BRIGHT STAR
Saturday, October 21st, 2017There’s no brighter star lighting up L.A. stages this month and next than the dazzling Carmen Cusack, reprising her Tony-nominated star turn as Alice Murphy in Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s Bright Star, a musical so stunningly staged and gorgeous to the ear that it’s easy to go easy on its Stella Dallas/Imitation Of Life-style soap.
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RUNAWAY HOME
Tuesday, October 17th, 2017A fourteen-year-old far too smart, self-assured, and resourceful for her own good takes to the streets of New Orleans three years after Hurricane Katrina lay waste to the city’s Lower Ninth Ward in Jeremy J. Kamps’ Runaway Home, a Fountain Theatre World Premiere that proves every bit as compelling a slice-of-post-Katrina-life as it is a bona fide crowd-pleaser.
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THE UNAUTHORIZED MUSICAL PARODY OF HOCUS POCUS
Saturday, October 7th, 2017The Salem-witchy women known far and wide as the Sanderson Sisters are alive and well and working their black magic in Los Feliz as Rockwell Table & Stage reprises its absolutely spooktastic Unauthorized Musical Parody Of Hocus Pocus for Halloween season 2017.
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WALKING TO BUCHENWALD
Friday, October 6th, 2017An intergenerational trek across Europe turns a good deal darker than the lighthearted family road trip it initially promises to be in the Open Fist Theatre Company’s World Premiere Walking To Buchenwald, the funny, impactful latest from the endlessly self-reinventing Tom Jacobson.
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BR’ER COTTON
Tuesday, October 3rd, 2017An angry, rebellious African-American teen finds himself at loggerheads with his hard-working single mom, his tradition-bound granddad, and the racist world he confronts on a daily basis in Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm’s Br’er Cotton, a dialog-provoking gripper of a play that I’d like even better if it stayed in the very real present instead of detouring into magical realism territory and the Civil War past.
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FIXED
Saturday, September 30th, 2017A sexually confused Filipino-American “ladyboy,” the drag princess’s sexually confused Mexican-American sort-of boyfriend, and the sort-of boyfriend’s just plain confused sort-of girlfriend, all three of them in massive states of denial, play out a centuries-old game of love and death in contemporary L.A. in Boni B. Alvarez’s Fixed, a Filipino-Latino telenovela come deliciously to life on the Atwater Village Echo Theater stage.
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FREDDY
Thursday, September 28th, 2017Cate Caplin’s exciting, eclectic choreography and some terrific dance performances from students enrolled in LACC’s Theatre Academy make Deborah Lawlor’s 55-minute look back at largely forgotten mid-20th-century dance icon Freddy Herko worth checking out despite stilted dialog that would challenge even the most accomplished cast.
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BILLY BOY
Thursday, September 28th, 2017An unexpected sexual encounter with a former high school girlfriend sends a 60ish gay man and a pair of long-dead ghosts on a trip down memory lane in Nick Salamone’s Billy Boy, a Playwrights Arena World Premiere that starts out promisingly enough before veering off into the Twilight Zone.
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