WEST SIDE STORY
Monday, July 16th, 2012
Following their multiple award-winning stagings of The Who’s Tommy, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, and Merrily We Roll Along (among others), The Chance Theater’s Oanh Nguyen and Kelly Todd have once again joined forces, this time to reinvent the Broadway classic West Side Story with equally spectacular results.
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CABARET
Saturday, July 14th, 2012
Theatre Out puts its personal stamp on Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, making for one of the LGBT theater’s all-around best musical offerings to date and one that solidifies its status as one of Orange County’s top two or three intimate theater companies.
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JEKYLL & HYDE
Monday, July 9th, 2012
If there’s anything Los Angeles theater can be justifiably proud of, it’s our particular talent for scaling down big-stage, big-bucks Broadway musicals to intimate dimensions. Recent productions of The Color Purple and Spring Awakening not only rivaled their Tony-winning New York counterparts, in the eyes of some observers they even surpassed them. Now, DOMA Theatre Company tries its hand at a downsized Jekyll & Hyde, and if a bit of miscasting and some roughness around the edges prevent it from reaching the heights hit by the aforementioned 99-seat smashes, the Marco Gomez-directed production nonetheless makes for an exciting evening of musical theater at its most dramatic and tuneful.
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CRAZY FOR YOU
Monday, July 9th, 2012
Santa Monica’s venerable Morgan-Wixson Theater once again redefines “community theater” with its latest big-stage musical revival, Crazy For You, the Tony-winning Best Musical of 1992, directed with assurance and pizzazz by Anne Gesling.
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THE IMMIGRANT
Friday, July 6th, 2012
From the rear of the Pico Playhouse comes a foreign-accented male voice singing a beautiful, mournful refrain: “The stars can see what we cannot, the stars remember what we forgot. See that shining spark. God is there in the dark…” Little by little, a slight, bearded figure enters our field of vision, pushing a cart filled with ripening bananas down the center aisle.
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LEGALLY BLONDE
Monday, July 2nd, 2012
Nothing makes this musical theater lover happier than when a recent Broadway favorite makes its way to regional productions on our local stages. Such is the case with 2007’s Legally Blonde, now getting its Southern California Regional Premiere at Vista’s Moonlight Amphitheatre, and if 90 or so miles seems a bit of a schlep to catch SoCal’s very first from-the-ground-up Legally Blonde, then you’re far less of a musical theater (and Elle Woods) aficionado than this reviewer. The Broadway stage adaptation of the 2001 movie smash is a textbook example of how to turn a hit celluloid romcom into a nigh-on-perfect musical comedy, and one that the folks down at Moonlight have staged about as terrifically as imaginable.
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MONTY PYTHON’S SPAMALOT
Monday, July 2nd, 2012
It’s taken eight long years for Monty Python’s Spamalot to go from its preview engagement in Chicago to its Regional Premiere at Long Beach’s Musical Theatre West, but in the case of the one-of-a-kind Spamalot, the resulting production proves well worth the wait. Using the original Broadway sets, costumes, and choreography (but in all other respects building its production “from the ground up”), MTW gives Los Angeles-area audiences abundant reasons to celebrate Spamalot’s long-awaited arrival.
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HARMONY, KANSAS
Sunday, June 24th, 2012
If it seems at times that native Angelinos are about as rare as a 99-seat production that starts at 8:00 on the dot, it’s perhaps even harder to find big-city LGBTs who haven’t left their small town homes for greener big city pastures, or so it may seem. No wonder, then, that Blue State gays and lesbians tend to forget just how many of us there still are in the American heartland.
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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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