SPRING AWAKENING
Sunday, September 2nd, 2018
Spring Awakening has arrived at Hollywood’s Lounge Theatre in what is easily the most “high-concept” of the fourteen productions I’ve seen. Promoted as “Spring Awakening For Gun Safety” and drawing overt connections between its 1891 teen protagonists and the 2018 world we live in, this thoroughly original vision is as stunningly directed and choreographed as it is strikingly designed and powerfully performed.
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MARIAN, OR THE TRUE TALE OF ROBIN HOOD
Saturday, August 25th, 2018
Maid Marian is far from the only resident of Nottingham and its neighboring Sherwood Forest to blur gender and sexuality in Adam Szymkowicz’s LGBTQ-celebratory, song-and-swordplay-packed Marian, Or The True Tale Of Robin Hood, one of Theatre Of NOTE’s most exhilarating hits in years.
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THE MOTHERF**KER WITH THE HAT
Tuesday, August 7th, 2018
Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherf**ker With The Hat proves a terrific showcase for the young professional actors studying at the Gloria Gifford Conservatory at the school’s spiffy new digs on Hollywood Theatre Row.
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FAMOUS
Sunday, July 29th, 2018
Fame wields a double-edged sword for those who come to Hollywood in search of it in Michael Leoni’s Famous, and if the latest from the writer-director of the smash hit Elevator is often flashier than it is profound, it is also without question one of the year’s electrifyingly staged productions, and thanks to the #metoo movement, just about as timely as a World Premiere play can get.
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MAYAKOVSKY AND STALIN
Sunday, July 22nd, 2018Some good actors attempt to breathe life into writer-director Murray Mednick’s talky, tedious Mayakovsky And Stalin, the longest two-and-a-half hours I’ve spent in a theater in years.
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CABARET
Friday, July 6th, 2018
Michael Matthews takes Cabaret, a director’s show if there ever was one, and transforms it into the summer’s most spectacular intimate musical, an almost perfect rendition of the 20th-century Broadway classic, a production blessed by superb performances, breathtaking choreography, and the most jaw-dropping design I may ever have seen at Celebration Theatre.
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100 APRILS
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2018The victims and the perpetrators of the mass murder of a million-and-a-half Armenians haunt a dying septuagenarian circa 1982 in Leslie Ayvazian’s edifying, impressively performed, if problematic World Premiere drama 100 Aprils, the latest from Rogue Machine.
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SEX
Sunday, May 27th, 2018The sound you hear at the Hudson Mainstage Theatre is Mae West turning over in her grave at the travesty being made of Sex, the 1926 play that outraged critics but proved that season’s biggest Broadway hit and put its one-of-a-kind playwright-star on the map.
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