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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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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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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