BETRAYAL
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
It’s New Year’s Eve, 1968, and Jerry is confessing to Emma his love for her, in the very bedroom she shares with her husband Robert, Jerry’s best friend. “I must tell you,” Jerry declares passionately. “I want to tell you. I have to tell you. You’re lovely. I’m crazy about you. All these words I’m using, don’t you see, they’ve never been said before. I’m bowled over, I’m totally knocked out, you dazzle me, you jewel, my jewel…” Heady words, and with them Jerry and Emma begin a love affair, virtually under the eyes of his wife and her husband, an affair which will last seven years, only to have become a distant memory when they meet again, nine years later.
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THE PRODUCERS
Saturday, January 31st, 2009
There is always excitement when a Broadway megahit like Mel Brooks’ The Producers makes its regional theater debut, and when the regional premiere is as all-around sensational as the one currently being staged by Musical Theatre West, it is a theatrical event of major proportions.
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SILK STOCKINGS
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Silk Stockings was songwriter Cole Porter’s last Broadway musical. The 1955 production ran for over a year, but unlike Porter’s biggest smash, the twice Broadway-revived Kiss Me Kate, Silk Stockings has pretty much vanished from view and memory. Thus, Musical Theatre West’s revisal of the Cold War comedy comes as something of an event, especially with a much rewritten book by Stuart Ross of Forever Plaid fame, who also directs.
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THE ALL NIGHT STRUT
Friday, October 17th, 2008
Long Beach is indeed a-jumpin’ with International City Theatre’s absolutely terrific revival of The All Night Strut. Music, song, and dance from the big band and swing era combine under the sensational direction of Lance Roberts (who also choreographed the many fabulous dance sequences), with a smashing quartet of triple-threat performers singing such standards as “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “As Time Goes By,” and “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing.”
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BAT BOY THE MUSICAL
Thursday, October 9th, 2008NOT RECOMMENDED
In the eleven years since Bat Boy: The Musical began its life here in L.A. at the Actors’ Gang Theatre, it has gone on to be produced Off-Broadway, in London’s West End, at the Edinburgh Festival and in dozens of regional and international productions. The original L.A. production received four Ovation Awards, and Off-Broadway it won both the Lucille Lortel Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award as Best Musical. The revised London script is now getting its first local staging in a production which I wish I could say is worthy of the material.
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FRANKIE AND JOHNNY IN THE CLAIRE DE LUNE
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Frankie and Johnny were lovers and (as the song goes), “Oh Lordy, how they could love,” that is until she caught Johnny cheating on her “with that high-browed Nellie Bly” and shot him dead.
Fortunately, things are a good deal more hopeful for the lovers in Terrence McNally’s moving two-character, two-act dramedy, Frankie And Johnny In The Clair De Lune, now playing at International City Theatre in Long Beach. With the superb Libby West and Thomas Fiscella in the title roles and master director Todd Nielsen at the helm, ICT’s production proves to be one of their finest.
THE WIZARD OF OZ
Saturday, July 12th, 2008
“We’re off to see the wizard!”
Children of all ages (and that means parents and grandparents too) will be following the yellow brick road from now until July 27 as Musical Theatre West concludes its 55th season with its very first staging of the L. Frank Baum/MGM classic.
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THE SWEEPERS
Thursday, June 19th, 2008
ICT has yet another winner in the West Coast premiere of The Sweepers, the first of John C. Picardi’s proposed 10-play cycle focusing on the Italian American experience. Set in the summer of 1945, The Sweepers begins as a Neil Simonesque comedy about squabbling female neighbors in Boston’s Italian neighborhood, then in its final quarter veers into Arthur Miller territory. That this startling transition from comedy to drama happens organically, and not as if from another play entirely, is thanks to the very real characters Picardi has created, and the superb performances of the cast ICT has assembled.
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