AVENUE Q

Avenue Q proves an ideal showcase for ten terrifically talented Trojans, eight of whom are making their Musical Theatre Repertory debuts, as USC’s premier all-student musical theater company opens its 13th season with 2004’s Tony-winning grown-up take on a children’s TV classic.
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VIETGONE

Romantic comedy lovers are in for a treat as a couple of Vietnamese evacuees in an Arkansas refugee camp circa 1975 fall reluctantly in love in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone, one of East West Players’ all-around best productions in years.
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BABY EYES

Playwright Donald Jolly takes us back to 1950s Baltimore via Ancient Greece in Baby Eyes, a Playwrights’ Arena World Premiere that scores points for ambitious intentions if not for its campy mix of ancient myth, Greek tragedy, ’50s melodrama, and men in drag.
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GLORIA

The office banter amongst the millennials who toil for a New Yorker-style magazine in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Gloria may be catty, querulous, gossipy, back-stabbing, and hilarious as all get-out, but the 33-year-old playwright has far more than edgy cable sitcom humor on his mind in his 2015 off-Broadway hit, a ripped-from-today’s-headlines gut-puncher of an Echo Theater Company West Coast Premiere.
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SWANSONG

Australian powerhouse André de Vanny does tour-de-force work as a mentally and emotionally disabled young Irishman in Connor McDermottroe’s one-man play Swansong, a star turn almost as exhausting for de Vanny to perform as the Australian Theatre Company/Skylight Theatre Company West Coast premiere is to experience.
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SWEAT

Playwright Lynn Nottage gives voice to blue-collar America in her Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, now making a gut-punching Los Angeles debut at the Mark Taper Forum, a suspenseful, insightful look at an electorate so disillusioned by their failed American Dreams that they ended up doing the unthinkable.
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I GO SOMEWHERE ELSE

An emotionally abusive childhood provides the backstory to the celebration of survival that is Inda Craig-Galván’s memory play I Go Somewhere Else, a playwrights’ Arena World Premiere as superbly acted as it is strikingly designed. If only it were easier to figure out who’s who and what’s what.
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AIN’T TOO PROUD

The Motown sound is ready once again to take New York by storm when Ain’t Too Proud—The Life and Times of The Temptations, now earning some of the loudest Ahmanson Theatre audience cheers I’ve heard in years, transfers to Broadway’s Imperial this spring.
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