END OF THE RAINBOW
Friday, February 27th, 2015
The facts behind Judy Garland’s death on June 22, 1969 are a matter of public record. Several months after a five-week stint at London’s trendy Talk of the Town, the legendary screen/recording star was found dead at the age of 47 by fifth husband Mickey Deans in the bathroom of their rented Chelsea house, the cause of death “an incautious self-overdosage” of barbiturates.
Peter Quilter’s critically acclaimed End Of The Rainbow, now playing at Long Beach’s International City Theatre, lets us be flies on the walls of Judy and Mickey’s London hotel (and of the London nightclub as well) during that much talked about Talk Of The Town run, and a humdinger of a play and production this is under John Henry Davis’ incisive direction.
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SOUTH PACIFIC
Sunday, February 15th, 2015
If there’s one thing Musical Theatre West’s old-meets-new revival of South Pacific makes abundantly clear, it’s this: Few 20th-century musicals can match the 1949 Rodgers & Hammerstein classic in absolute brilliance.
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BABES IN ARMS
Tuesday, January 27th, 2015
Here’s a thought for schools considering yet another production of Grease, Bye Bye Birdie, or High School Musical. How about having a go at the quintessential “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” show, Rodgers & Hart’s Babes In Arms, and not the “sanitized, de-politicized rewrite” that debuted in 1959 but the 1937 original, political incorrectness be damned. As anyone attending Sunday’s one-night-only Concert Staged Reading at Musical Theatre West can tell you, there’s not a funnier, dancier, or more gorgeously tuneful show for up-and-coming musical theater majors to show off their triple-threat talents than Babes In Arms 1.0.
BUS STOP
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2014
Little Fish Theatre does everything right in their pitch-perfect revival of William Inge’s Bus Stop, the finest of the dozen-and-a-half productions I’ve reviewed at San Pedro’s little gem of a theater, and one absolutely worth a drive down Port Of Los Angeles way.
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STEEL PIER
Monday, November 24th, 2014
Though I’d be hard pressed to pick just one of the fifty concert staged readings reviewed here as the Absolute Best Concert Staged Reading Ever, I can’t recall a more spectacularly staged “reading” of a Broadway musical than last night’s Reiner Reading Series staging of Kander & Ebb’s Steel Pier.
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BIG FISH
Sunday, November 2nd, 2014
A deeply conflicted father-son relationship, a husband and wife’s lifelong love, a spellbinding lead performance, a bunch of captivating supporting turns, some terrific dance sequences, an often quite gorgeous production design, and above all one of the most beautiful scores of recent years add up to an entertaining and often quite moving West Coast Premiere of Andrew Lippa and John August’s Big Fish at Long Beach’s Musical Theatre West.
Still, when a Broadway musical closes less than three months after its opening and fails to score a single Tony nomination or even a non-Equity tour, it is worth asking why.
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GLORIOUS!
Saturday, October 11th, 2014
It’s been seventy years now since Florence Foster Jenkins met her maker, but the voice that could shatter glass and bring an audience to its feet (for a quick escape?) lives on seven decades later as International City Theatre delights audiences with Peter Quilter’s Glorious!, aka “the true story of Florence Foster Jenkins, the worst singer in the world.”
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TRYING
Saturday, August 23rd, 2014
Two-character plays don’t get much more entertaining or ultimately moving than Joanna McClelland Glass’s Trying, a humungous hit for the Colony Theatre back in 2007. Now, seven years later, the same lightning could easily strike for Long Beach’s International City Theatre with performances as memorable as those being given by Tony Abatemarco and Paige Lindsey White on the ICT stage.
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