CABARET
Friday, September 26th, 2014
It takes a combination of inspiration and chutzpah to reinvent a 58-year-old musical theater classic that’s been reinvented time and time again—but director Gary Lamb has done just that with Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret, his creative touches adding up to the best of the five intimate Cabarets I’ve seen and one of the top two or three of the ten productions I’ve experienced in all.
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IT’S JUST SEX
Monday, September 1st, 2014
A dinner party that morphs into a spouse-swapping swingers’ bash may well be the hook that has attracted audiences to Jeff Gould’s It’s Just Sex – A Comedy About Lust & Trust since its World Premiere at the Whitefire back in 2002, but it’s the playwright’s perceptiveness about male-female relationships, the depth he gives his characters, and the unexpected life changes each couple ends up undergoing that has turned It’s Just Sex into L.A.’s longest-running comedy (factoring in its later runs at the Zephyr and the Two Roads), sent it off-Broadway in 2013, and have now brought it back to NoHo’s Secret Rose Theatre with an upcoming Las Vegas run likely in the cards.
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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Saturday, August 16th, 2014
No set, no frills, the original script cut by more than half, and abundant imagination and flair add up to quite possibly the shortest and without a doubt one of the most entertaining Midsummer Night’s Dreams in the four-hundred-twenty or so years since those foolish mortals first ventured into the woods, sixty-five minutes of madcap Midsummer 2014 magic courtesy of Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group.
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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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TWO GROOMS: BIG GAY NORTH HOLLYWOOD WEDDING REDUX
Monday, July 7th, 2014
You don’t have to be gay to add Two Grooms: Big Gay North Hollywood Wedding Redux to your Must-See List. In fact, this astutely tweaked reprise of 2009’s smash hit A Big Gay North Hollywood Wedding is fabulous entertainment for theatergoers of all sexual/gender shadings, and what’s even better, it’s all real … or the next best thing.
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THE CURSE OF OEDIPUS
Saturday, July 5th, 2014
Spending time with the Ancients has rarely if ever been as exhilarating as it is in Kenneth Cavander’s The Curse Of Oedipus, an Antaeus Company World Premiere which proves that even the deadly dullest of theatrical genres, Greek Tragedy, can end up the opposite of boring when given fresh new life by the right creative team.
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FLOWER DUET
Sunday, June 22nd, 2014
Marriage is “till death do us part”—except when it isn’t—or so Max and Stephanie and Sandy and Maddie discover in Maura Campbell’s provocative Flower Duet, now getting its West Coast Premiere at North Hollywood’s Road Theatre following a 2010 World Premiere in Burlington, Vermont.
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THE HYPOCHONDRIAC
Tuesday, May 13th, 2014RECOMMENDED
Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid gets trimmed down from three acts to a fast-moving fifty-minutes as Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre presents Roger K. Weiss’s The Hypochondriac, and thought results fall short of the brilliance of December’s A Christmas Carol, there are laughs aplenty to be had.
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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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