JUSTIN LOVE
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012
Neil Patrick Harris. Zachary Quinto. Jesse Tyler Fergusson. Ricky Martin. Andrew Rannells. Jim Parsons. Matt Bomer. Cheyenne Jackson. Gavin Creel. Sean Hayes. Jonathan Groff. T.R. Knight. It seems lately that hardly a month goes by without another movie, TV, or Broadway leading man coming out of the closet—and coming out ahead career-wise, as the abovementioned dozen make perfectly clear.
Still, despite the increasing number of celebrity coming-out stories, there has yet to be a major A-list romantic/action hero movie star we can embrace as “Openly Gay,” someone the stature of a George Clooney or a Jake Gyllenhaal or a Bradley Cooper—to name three totally random examples. Someone like Justin Rush, the fictitious hero of Justin Love, the best new intimate stage musical I’ve seen in years, now getting a spectacular World Premiere at Celebration Theatre under the inspired direction of 4-time Scenie-winning Director Of The Year Michael Matthews.
(read more)
XANADU
Saturday, September 15th, 2012
Playwright Douglas Carter Beane provided a textbook example of how to turn a movie lemon into Broadway lemonade when he wrote the book for the stage adaptation of the turkey known as Xanadu, and lo and behold, one of biggest critical and commercial failures of the 1980s was transformed from flaming flop to fabulous hit!
(read more)
THE WORLD GOES ‘ROUND
Monday, September 10th, 2012
A bunch of Kander & Ebb songs assigned to Man 1, Man 2, Woman 1, Woman 2, and Woman 3. That’s pretty much what a theater company gets when Music Theatre International grants it the rights to The World Goes ‘Round, and that’s pretty much what audiences have been getting since the Kander & Ebb revue made its Off-Broadway debut back in 1991. Five singers performing songs from the Broadway classics Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss Of The Spider Woman and lesser know Kander & Ebb gems like The Rink, The Happy Time, and Woman Of The Year.
Audiences expecting more of the same from Actors Co-op’s intimate-stage The World Goes ‘Round can instead plan on being bowled away by director-choreographer Robert Marra’s brilliant reconception of the Kander & Ebb revue as a sung-through musical. That’s right. The World Goes ‘Round is now a bona fide musical, and which manages to tell the stories of seven authentic, distinct, fully developed characters without a word of spoken dialog.
(read more)
THE FULL MONTY
Saturday, September 8th, 2012
Richard Israel’s intimate staging of the 2001 Broadway hit The Full Monty is so perfect on just about every level that a visit to the Third Street Theatre ought to be required of anyone aiming to produce, direct, appear in, musical direct, or design a 99-seat-plan musical—or by anyone who’s ever foolishly asserted that L.A. doesn’t know how to “do theater.”
(read more)
THE COMPANY MEN
Tuesday, September 4th, 2012
With their snazzy business suits and skinny neckties, they might seem at first glance to be a quartet of ad execs straight out of TV’s Mad Men. Place them onstage in front of mikes and backed by a four-piece rock band and they turn into the hot new singing group The Company Men, now wowing audiences in a limited series of Sunday appearances at the Key Club on world famous Sunset Strip.
(read more)
THE FANTASTICKS
Sunday, September 2nd, 2012RECOMMENDED
When the best-known of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s musicals ended its off-Broadway run ten years ago, the New Yorker marked its closing with (what else?) a cartoon. In it, an elderly couple sit reading the news, one of them glancing up to remark deadpan to the other, “We missed ‘The Fantasticks,’” a sly dig on folks who put off seeing a show so long that they end up missing it entirely, and in the case of The Fantasticks, that meant a record-breaking 42-year, 17,162-performance postponement.
(read more)
HEARTS LIKE FISTS
Monday, August 6th, 2012
Someone in a major American metropolis has been murdering post-coital couples, injecting them with a poisonous serum as they lie entwined in each other’s arms, leaving police baffled and the city’s lovers scared out of their minds.
Fortunately, as any comic book fan knows, serial murders like these are the reason super heroes exist, or in the case of Adam Szymkowicz’s World Premiere comedy-fantasy Hearts Like Fists, super heroines.
(read more)
ASSASSINS
Sunday, August 5th, 2012
A terrifically performed and imaginatively directed revival of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins makes it three annual musical hits in a row for the young artists of Coeurage Theatre Company, following their inventive downscaling of The Rocky Horror Show and Ovation winner Gregory Nabours’ original song cycle The Trouble With Words.
(read more)
Since 2007, Steven Stanley's StageSceneLA.com has spotlighted the best in Southern California theater via reviews, interviews, and its annual StageSceneLA Scenies.
COPYRIGHT 2025 STEVEN STANLEY :: DESIGN BY