SILENCE! THE MUSICAL
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012
When a flock of musical theater triple-threats adorned with sheep’s ears and hooves blend light-operatic voices to sing out “This is the story of Clarice,” only to be joined by a pantsuit-clad jogger looking like none other than a young Jodie Foster in FBI trainee mode, there’s only one place you could possibly be, whether in New York or L.A., and that’s at SILENCE! The Musical, the “unauthorized parody of Silence Of The Lambs” whose continuing Off-Broadway run has proved so successful that a sister production has now opened in Los Angeles to audience laughter and cheers.
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CRAZY FOR YOU
Saturday, September 29th, 2012
Downey Civic Light Opera opens its 2012-13 season with one of its strongest productions in recent years, Crazy For You, the Tony-winning Best Musical of 1992. Winning lead performances by Mishi Schueller and Andrea Dodson, a bunch of terrific supporting turns, and some of the best dancing I’ve seen on the Downey Theatre stage make this a worthy follow-up to last spring’s excellent The Pajama Game.
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SWEENEY TODD
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
The sexual heat is on in Sweeney Todd, and if that sounds like an impossibility to those who’ve only seen Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett played by actors well into their forties, fifties, or even older, then just wait till you feel the heat ignited by Robert J. Townsend and Bets Malone in Moonlight Stage Productions’ ground-breaking revival of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical smash, brilliantly directed by Steven Glaudini.
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ALLEGIANCE
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
Imagine you were told by the country in which you were born and raised that you had only a few days to sell your home and all your possessions, minus of what you could carry with you. Imagine that you were then transported hundreds of miles away and forced to live in cramped barracks where you would swelter during the summer and freeze during the winter, month after month, year after year. Imagine what kind of country that would be and how you would feel about the land you had believed with all your heart was your own.
To those Americans who take comfort in the certainty that “It couldn’t happen here,” an extraordinary World Premiere musical called Allegiance reveals that it not only could, it did happen here, and a mere seventy years ago when almost 70,000 American citizens and another 40,000 who called America home were imprisoned in internment camps for most of World War II simply because of their race.
A truly dark chapter in our country’s history, but one from which composer-lyricist Jay Kuo and book writers Marc Acito, Kuo, and Lorenzo Thione have created a musical that educates, moves, and entertains, particularly as performed by a stellar cast under the inspired direction of Stafford Arima at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.
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JUSTIN LOVE
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012
Neil Patrick Harris. Zachary Quinto. Jesse Tyler Fergusson. Ricky Martin. Andrew Rannells. Jim Parsons. Matt Bomer. Cheyenne Jackson. Gavin Creel. Sean Hayes. Jonathan Groff. T.R. Knight. It seems lately that hardly a month goes by without another movie, TV, or Broadway leading man coming out of the closet—and coming out ahead career-wise, as the abovementioned dozen make perfectly clear.
Still, despite the increasing number of celebrity coming-out stories, there has yet to be a major A-list romantic/action hero movie star we can embrace as “Openly Gay,” someone the stature of a George Clooney or a Jake Gyllenhaal or a Bradley Cooper—to name three totally random examples. Someone like Justin Rush, the fictitious hero of Justin Love, the best new intimate stage musical I’ve seen in years, now getting a spectacular World Premiere at Celebration Theatre under the inspired direction of 4-time Scenie-winning Director Of The Year Michael Matthews.
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DAMN YANKEES
Monday, September 17th, 2012RECOMMENDED
Simi Valley Performing Arts Center hit the jackpot earlier this year with productions of the Broadway hits Hairspray and Pippin that rivaled those of bigger-stage, bigger-budget companies like Thousand Oaks’ Cabrillo Music Theatre and Long Beach’s Musical Theatre West. Their latest, a revival of the 1950s Broadway smash Damn Yankees, while not in the same league as its predecessors, does offer sufficient pleasures to recommend it to Simi Valley audiences (with a couple of reservations).
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PIPPIN
Monday, September 17th, 2012
Few musicals lend themselves to as many different interpretations as the Stephen Schwartz classic Pippin. Reprise did it sexy and Chicago-esque some years back; East West Players took an Asian hip-hop approach to the material; Deaf West at the Taper featured not one but two Pippins, one deaf and one hearing; and the recently reviewed Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center revival set Pippin in the world of “Steampunk Carnivale.”
Now, Scenie-winning San Diego Director Of The Year James Vasquez puts his own personal stamp on Pippin for San Diego’s LGBT Diversionary Theater, and trust me, you may have seen Pippin before, even many times before, but you’ve never seen a Pippin like this one.
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XANADU
Saturday, September 15th, 2012
Playwright Douglas Carter Beane provided a textbook example of how to turn a movie lemon into Broadway lemonade when he wrote the book for the stage adaptation of the turkey known as Xanadu, and lo and behold, one of biggest critical and commercial failures of the 1980s was transformed from flaming flop to fabulous hit!
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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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