THE CAKE
Monday, July 3rd, 2017
Bekah Brunstetter puts a deeply personal, delightfully down-home face on the Gay-Wedding-Cake Wars in The Cake, the gifted young playwright’s latest World Premiere dramedy, another feather in director Jennifer Chambers’ and The Echo Theater Company’s multi-plumed hats.
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LOVE IS A DIRTY WORD
Friday, June 23rd, 2017
Plenty of actors have stories to tell, and plenty of those may be as solo-show-ready as Giovanni Adams’ tale of growing up black and “sissy” in Jackson, Mississippi, but few end up as exquisitely written, stunningly performed, and strikingly designed as the Yale University grad’s World Premiere Love Is A Dirty Word.
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IT’S ONLY LIFE
Monday, June 12th, 2017
The dreams and searching and loneliness and blessings that make up this thing called life are highlighted in song in Art-In-Relation’s superbly performed, imaginatively directed intimate staging of John Bucchino’s aptly-titled It’s Only Life.
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NICKY
Friday, June 9th, 2017
Chekhov’s melancholy antihero Nikolai Ivanov is alive and well and living unhappily ever after in today’s Palm Springs as Nicky, the titular protagonist of Boni B. Alvarez’s rewardingly adventurous reinvention of a late-19th-century Russian classic.
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THE LAST BREAKFAST CLUB
Sunday, June 4th, 2017
Imagine John Hughes’ archetypal Brain, Athlete, Basket Case, Princess, and Criminal performing twenty or so ‘80s hits to a live band inside the Shermer High School library as the only kids left in “an apocalypse of nuclear zombies” and you’ve got The Last Breakfast Club, the latest from Rockwell Table And Stage and the ab-fab first in a series of The Fuse Project musical movie spoofs.
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FIVE GUYS NAMED MOE
Monday, May 22nd, 2017
The Nate Holden Performing Arts joint is a-jumpin’—and then some—as Ebony Repertory Theatre thrills L.A. audiences with its 25th-anniversary revival of the Best Musical Tony-nominated Five Guys Named Moe, Broadway’s crowd-captivating tribute to the songs of 1940s R&B pioneer Louis Jordan.
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JERSEY BOYS
Friday, May 19th, 2017
Mark Ballas shows off Frankie Valli vocals to match his Dancing With The Stars footwork as Jersey Boys, the 12th-longest-running show in Broadway history, arrives at the Ahmanson Theatre to dazzle audiences with its true-life story of pop legends The Four Seasons (plus a few dozen Top Forty smashes thrown in for zing).
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NEXT TO NORMAL
Friday, May 19th, 2017Deedee Magno Hall gives a beautifully nuanced performance as bipolar wife-and-mother Diana Goodman opposite her real-life spouse Cliffton Hall’s powerful Dan Goodman in Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s Next To Normal, and though the East West Players season closer doesn’t deliver on all fronts, it provides the Halls with a pair of dream roles and audiences with a moving musical look at the effects of mental illness on an all-American family.
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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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