MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

Broadway couldn’t do it any better than the breathtaking revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along now playing at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center For The Performing Arts, not unless they too could get recent Tony nominee Michael Arden on board to direct with the same originality and flair he brought to last season’s Spring Awakening or come up with a cast as spectacular as the one at the Wallis.
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WHEN JAZZ HAD THE BLUES

He was the love of Lena Horne’s life. He ghostwrote and/or arranged many of Duke Ellington’s Greatest Hits. He lived an openly gay life three full decades before Stonewall. He was Billy Strayhorn, and if the name doesn’t ring a bell, playwright Carole Eglash-Kosoff aims to rectify that with her elucidating, engrossing, enormously entertaining World Premiere musical drama When Jazz Had The Blues.
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HAIRSPRAY

Hairspray is back in town, and just in time to provide an honest-to-goodness live alternative to NBC’s upcoming Hairspray Live. More importantly, thanks to some sparkling lead and featured performances, Cupcake Theater’s mid-sized revival proves a surefire crowd pleaser for audiences from nine to ninety.
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MAMMA MIA!

Mamma Mia!, the jukebox musical that started it all, has come back to Costa Mesa in its Final Farewell Tour, its return to the Segerstrom Center For The Arts offering the Broadway mega-smash’s mega-multitude of fans not only two dozen of ABBA’s Greatest Hits but one of Thanksgiving week’s Greatest Reasons to give thanks.
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THE DROWSY CHAPERONE


A fresh new crop of Cal State Fullerton musical theater majors breathe fresh new life into Broadway’s 2006 Valentine to musical theater, The Drowsy Chaperone, winner of 5 Tony Awards and a CSUF crowd-pleaser if there ever was one.
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PARADE

The UCI Claire Trevor School Of The Arts’ Department Of Drama opens its 2016-2017 season with a powerful, superbly performed big-stage revival of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s Parade.
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URINETOWN

Annie, Cabaret, Dreamgirls, Grease, Hair, Mame, Pippin, Rent. One-word-titled Broadway smashes go all the way back to the birth of the modern American musical. (Showboat or Oklahoma!, you take your pick.) Still, there’s never quite been a modern American musical like Urinetown, proof positive of which can be marveled at in director Kari Hayter’s exhilarating intimate-stage revival, the latest from L.A.’s “Pay What You Want” Coeurage Theatre Company.
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SISTER ACT

Mark my words. Daebreon Poiema’s superstar turn as bodacious nightclub chantooze Deloris Van Cartier turned bogus Catholic nun Mary Clarence will have Southland audiences standing up and cheering Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre’s latest crowd-pleaser, the screen-to-stage Broadway hit musical Sister Act.
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