KIMBERLY AKIMBO
Friday, July 26th, 2013
Kimberly Levaco is not your average, everyday teenager. After all, how many teens do you know who are saddled with an alcoholic dad, a hypochondriac mom, and a con artist of an aunt? And how many of them suffer from all of the above, plus a body that’s aging at supersonic speed? Sixteen-year-old Kimberly lives her life in the body of someone more than four times her age, someone with a life expectancy of sixteen, give or take a year or so. How many teens do you know who are saddled with that?
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire makes Kimberly the heroine of his funny, touching 2000 dramedy Kimberly Akimbo, the latest offering from The Theatricians, a company of actors whose youth turns out to be the only major strike going against an otherwise excellent production.
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WATSON AND THE DARK ART OF HARRY HOUDINI
Tuesday, July 9th, 2013
What do you do when you’re writer-director Jaime Robledo and your play Watson: The Last Great Tale Of The Legendary Sherlock Holmes has won just about every award in the book? Elementary, my dear reader. You do what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did after creating his mystery-solving supersleuth in A Study In Scarlet (and what Universal Pictures kept doing year after year for their own inimitable Sherlock, Basil Rathbone). You write and direct a sequel, in this case Watson And The Dark Art Of Harry Houdini, and if the results don’t match the original in sheer brilliance, Watson 2.0 does for the most part avoid the dreaded sophomore curse.
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LOVE SONGS
Sunday, June 23rd, 2013RECOMMENDED
Six simply marvelous performances and a couple dozen simply gorgeous songs are the best reasons to see Love Songs A Musical, Steven Cagan’s minimal-plot song cycle now getting its World Premiere by Chromolume Theatre at the Attic in a production that comes across more like a low-budget workshop than the fully-staged premiere Cagan’s work deserves and L.A. theatergoing regulars will likely be expecting.
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DYING CITY
Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
A young man’s unannounced arrival at the New York apartment of his deceased twin brother’s widow triggers the gradual revelation of three lifetimes’ worth of secrets and lies in Christopher Shinn’s Dying City, now getting a compelling, beautifully acted and directed Los Angeles premiere at Rogue Machine.
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HEART SONG
Sunday, May 26th, 2013
Flamenco and friendship join forces to help a middle-aged Jewish single New Yorker recover from the death of her 91-year-old mother in Stephen Sachs’ laughter-and-tear-packed new dramedy Heart Song.
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CHESS
Thursday, May 16th, 2013
Though Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus’ Chess may now and forever remain a musical that “needs work,” there are ample reasons to catch Tim Dang’s multiethnic revival of the West End hit at East West Players, not the least of which is the singular opportunity to see Chess Not In Concert—but rather as a fully-staged production, with performances, direction, choreography, costumes and lighting all combining to make for a thrilling evening of theater, despite its source material’s undeniable flaws.
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COPS AND FRIENDS OF COPS
Friday, May 10th, 2013
A man walks into a bar and all hell breaks loose in Ron Klier’s edge-of-your-seat World Premiere suspense thriller Cops And Friends Of Cops, the latest offering from VS. Theatre Company and one that suits their spiffy new Mid-City space to a T.
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tick, tick… BOOM!
Wednesday, May 1st, 2013
USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory concludes its eight annual season with Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick… BOOM!, providing Larson lovers with a terrifically entertaining, imaginatively re-envisioned staging of Larson’s posthumous, autobiographical, pre-Rent musical gem, one which, like all MTR productions, is directed, choreographed, designed, and performed entirely by students.
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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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