ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER
Monday, July 23rd, 2012
A title that rings a bell for older musical theater buffs, but one that might not be familiar to anyone under a certain age. A score by songwriters whose better known shows keep getting revived and revived, but not this one. Songs that became hits even though the musical they came from did not. A book that, as they say, “needs work.”
It’s precisely for musicals like 1965’s On A Clear Day You Can See Forever that the “concert staged reading” was designed.
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MONTY PYTHON’S SPAMALOT
Monday, July 2nd, 2012
It’s taken eight long years for Monty Python’s Spamalot to go from its preview engagement in Chicago to its Regional Premiere at Long Beach’s Musical Theatre West, but in the case of the one-of-a-kind Spamalot, the resulting production proves well worth the wait. Using the original Broadway sets, costumes, and choreography (but in all other respects building its production “from the ground up”), MTW gives Los Angeles-area audiences abundant reasons to celebrate Spamalot’s long-awaited arrival.
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PANACHE
Friday, May 25th, 2012
Here’s a question for romantic comedy buffs. When is the last time you saw a stage play that drew you into its spell and held you throughout laughter (and a tear or two) to a picture perfect fade-out in the same way that romcom favorites like You’ve Got Mail, While You Were Sleeping, and Notting Hill have been doing for decades on the silver screen. It’s been years since this reviewer (and romcom lover) has seen a comedy as intoxicatingly romantic as Don Gordon’s Panache, now in the homestretch of its six-week run at San Pedro’s Little Fish Theatre. As I write this review, you’ve got only two more chances not to miss out on his romantic comedy gem.
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BELLS ARE RINGING
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
Tony-nominated musicals of the 1950s fall largely into two categories. There are those that have made such a lasting impression that hardly a year goes by without regional theater revivals galore. Shows like South Pacific, Guys And Dolls, The King And I, West Side Story, Damn Yankees, My Fair Lady, and The Music Man make this list. The rest are mostly long-forgotten chestnuts that nonetheless merit a “concert staged reading” from time to time, if only for nostalgia’s sake. Take for instance Pipe Dream, Redhead, or New Girl In Town.
Then there’s Bells Are Ringing, which in spite of a Tony-nominated Broadway revival in 2001, has largely faded into obscurity despite at least three popular standards (“Long Before I Knew You,” “Just in Time,” and “The Party’s Over”) written by the incomparable Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and a book that continues to delight five and a half decades later. If ever there were a show in Category B which deserved to be in Category A, Bells Are Ringing is that show, as Sunday’s Musical Theatre West concert staged reading made abundantly clear.
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THE FIX
Saturday, April 28th, 2012
When Senator Reed Chandler dies in flagrante delicto, his Spiderwoman of a widow and his embittered, crippled brother connive to make the Senator’s handsome but dim son the next President of the United States.
No, this isn’t an upcoming Meryl Streep flick or nighttime network series created to coincide with this election year, though it well could be. It is instead the setup that John Dempsey and Dana P. Rowe use to open their highly topical and equally entertaining musical The Fix, now getting its official West Coast Premiere at Long Beach’s International City Theatre (though Angelino theater buffs will recall its Musical Theatre Guild’s one-night-only concert staged reading our last big national election year).
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FORBIDDEN BROADWAY GREATEST HITS, VOLUME 2
Monday, April 16th, 2012
It’s been thirty years now since New York City audiences first got treated to Forbidden Broadway, a series of revues spoofing The Great White Way’s latest hits (and flops).
Since 1982, a revolving quartet of supertalented performers backed by a piano—and the master-satirist that is writer/creator Gerard Alessandrini—have lampooned Broadway legends like Carol Channing, Ethel Merman, and Mandy Patinkin, current hit shows like Wicked and Mary Poppins, and musical theater classics from Evita to Annie to Cats.
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FIORELLO!
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012
Here’s a trivia question for you: What do these eight Broadway musicals of the 1950s have in common?
Plain And Fancy, Pipe Dream, New Girl In Town, Oh, Captain!, Jamaica, La Plume De Ma Tante, Take Me Along, Redhead, and Fiorello!
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MAN OF LA MANCHA
Sunday, February 12th, 2012
You know from the striking “a cappella” flamenco dance tableau which opens Musical Theatre West’s revival of Man Of La Mancha that you’re in for something special. Then again, with multi-award winners Davis Gaines, Lesli Margherita, and Justin Robertson in the starring roles, Nick DeGruccio directing with his accustomed brilliance and imagination, and choreographic whiz Carlos Mendoza in charge of dance numbers, musical theater aficionados could expect nothing less.
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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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