OLD WICKED SONGS
Saturday, February 11th, 2012
No L.A.-area theater has a better track record with two-character “odd couple” plays that Burbank’s The Colony, which over the past half decade has won acclaim—along with numerous awards—for its popular two-handers, including Rounding Third, Trying, Educating Rita, Visiting Mr. Green, and Grace And Glorie. To this list can now be added the Colony’s nigh-on perfect revival of Jon Marans’ 1996 Pulitzer Prize-nominated Old Wicked Songs.
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A CHRISTMAS WESTSIDE STORY
Sunday, December 11th, 2011
Take the storyline of a classic holiday flick, add the music of a revolutionary Broadway musical, stir in the iconic dance moves of that musical smash, and sprinkle with the zaniness that has become the trademark of Troubadour Theater Company, and you have A Christmas Westside Story, possibly the most sensational Troubies show yet.
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TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT
Monday, November 14th, 2011
Imagine for a moment that Patrick Dennis had met his Auntie Mame when he was well into middle age rather than as a child. Imagine too that this meeting had occurred in the swinging ‘60s instead of the Roaring ‘20s, and that aunt and nephew had been British and not American. Imagine all this and what you’d come up with would be Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, the famed author’s 1969 novel which playwright Giles Havergal adapted for the stage in 1989. It is this oh-so-clever stage adaptation that Burbank’s Colony Theatre now brings to vivid, imaginative life under the truly inspired direction of David Dean Bottrell.
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SOUTHERN COMFORTS
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
To hear Hollywood tell it, the only thing post-retirement folks are good for is a laugh, often at their own expense. As for romance or (God forbid) sex, forget it. For these and many other reasons, Kathleen Clark’s romantic comedy Southern Comforts, now playing at Burbank’s Falcon Theatre, comes as a welcome treat.
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SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS
Thursday, October 6th, 2011
The 1954 MGM musical movie hit Seven Brides For Seven Brothers comes to life in-the-round at Glendale Centre Theatre in a production that provides old-fashioned G-rated family entertainment under Robert Marra’s assured direction.
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HIGH FIDELITY
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
Musical Theatre Guild’s awesome one-night-only “concert staged reading” of the 2006 Broadway flop High Fidelity has confirmed what Hunger Artists’ West Coast Premiere first suggested in July. I am madly in love with HiFi, and if the cheers which greeted last night’s reading are any indication, I am not the only one who feels this way.
SHOOTING STAR
Sunday, September 18th, 2011
There’s something about airport terminal waiting areas that makes them ripe with dramatic possibilities. A few years back, Departures provided the writer-actors at the NoHo Arts Center with over half a dozen waiting area vignettes, and earlier this year, Having It All’s female fivesome met cute and bonded while stranded waiting for postponed flights. Now it’s former couple Reed and Elena who happen upon each other in a blizzard-bound Midwest airport twenty-five years post-love affair in Steven Dietz’s Shooting Star, getting its West Coast Premiere at Burbank’s Colony Theatre.
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BEAU JEST
Thursday, August 25th, 2011
Perhaps the three best words of advice to offer any theater company hoping to stay in business year after year are the following: Know Your Audience. The post-retirement set who make up Glendale Centre Theatre’s loyal subscribers keep coming back again and again because they trust GTC to give them the kind of time-proven hit musicals and plays that they grew up enjoying, shows like this season’s Forever Plaid, To Kill a Mockingbird, Big River, and 1776, to name just a few.
Beau Jest, the current Glendale offering, isn’t going to win any “Drama Critics’ Circle” awards for sophistication, daring, or cutting-edgedness. In fact, the New York Times savaged a New Jersey production back in 1994 in a review which still shows up first if you Google the title. But tell that to last night’s mostly over-65 crowd, who loved every one of Beau Jest’s sitcommy jokes and archetypical characters, and you know what? Even though I’m not quite as up there in age as the majority of the aforementioned, I too had a ball from start to finish, thanks in great part to the terrific talent who’ve put together GCT’s latest offering.
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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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