MEMPHIS
Wednesday, November 7th, 2012
December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. November 6, 2012: Barack Obama is reelected to the Presidency of the United States. What a difference 57 years make!
November 6, 2012 happens also to have been the Opening Night of the National Tour of Memphis, the Tony-winning Best Musical set in the same decade Rosa Parks made her historic stand for racial equality, a serendipitous coincidence given that Memphis is the fictional but fact-inspired tale of Huey Calhoun, a Memphis DJ who made history in his own way by daring to play “race music” on mainstream, i.e. white radio. That particularly groundbreaking step, and Calhoun’s then illegal romance with a young singer he meets on his first visit to a “colored” nightclub, are at the heart of one of the most powerful—and most tuneful and exuberant—musicals Broadway has seen in many a year.
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THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW
Sunday, November 4th, 2012
What would the Halloween season be without the camp classic Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show, the science fiction/horror movie spoof that has become so iconic, it now includes its creator’s name in its official title?
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SPRING AWAKENING
Saturday, November 3rd, 2012
More than a dozen talented young Southland triple-threats have brought Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening to the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center, where they star in a topnotch staging of the Tony-winning musical adaptation of Frank Wedenkind’s groundbreaking 1891 drama.
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42nd STREET
Sunday, October 28th, 2012
The audience has only just finished applauding this Broadway classic’s “Greatest Hits” overture when the curtain rises to reveal the legs—and only the legs—of thirty long-legged hoofers tap-dancing as if their Broadway careers depended on it (as they indeed do) … and the audience erupts in high-decibel cheers.
Anyone who knows musical theater can surely identify the show in question. It’s the Broadway megahit 42nd Street (3486 performances in its original run and another 1524 in its smash revival), now playing to sold-out houses at Long Beach’s Musical Theatre West in a production that sets the bar spectacularly high for any other company with the chutzpah to follow in their foot-taps.
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HAIRSPRAY
Sunday, October 14th, 2012
When I tell you that 3-D Theatricals’ big-stage, big-budget production of “Broadway’s Big Fat Musical Comedy Hit” is the best Hairspray I’ve seen since catching both the original Broadway production and its First National Tour in 2004, trust me that having seen now nine different productions since then (all in the space of two and a half years), this is the Hairspray not to be missed.
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ORDINARY DAYS
Friday, October 12th, 2012
The lives of the four young New Yorkers featured in Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days may well be nothing out of the ordinary, but the same cannot be said about the exquisite chamber musical which Southern Californians first discovered in 2010 in its big-stage West Coast Premiere at South Coast Repertory.
Now, director Patrick Pearson and a talented cast of Cal State Fullerton Musical Theater BFA majors bring Gwon’s musical back to its intimate theater roots at CSUF’s off-campus black box, Santa Ana’s Grand Central Theatre, and what a gem of a production it is.
ANYTHING GOES
Sunday, October 7th, 2012
Way back in Broadway’s pre-Oklahoma! days, pretty much all that was required to create a hit musical was a a dozen or so songs (preferably by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, or Rodgers & Hart) and some lively dance numbers (the kind that Busby Berkeley was creating both in New York and in Hollywood). As for plot, three-dimensional characters, or any trace of the dramatic, well who needed those so long as a show’s zany characters made you laugh?
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LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
Friday, October 5th, 2012
The prodigiously talented students of USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory join forces to produce, direct, perform in, and design one of MTR’s absolute best productions to date, an almost perfect intimate theater revival of the Broadway/cult classic Little Shop Of Horrors that more than holds its own against the finest professional productions in town.
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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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