THE PAJAMA GAME
Saturday, June 2nd, 2012
Carousel, Funny Girl, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, South Pacific … Probably no local Civic Light Opera so consistently revives classic musical comedies from Broadway’s Golden Age as Downey CLO, and their first-ever production of 1954’s The Pajama Game is one of their best revivals ever.
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MISS SAIGON
Friday, April 20th, 2012
When recreating one of Broadway’s biggest smash hits of the 1990s, there’s perhaps no better way of keeping things fresh than to start off with a creative team brand new to the project. That’s precisely the approach that McCoy Rigby Entertainment have taken with the La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts’ Miss Saigon, a production guaranteed to thrill Southland audiences with its epic blend of war, romance, gorgeous melodies, and show-stopping production numbers. Directed by Brian Kite with an eye to the authentic, this Miss Saigon focuses on the human relationships central to the story while maintaining the elements of spectacle that have been thrilling audiences worldwide for more than two decades.
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COLE
Saturday, February 18th, 2012
When asked who wrote “Some Enchanted Evening,” Cole Porter is said to have replied, “Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you can imagine it taking two men to write one song,” a clever way of pointing out that unlike most of his contemporaries (Irving Berlin excluded), Cole Porter did the work of two. Not only that, but he did it better than just about anyone else around, writing both de-loveliest melodies in town and quite possibly the cleverest lyrics ever heard on a Broadway stage. “Birds do it, bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it. Let’s fall in love.” “I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all. So tell me why should it be true, that I get a kick out of you?” “He may have hair upon his chest but, sister, so has Lassie.” Did anyone do it better than Cole?
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THE 39 STEPS
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
A quarter century before Cary Grant found himself pursued across the United States by enemy spies mistakenly believing him to be a CIA agent in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller North By Northwest, a young man named Richard Hannay wound up in similar straits in The 39 Steps, one of the master of the suspense’s earliest hits, and one whose now iconic sequences include a train-top chase leading to Hannay’s daredevil jump onto the Forth Bridge, a seemingly fatal shooting of our hero midway through, hero handcuffed to Hitchcock Blonde heroine as he searches for a villain recognizable only by the missing top joint on one of his fingers, and a very public climactic scene at the London Palladium, much like the one Hitchcock later filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
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SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
The 1952 MGM Musical classic Singin’ In The Rain gives Downey Civic Light Opera its best production since 2009’s My Fair Lady, one that judging from the enthusiastic reaction of Friday’s Opening Night audience could well prove DLCO’s biggest hit in as many years.
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NOISES OFF
Thursday, September 29th, 2011
Imagine a production of one of those hilarious English farces like No Sex Please, We’re British whose actors are still struggling with their lines, have yet to master the requisite comic timing, and still haven’t learned when to enter and exit. Lines will be forgotten, jokes won’t get their payoff, cues will be missed, and the entire production an absolute mess. Certainly not one you’d pay to see, right?
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THE MARVELOUS WONDERETTES
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
Since The Marvelous Wonderettes’ made its first full-length big-stage Southern California appearance at the Laguna Playhouse in 2008, there’s scarcely a mid or large-sized Southland theater that hasn’t jumped at the chance to present this off-Broadway megahit to its local audience of theatergoers, and with reason. Roger Bean’s wonderfully marvelous look back at the pop music of the 1950s and ‘60s as sung by a quartet of high school girls at their 1958 prom and their 1968 class reunion is the very definition of a crowd-pleaser. Following runs at Musical Theatre West, the Norris Theatre, and Cabrillo Music Theatre, the Wonderettes have now arrived in La Mirada, once again directed by their writer-creator, and if last night’s audience reaction was any indication, McCoy Rigby Entertainment has a smash hit on its hands. Performing with a live band, these Marvelous Wonderettes are sure to captivate audiences from teens to grandfolks, and everyone in between.
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FUNNY GIRL
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
If the best reason to see Broadway’s Funny Girl in 1964 could be summed up in a name (Barbra Streisand, for those living under a rock), then the same can be said for its current revival at Downey Civic Light Opera. That name is Karen Volpe, the triple threat who first caught this reviewer’s attention as Ado Annie in DCLO’s Oklahoma! a few years back and now dazzles in the proverbial role of a lifetime.
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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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