KRUNK FU BATTLE BATTLE
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
East West Players closes its best season in years with Krunk Fu Battle Battle, quite possibly the first full-fledged hip-hop musical ever, and a sensational one at that.
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ALL SHOOK UP
Friday, May 13th, 2011
Who says lightning doesn’t strike twice? Who says you can’t improve on perfection? Well, whoever said either of those things clearly hasn’t seen 3-D Theatricals’ 2nd-Time-Around production of All Shook Up.
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REEFER MADNESS
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
“Creeping like a communist, it’s knocking at our doors—turning all our children into hooligans and whores. Voraciously devouring the way things are today, savagely deflowering the good ol’ U.S.A.—it’s Reefer Madness. Reefer Madness.”
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9 TO 5
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
Violet, Doralee, and Judy, the trio of office gals made famous by Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Jane Fonda in 1980’s 9 To 5 are back—in a re-directed, re-choreographed, re-designed National Tour of the Broadway musical which world premiered a few years back at the Ahmanson.
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RENT
Saturday, May 7th, 2011
When Jonathan Larson’s megahit Rent ended its twelve-year-long Broadway run in 2008, regional theaters finally got their crack at staging the now iconic tale of impoverished young artists and musicians living in New York’s Lower East Side during the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic. Sadly though, despite an (over)abundance of Southern California productions since then, few appear to have achieved the greatness that Rent deserves. This is a show that requires bona fide triple threats in all its roles, including its many ensemble tracks, and despite our SoCal talent pool, this may have proved more easily said than done.
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THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA
Tuesday, April 26th, 2011
Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s The Light In The Piazza is the most exquisite new musical to grace Broadway in the past ten years. How’s that for a reason to catch its first big-stage L.A.-area production since the National Tour played the Ahmanson in 2006—especially one as gorgeous as that of Civic Light Opera Of South Bay Cities?
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THE BOY IN THE BATHROOM
Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
No theatrical genre is more quintessentially American than the musical. From Show Boat to Oklahoma to West Side Story to A Chorus Line to Rent to Spring Awakening, the American musical continues to evolve, breaking new ground and exploring new themes, and nowhere more so than in the intimate “chamber musical.” Daddy Long Legs, Adding Machine: The Musical, Hello Again, Loving Repeating, Group: A Musical, and Glory Days are but a half dozen chamber pieces raved about on these pages over the past half dozen months, and to this list can now be added The Boy In The Bathroom, currently getting its World Premiere at The Chance Theater.
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LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS
Saturday, April 16th, 2011
Audrey II, the “strange and interesting plant” that made his/her/its? first appearance way back in 1960 in Roger Corman’s Z-movie classic, is back once again, this time at the La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts, with human flesh on his/her/its? cannibalistic mind—and you all know what that means. “They may offer you lots of cheap thrills, fancy condos in Beverly Hills, but whatever they offer you, don’t feed the plants!”
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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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