THE ALL NIGHT STRUT!


The fabulous sounds of 1940s swing, bebop, and jive are alive and well and living in Burbank as The Colony Theatre presents the musical revue The All Night Strut!, an entertaining follow-up to last year’s Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris and one that proves the axiom that when you’re on a revue roll, “Why mess with a good thing?”
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THE COMEDY OF ERRORS


You haven’t seen Shakespeare’s The Comedy Of Errors till you’ve seen it “Burlesque On Brand” style, courtesy of director extraordinaire Michael Michetti at A Noise Within.
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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD


As I sat last night watching the lives of Atticus, Scout, Jem, and the rest of the characters created by Harper Lee in To Kill A Mockingbird, I couldn’t help looking at the audience around me, mostly seniors, their ages hovering around 76, give or take a few years, and think of the changes that have taken place in our society since 1935, the year Lee’s novel-turned-play takes place, the year in which many of those audience members first saw the light of day.
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ONE TOUCH OF VENUS


Sparkling performances and Richard Israel’s deft direction make One Touch Of Venus, Musical Theatre Guild’s latest revival, a delightful 1940s bonbon.
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FOREVER PLAID


The Plaids of Forever Plaid are back, entertaining Glendale Centre Theatre audiences with their close-harmony vocals and amusing between-song patter in a 90-minute revue that couldn’t be a better choice for the retired seniors who make up the bulk of GCT audiences—and should prove entertaining to the under-65 set as well.
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SMUDGE

RECOMMENDED
How to review a show whose point you missed entirely? That’s the dilemma currently faced by this reviewer in writing about Rachel Axler’s Smudge, the latest offering by Burbank’s esteemed Syzygy Theatre Group.
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THE FIRST JO-EL


Here’s a bit of Biblical trivia for you. According to the Gospel According To The Troubies, there were not one but two pregnant women at the Bethlehem Inn on December 25th of the year 0. Joseph and Mary were there, of course, but unbeknownst until now, an unmarried couple named Manolo and Letty were about to give birth as well—or at least so we’re told in this year’s Troubadour Theatre Company holiday show, The First Jo-el.
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GREAT EXPECTATIONS


Over the past two decades, Glendale’s A Noise Within has tended to offer three kinds of plays, one each per Fall or Spring season. There’s something by Shakespeare, something by Ibsen, Moliere, Shaw, or an ancient Greek or Roman, and something more contemporary, say a play by Odets, Anouilh, Williams, Miller, or O’Neil. Now, with Neil Bartlett’s 2007 adaptation of Charles Dickens’ 1861 novel Great Expectations, California’s Home For The Classics gets the chance to merge the classical and the modern for an evening of classical contemporary (or contemporary classical) theater at its finest.
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