JERRY SPRINGER: THE OPERA
Saturday, July 9th, 2011
Jerry Springer has arrived in Anaheim Hills, and some of the natives are up in arms. Open-minded theatergoers, on the other hand, will be lining up in droves to catch the Southern California Premiere of Jerry Springer: The Opera, a sensational Chance Theater production which once again proves that for controversial, intimate-stage excellence in the OC,nobody does it better than the Chance.
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FLEETWOOD MACBETH
Friday, July 8th, 2011
They’ve done As You Like It as “As U2 Like It,” A Winter’s Tale as “A Wither’s Tale,” Much Ado About Nothing as “Much Adoobie Brothers About Nothing,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream as “A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream,” and Hamlet as “Hamlet The Artist Formerly Known As Prince Of Denmark.” Now, the Troubadour Theater Company (affectionately nicknamed The Troubies) are back with a revival of their 2004 musical spoof of Macbeth, which they’ve titled “Fleetwood Macbeth.”
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1776
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011
If you’ve ever wondered what it would have felt like to be a fly on the wall of the Continental Congress of 1776 as our country’s Founding Fathers wrangled over the question of Independence from Great Britain and the writing of our Declaration Of Independence, then wonder no more. Instead, head on over to Glendale Centre Theatre, where a splendid cast of twenty-six under the skilled direction of Todd Nielsen revive the 1969 Broadway musical 1776 in an “all-a-round” terrific in-the-round staging.
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TWIST: AN AMERICAN MUSICAL
Sunday, June 26th, 2011
Simply put, the first fifteen to twenty minutes of Twist: An American Musical are as breathtakingly thrilling as any I’ve ever experienced inside a theater. An honest-to-goodness overture previews some of the tunes we’ll be hearing, and how exciting it feels to have this mostly lost tradition revived. Then comes “Back By Demand,” the kind of dazzling tap extravaganza one might have seen at Harlem’s legendary Prohibition-era Cotton Club, though here it is set in Louisiana’s Big Easy, aka New Orleans, and the applause it inspires seems to go on forever.
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CHICAGO
Saturday, June 25th, 2011
Just the thought of a community theater trying its hand at the Broadway megahit Chicago is probably enough to send most Kander and Ebb lovers scurrying in the opposite direction, that is unless the community theater in question is Santa Monica’s venerable Morgan-Wixson. As their productions of Urinetown: A Musical, A Chorus Line, and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee have demonstrated, the folks at the Morgan-Wixson are more than capable of staging quality musical theater on a tight budget—without the benefit of Equity performers, blessed as they are with directors, designers, and technical staff who know their stuff, and the talent pool of an area as crowded with triple-threats as is Los Angeles.
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THE BLUE LAGOON: A MUSICAL
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
(*At 45 minutes, The Blue Lagoon: A Musical gets a lower-case wow!)
When Henry De Vere Stacpoole wrote his romance novel The Blue Lagoon back in 1908, little did he know that a century later, his teenaged heroine Emmeline Lestrange would be singing “(Oh Dear God Above) Please Keep Us Safe On This Ocean” to her first cousin Richard, who would then reply with an encouraging “With Dick around, you don’t have to frown.”
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MAMMA MIA!
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
Is there any show in the world that can rival the success of Mamma Mia!? Since its 1999 World Premiere in London’s West End, there have been at least 30 “sit-down” productions across the globe. Sydney, Las Vegas, Madrid, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Paris, and Oslo are just a handful of the cities where Mamma Mia has “sat down” and stayed for months or even years. Then there are the tours, beginning with the First U.S. tour that played the Ahmanson back in 2002, stretching up to the musical’s four current tours—North American, European, Japanese, and Korean. As for Mamma Mia!’s Broadway run, just a couple weeks ago it hit 4000 performances and counting. All this is to say that a) you shouldn’t expect your local CLO to mount its own production in the foreseeable future and b) if you want to see Mamma Mia! live on stage, you’d better head on down to Costa Mesa where the North American tour is making an all-too-brief one-week stop.
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THE WILD PARTY
Sunday, June 19th, 2011
Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party is a tough show to nail. In fact, one of the few times I’ve left a production at intermission was a well-intentioned but mostly disastrous attempt at meeting TWP’s many challenges. That’s why Theatre Out’s intimate staging down Santa Ana way comes as such a thrilling surprise, one which marks director-choreographer Frankie Marrone as One To Watch and spotlights a revelatory performance by a never better Andrea Dennison-Laufer.
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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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