CRAZY FOR YOU
Saturday, September 29th, 2012
Downey Civic Light Opera opens its 2012-13 season with one of its strongest productions in recent years, Crazy For You, the Tony-winning Best Musical of 1992. Winning lead performances by Mishi Schueller and Andrea Dodson, a bunch of terrific supporting turns, and some of the best dancing I’ve seen on the Downey Theatre stage make this a worthy follow-up to last spring’s excellent The Pajama Game.
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PETER PAN
Sunday, June 3rd, 2012
Hear the words “I won’t grow up” and the name most likely to pop into your head will surely be Peter Pan, the boy who has become so synonymous with a refusal to grow older, he’s even got a syndrome named after him. That’s why it makes perfect sense for the ageless Cathy Rigby to once again be starring in the Broadway/TV smash Peter Pan, whose title role she first played in the first of four separate Broadway engagements way back in 1990 … when she was a mere thirty-eight. As to the question of whether she can still pull it off twenty-two years later in the musical’s latest National Tour, the answer is a resounding “Yes!”
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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