CHICAGO


You may have seen Kander & Ebb’s Chicago at your nearby regional, community, or 99-seat theater, but you haven’t seen Chicago in all its Broadway brilliance till you’ve seen the National Tour of the Walter Bobbie-directed, Ann Reinking-choreographed 1996 revival, now dazzling Southern California audiences this week only at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts.
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LET’S MISBEHAVE: THE MUSIC AND LYRICS OF COLE PORTER


Take three of Southern California’s most talented musical theater performers, then add three-dozen or so Cole Porter songs linked together by an ingenious book, and you’ve got Patrick Young and Karin Bowersock’s Let’s Misbehave, a brand spanking new Cole Porter musical now getting a sparkling California Premiere at Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG


Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along once again proves, as has virtually ever other Musical Theatre Repertory offering reviewed here since Sunday In The Park With George six years ago, that a blackbox production entirely directed, designed, and performed by college students can easily rival the best of 99-seat-plan Los Angeles theater, that is if the students involved are part of USC’s illustrious School Of Dramatic Arts.
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bare: a pop opera


Catholic school is hardly the most welcoming environment for two teenage boys to fall in love, or so roommates Peter and Jason discover in Damon Intrabartolo and Jon Hartmere’s off-Broadway cult favorite bare: a pop opera, now being given a particularly powerful Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center debut under Fred Helsel’s inspired direction.
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DISNEY’S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST


That “tale as old as time” better known as Disney’s Beauty And The Beast is back at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts for the first time in over three years—with a brand-new cast and all the magic of the 1992 animated classic and the Broadway musical it inspired.
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THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS

RECOMMENDED
A terrific ensemble of Southern California triple threats and John Vaughan’s pizzazzy choreography are the best reasons to catch Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre’s revival of 1978’s The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, a Broadway smash that begs the question, how did this mostly forgettable musical end up running a whopping 1,584 performances on Broadway?
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bare the musical


Orange County’s premier LGBT theater, Theatre Out, opens its first complete season in its spiffy new 4th Street Artist Village space (appropriately just down the block from trendy Santa Ana gay club Velvet Lounge) with a powerfully staged OC Premiere production of Jon Hartmere and Damon Intrabartolo’s bare.
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ANYTHING GOES


Anything Goes may be scaled down to fit the 339-seat Laurence Welk Resort Theatre, but no entertainment value has been stinted in bringing the perennial 1930s favorite to crowd-pleasing life at the Welk. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find a pizzazzier Anything Goes than the one now being staged down Escondido way.
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