MINE EYES HATH SEEN
Saturday, April 4th, 2015
Theatre Banshee commemorates the sesquicentennial of end of the bloodiest war in our nation’s history in their tenth-anniversary revival of Mine Eyes Hath Seen, Sean Branney and Leslie Baldwin’s theatrical montage of Civil War tales told “in their own words,” and powerfully so, under Branney’s imaginative direction.
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JULIUS CAESAR
Sunday, March 29th, 2015
When staging Shakespeare for a contemporary audience who’s seen each of the Bard’s plays a gazillion times, it all comes down to acting, design, and execution, and A Noise Within scores three for three in their Spring 2015 season production of Julius Caesar.
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HENRY IV, PART ONE
Friday, March 20th, 2015
Outstanding performances and a stylish contemporary design distinguish The Antaeus Company’s 2015 season opener, William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One. A hefty three-hour running time may test the patience of those for whom “90 Minutes No intermission” are the sweetest four words ever heard, but Bard fans will definitely feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth with this one.
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DONTRELL, WHO KISSED THE SEA
Monday, March 16th, 2015
An African-American teenager in search of his roots finds them deep under the Atlantic Ocean in Nathan Alan Davis’s Dontrell, Who Kissed The Sea, now getting an exquisitely staged and performed World Premiere production by Skylight Theatre Company and Lower Depths Theatre Ensemble.
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FUGUE
Saturday, March 7th, 2015
A trio of classical music composers, each involved in a deadly love triangle, find their lives interwoven fugue-style—and quite stylishly indeed—in Fugue, Tommy Smith’s mesmerizing meditation on music and madness (and musicians driven mad by love), the latest World Premiere from Echo Theater Company and one of the most provocative evenings of theater you’re likely to experience for some time to come.
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END OF THE RAINBOW
Friday, February 27th, 2015
The facts behind Judy Garland’s death on June 22, 1969 are a matter of public record. Several months after a five-week stint at London’s trendy Talk of the Town, the legendary screen/recording star was found dead at the age of 47 by fifth husband Mickey Deans in the bathroom of their rented Chelsea house, the cause of death “an incautious self-overdosage” of barbiturates.
Peter Quilter’s critically acclaimed End Of The Rainbow, now playing at Long Beach’s International City Theatre, lets us be flies on the walls of Judy and Mickey’s London hotel (and of the London nightclub as well) during that much talked about Talk Of The Town run, and a humdinger of a play and production this is under John Henry Davis’ incisive direction.
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THE OTHER PLACE
Sunday, February 22nd, 2015
Trust nothing you see or hear until about halfway through the riveting, complex puzzle that is Sharr White’s The Other Place, now getting its first Los Angeles production, and a superb one at that, at North Hollywood’s 99-seat-plan Road Theatre.
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THE WHIPPING MAN
Wednesday, February 4th, 2015
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House, at long last ending what is still the deadliest war in United States history. Five days later, President Abraham Lincoln was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet. Coincidentally, during this fateful week in our country’s history, Jews in both North and South observed Pesach, the festival of Passover, celebrating the freeing of the Israelites from centuries of slavery in Egypt.
Inspired by this bit of historical happenstance, and armed with the knowledge that there were indeed Jewish slaveholders (and Jewish slaves) in the pre-Civil War Deep South, playwright Matthew Lopez sat down to write The Whipping Man, a gripping, eye-opening look at three Jews—two black, one white—in the days just following Appomattox, a play now brought to compelling life in a spectacular new production just transferred from South Coast Rep to the Pasadena Playhouse.
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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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