LEGALLY BLONDE
Monday, October 14th, 2013
3-D Theatricals gets everything right in its end-of-season staging of Legally Blonde The Musical. With director David F.M. Vaughn assuredly in charge, this is the very best production I’ve seen of one of Broadway’s best-crafted hits of the past ten years.
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DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS
Saturday, October 12th, 2013
The multi-talented student triple-threats of USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory are back onstage again in their latest student-directed, designed, and performed musical hit, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and though its lead characters are indeed the dirtiest of scoundrels, there’s nothing at all rotten about MTR’s latest Broadway-to-blackbox gem. Quite the contrary, there’s not a more sensationally performed 99-seat musical now playing in all L.A.
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THE LAST GOODBYE
Tuesday, October 8th, 2013
Romeo and Juliet may have fallen in love countless times before, but perhaps never quite so stunningly as they do to the songs of Jeff Buckley in The Last Goodbye, the 2010 Williamstown Theatre Festival hit now being given a splashy Broadway-ready production at San Diego’s Old Globe.
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LA CAGE AUX FOLLES
Monday, October 7th, 2013RECOMMENDED
The “birds” are boys and the boys are girls as Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center presents Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage Aux Folles (aka The Birdcage), and if an uninspired scenic design gives the production a more “community theater” look than it deserves, the result is nonetheless a crowd-pleasing, gender-bending treat.
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THE WHO’S TOMMY
Tuesday, October 1st, 2013
Moonlight Stage Productions concludes its 33rd Summer Season with a sensational production of the legendary The Who’s Tommy, one sure to thrill both Baby Boomers (in their teens and twenties when Tommy began its life) and Generation Xers and Millennials, Tommy’s multiple 1960s hits (“Pinball Wizard,” “I’m Free,” “See Me, Feel Me”) sounding hardly to have aged even a decade in the ensuing years.
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HAIRSPRAY
Saturday, September 28th, 2013
The plus-size mother/daughter duo of Tracy and Edna Turnblad have arrived at Escondido’s Welk Theatre in a mid-sized Hairspray that diverts, dazzles, and delights under director-choreographer Dan Mojica’s accomplished hand.
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ANYTHING GOES
Wednesday, September 25th, 2013
No 1930s musical has achieved the enduring popularity of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. A grand total of five Broadway, off-Broadway, and West End revivals, a pair of movie adaptations, a TV special, and more national and international productions than even the most dedicated Porter aficionado could possibly count.
For those who wonder why Anything Goes just keeps on ticking, there’s no more compelling evidence than the National Tour of its 2011 Broadway revival now spending the week at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts, a Broadway tour that guarantees SoCal audiences one show-stopping number after another in an Anything Goes that tops any other production of it you might happen to have seen.
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THE PRODUCERS
Saturday, September 21st, 2013
The Norris Center For The Arts undertakes its most ambitious musical to date, a near Broadway-scale production of Mel Brooks’ multiple Tony-winning The Producers which, despite some technical elements still rough around the edges on opening night, makes for a bona fide crowd-pleaser sparked by one standout performance after another.
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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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