RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDOORS


It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and for Los Angeles theatergoers that means the latest annual Troubies Christmas show at Burbank’s Falcon Theatre.

Last year’s A Christmas Westside Story mixed the music of West Side Story with the plot of the family film classic A Christmas Story. 2010’s The First Jo-el recounted that starry Bethlehem December with the music of Billy Joel. And 2009’s Frosty The Snow Manilow recreated the stop-motion animated TV classic with the music of Barry M—all of the above with the audacious flair, plethora of adlibs (or apparent adlibs), and sensational triple-threat performances that have become The Troubadour Theater Company’s stock in trade.

This year’s Rudolph The Red-Nosed ReinDOORS is no exception.
(read more)

IN THE HEIGHTS


In The Heights, the Tony-winning Best Musical of 2008, now gets its very first Los Angeles regional staging—an under-the-radar intimate production in L.A.’s own (Boyle) Heights that is so sensational it deserves to be on any musical theater fan’s radar throughout the month of December, and hopefully beyond.
(read more)

A CHRISTMAS TO REMEMBER

RECOMMENDED
Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre celebrates the holidays with a delightfully performed original musical certain to appeal to children and their grandparents (though perhaps not quite as much to those in-between).
(read more)

THE SNOW QUEEN


That particularly English form of musical entertainment called “panto” is back for the holidays in Dale Sandlin and Steve Apostolina’s “Frosty Fractured Fable” The Snow Queen, now keeping audiences in stitches at South Pasadena’s Fremont Centre Theatre under the imaginative, effervescent direction of McKerrin Kelly.
(read more)

LITTLE WOMEN THE BROADWAY MUSICAL


Little Women The Broadway Musical returns to the Chance Theater for the first time since its maiden holiday engagement in 2009, and to paraphrase an Oscar-nominated song, the Chance hit proves even more wonderful the second time around.
(read more)

TEA, WITH MUSIC


When Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea was first staged back in 1987, the playwright could scarcely have imagined that one night, twenty-five years later, her poetic tribute to her mother and the 100,000 other Japanese “war brides” who came to the U.S. after World War II would one night become Tea, With Music, an exquisite new chamber musical now getting its World Premiere production by East West Players.
(read more)

AVENUE Q


DOMA Theatre Company presents its strongest production to date with the first L.A.-area intimate staging of Avenue Q, Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx, and Jeff Whitty’s 2004 Tony-winning Best Musical, brought to fresh new life by director extraordinaire Richard Israel and an ever-so-talented young cast.
(read more)

MEMPHIS


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.
(read more)

« Older Entries Newer Entries » « Older Entries Newer Entries »