OUR TOWN
Monday, October 2nd, 2017Deaf West Theatre and Thornton Wilder prove a match made in heaven as Pasadena Playhouse debuts an exquisite seventy-ninth anniversary revival of Wilder’s classic bit of Americana, Our Town, as it has quite literally never been staged before.
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BILLY BOY
Thursday, September 28th, 2017An unexpected sexual encounter with a former high school girlfriend sends a 60ish gay man and a pair of long-dead ghosts on a trip down memory lane in Nick Salamone’s Billy Boy, a Playwrights Arena World Premiere that starts out promisingly enough before veering off into the Twilight Zone.
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MASTER CLASS
Saturday, September 23rd, 2017Carolyn Hennesy gives one of the year’s most dazzling performances as the legendary Maria Callas in the virtual one-woman-show that is Terrence McNally’s Master Class, the inaugural season opener of the newly rechristened, spiffily refurbished Garry Marshall Theatre.
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THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
Wednesday, September 13th, 2017Theatrical magic doesn’t get more magical than the Tony-winning brilliance that is the National Theatre production of The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, nor lead performances more remarkable than Adam Langdon’s as Christopher Boone, the most unlikely of detectives about to embark on the most thrilling, harrowing, and rewarding of journeys.
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CARMEN DISRUPTION
Sunday, September 10th, 2017Prolific British playwright Simon Stephens goes avant-garde in Carmen Disruption, meaning that no matter how much you may have loved the edgy realism of Punk Rock or the captivating whimsy of Heisenberg or the utter magic of his stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, you may well find his artsy 2015 take on Bizet a good deal less engaging.
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OTHER DESERT CITIES
Monday, September 4th, 2017Real-life sisters Ellen Geer and Melora Marshall and Geer’s daughter Willow play characters with matching family ties in Theatricum Botanicum’s superb outdoor revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities.
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AMERICAN HOME
Friday, September 1st, 2017Homeownership dreams come true, then fall apart in Stephanie Alison Walker’s overly ambitious American Home, whose intriguing premise and promising opening scenes soon develop into an excessively populated, tonally uneven, insufficiently involving World Premiere dramedy.
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CIGARETTES AND CHOCOLATE & HANG UP
Saturday, August 19th, 2017And now for something completely different, Pacific Resident Theatre treats L.A. audiences to the West Coast Premieres of Cigarettes & Chocolate and Hang Up, a couple of Anthony Mighella-penned BBC radio plays from the ‘80s that add up to considerably more than a staged reading, slightly less than the “fully designed/staged production” that’s been advertised, yet one that’s every bit as gorgeously acted as PRT’s compelling best.
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