THE MAX FACTOR FACTOR
Saturday, August 2nd, 2014
Secretly gay 1930s film star Lance Grant falls head-over-heels for the equally famous—and equally closeted—Hoyt Baxter in Adrian Bewley, Joe Blodgett, and Chana Wise’s delightful new musical The Max Factor Factor, a fortuitous first collaboration between New Musicals Inc. and Celebration Theatre.
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GHOST THE MUSICAL
Wednesday, July 30th, 2014
What do you do when the musical you’ve produced ends up flopping on The Great White Way, but has enough going for it to merit a post-Broadway National Tour?
One possible solution is to mount a cost-saving non-union tour, and hope that even without an Equity cast and budget, whatever magic brought the show to Opening Night on Broadway will somehow survive.
In the case of Ghost The Musical, now playing at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts, the magic mostly does.
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INTO THE WOODS
Tuesday, July 29th, 2014
Fiasco Theatre Company’s re-imagined revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods is the most thrillingly imaginative production I’ve seen of the 1987 triple-Tony-winner, and trust me … I’ve seen a forest-ful of Into The Woodses, fourteen in all since the First National Tour stopped at the Ahmanson in 1989.
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MARY POPPINS
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014
Moonlight Stages in San Diego-adjacent Vista once again trumps L.A. and Orange Counties by offering Southland audiences the much-awaited First Regional Production of a Big Broadway Smash, this time a terrifically staged and performed Big-Stage, Big-Cast, Big-Orchestra Disney’s And Cameron Mackintosh’s Mary Poppins.
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bare: a pop opera
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014
Damon Intrabartolo and Jon Hartmere’s bare: a pop opera at long last gets its San Diego Premiere—and an absolutely superb one at Diversionary Theater—fourteen years after it first impacted Los Angeles theatergoers with its devastatingly powerful take on two Catholic High School boys in love.
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BYE BYE BIRDIE
Saturday, July 19th, 2014
Cabrillo Music Theatre revives the 1960 Broadway classic Bye Bye Birdie with a now almost unheard-of cast of more than sixty, and though this is one Birdie that doesn’t say “Bye Bye” till two hours and fifty-five minutes after the first note of its Overture, the all-around sensational revival provides proof positive why theater lovers and local businesses must rally behind the endangered Southland musical theater mainstay that is Cabrillo. To paraphrase Irving Berlin, there’s no musical theater in Ventura County like Cabrillo Music Theater.
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DISNEY’S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
Monday, July 14th, 2014
La Belle et La Bête have brought their “tale as old as time” to Long Beach as Musical Theatre West offers Angelinos an absolutely sensational regional production of Disney’s Beauty And The Beast.
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IN THE HEIGHTS
Saturday, July 12th, 2014
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s In The Heights now arrives in Anaheim Heights (sorry, make that Anaheim Hills) in as fine an intimate staging as any you could hope to see of the Tony-winning Best Musical of 2008, Chance Theater mainstays Oanh Nguyen and Kelly Todd directing and choreographing with their accustomed brilliance, aided and abetted by a sensational young cast.
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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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