STEEL MAGNOLIAS
Thursday, September 12th, 2013
You may have seen Steel Magnolias before, either on stage or on film, but you’ve never seen magnolias of steel quite like the six women now lighting up the stage at East West Players’ David Henry Hwang Theater. Robert Harling’s now iconic Southern belles are Asian-American this time round, their ethnicity adding new shadings to this sextet of women whose delicate exteriors mask tough-as-nails cores.
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bare a rock musical
Saturday, September 7th, 2013
A Catholic high school is hardly the most welcoming environment for two boys to fall in love, especially when one of them is deeply conflicted about his sexuality, as Jon Hartmere and Damon Intrabartolo’s bare made heartbreaking clear in its 2000 World Premiere at the Hudson Mainstage Theater.
Now, thirteen years later, glory|struck productions brings bare back to the city of its birth in an exciting revival that could easily turn into the season’s biggest intimate musical smash.
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THE ARCTIC CIRCLE (and a recipe for Swedish pancakes)/THE MATADOR
Sunday, September 1st, 2013
Whimsy and more than a touch of the surreal link an entertaining pair of one-acts now getting their West Coast Premieres at Studio/Stage, both of them penned by members of The Playwright’s Lab @ Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia.
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RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN
Friday, August 23rd, 2013
Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Gina Gionfriddo examines the changing roles of women from the pre-Betty Friedan 1950s to the post-post-Feminist now in Rapture, Blister, Burn—and if this sounds like a potentially dry (i.e. boring) way to spend a night at the theater, think again. I haven’t had a more exhilarating time with four fabulous women and one not-so-fabulous man in I don’t know how long.
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A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY
Monday, August 19th, 2013
Director Jeremy Lelliott works wonders with Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, turning a play that in other hands might seem stuffy or talky or dated into an exciting, utterly relevant evening of theater.
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PRAIRIE-OKE!
Saturday, August 17th, 2013
Any resemblance between the show being reviewed here and a certain TV series that ran from 1974 to 1983 on NBC and starred Michael Landon, Melissa Gilbert, and Karen Grassle as a family living on a farm in Walnut Grove, Minnesota in the 1870s and 1880s is “entirely coincidental,” as Silverlake’s Cavern Club Celebrity Theater welcomes back master parodist Dane Whitlock’s Prairie-oke!, aka “That Totally Unauthorized Karaoke Parody Musical Formerly Known As Something Else.”
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eve2
Friday, August 16th, 2013NOT RECOMMENDED
Playwright Susan Rubin experiments with the surreal in eve2, an avant-garde one-act that left me scratching my head in bewilderment.
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OPEN HOUSE
Monday, August 5th, 2013
You’d think that a real estate agent’s attempts to close a deal with a house-for-sale’s sole prospective buyer would be slight stuff for a ninety-minute two-character play. Not so, if the play in question is Shem Bitterman’s Open House and the dueling protagonists brought to life by L.A. stage stars Robert Cicchini and Eve Gordon.
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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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