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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VIOLET
Saturday, May 26th, 2018
Director Richard Israel and a couldn’t-be-better cast and design team get everything right in Actors Co-op’s soul-reviving intimate staging of Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley’s New York Drama Critics’ Circle-winning 1997 off-Broadway musical Violet.
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KNIFE TO THE HEART
Tuesday, May 8th, 2018
To cut or not to cut. That is the question facing Marshall and his shiksa spouse when pregnant-with-twins Julie Ann learns that the postpartum shindig her Jewish mother-in-law’s got planned will involve not just cocktails but a bit of infant cock-snipping. No wonder Stan Zimmerman and Christian McLaughlin have titled their entertaining, unexpectedly touching 80-minute stage sitcom Knife To The Heart.
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VOTE, PRAY, LOVE
Monday, April 9th, 2018
Charismatic, multitalented L.A. musical theater performer Ryan O’Connor recalls the most challenging year of his life in story and song in his terrifically entertaining musical memoir Vote, Pray, Love, now playing Sundays and Mondays at the Celebration.
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AKUMA-SHIN
Sunday, April 1st, 2018Terrific performances and an ingenious production design cannot salvage the perplexing jumble that is Kenley Smith’s big-ideas sci-fi-parody-fantasy-thriller black comedy Akuma-Shin, a Sacred Fools Theater Company World Premiere, any more than its cast of characters—Dr. Joyce Brothers, William F. Buckley, Jr., Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer among them—are able to save Tokyo from Godzilla.
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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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