status for being built entirely from the ground up—brand new actors, a brand new director, and a brand new team of designers, all of them doing bang-up work on the ICT stage.
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ART
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
There’s nothing like star quality to turn yet another revival of an oft-produced play into an event—not celebrity stunt casting, but rather that combination of talent, individuality, and charisma that true stars bring to whatever project they undertake.
Such is the case with the Pasadena Playhouse’s fabulous all-star revival of Yasmina Reza’s Art, the French playwright’s Tony-winning Best Play of 1998.
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DIVIDING THE ESTATE
Monday, January 30th, 2012
The late, great Horton Foote returned to the small-town Texas he knew so well—in comedic mode this time round—in his Dividing The Estate, Tony-nominated as Best Play of 2009 and now playing at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre with two-thirds of its New York cast intact, including Foote’s daughter Hallie in the role that scored her a Tony nomination.
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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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