SHE LOVES ME
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011
Civic Light Opera Of South Bay Cities opens the Southland’s most exciting 2011 CLO season with about as perfect a musical (and as exquisite a production) as you’re likely to see all year, Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick’s She Loves Me.
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KISS ME KATE
Sunday, February 20th, 2011RECOMMENDED
Cole Porter’s 1948 Broadway smash has opened at San Pedro’s historic Warner Grand, the latest offering of The Relevant Stage theater company. Dedicated to the memory of Kathryn Grayson (who played Kate in the 1953 MGM Technicolor movie classic), the production stars none other than her granddaughter Kristen Towers-Rowles.
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THE CRADLE WILL ROCK
Thursday, February 17th, 2011NOT RECOMMENDED
Corruption and corporate greed are nothing new to the 21st Century. Composer-playwright Marc Blitzstein wrote about both in The Cradle Will Rock, his 1937 “play in music,” now being revived by the company that won the LA Weekly Award for Musical Of The Year for its first production of it back in 1994.
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DANGEROUS BEAUTY
Sunday, February 13th, 2011
If career options for women were limited in the decades before women’s lib, they were even fewer in the mid-16th Century when Veronica Franco was born, particularly if your mother had at one time been a courtesan, something Veronica found out the hard way when her dreams of marrying her life’s true love were dashed by the realities of Venetian society. For Veronica Franco, there was but one option—to follow in her mother’s footsteps, and if she couldn’t be Marco Venier’s wife, then his mistress she would be.
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THE DROWSY CHAPERONE
Friday, February 11th, 2011
With Cupid’s day fast approaching, timing could not be more perfect for The Drowsy Chaperone, Broadway’s Valentine to Musical Theater, to make its West Coast Regional debut in an absolutely splendid production by 3-D Theatricals.
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THE WHO’S TOMMY
Thursday, February 10th, 2011
It’s not every day—or even every year—that an intimate theater production gets invited for a repeat engagement by a major Performing Arts Center. On the other hand, it’s not every year that an Orange County intimate theater production scores four Los Angeles Stage Alliance Ovation Award Nominations, wins a special Ovation Award for its spectacular video design, and is currently up for three Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards, not to mention its nine Scenies including Best Intimate Theater Musical and Director Of The Year.
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ADDING MACHINE: A MUSICAL
Sunday, February 6th, 2011
“I’m sorry to lose an old and faithful employee, but you see, in an organization like this, efficiency is the first consideration. You will, of course, draw your salary for the full month. We couldn’t do anything less for such a valued and loyal employee. And I’ll direct my secretary to give you an excellent letter of recommendation.”
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LOVING REPEATING
Thursday, January 27th, 2011
If you’d asked me a few days ago what I knew about Gertrude Stein, my answer would have been “Not that much,” aside from her oft-quoted “A rose is a rose is a rose,” her relationship with longtime lesbian companion Alice B. Toklas, and some sense that she’d lived a good deal of her life in Europe. Though there are doubtless many theatergoers my age considerably better informed than I, I’d venture to guess an even greater number, particularly those under forty, know not even that much. For this reason alone, “A Musical Of Gertrude Stein” would seem to have at least one strike against it from the get-go. Add to that the fact that the musical in question has little or no storyline, that its relatively few spoken words come from a lecture delivered by Stein at the University of Chicago in 1934, and that the lyrics of this mostly sung-through musical are taken from Stein’s idiosyncratic poems (“Each one of them of the three of them meant something by being such a one”) and you have rather a hard-sell of a show—particularly if your audience of subscribers is accustomed to more traditional, linear fare.
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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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