WEDDING BAND: A LOVE/HATE STORY IN BLACK AND WHITE
Sunday, October 19th, 2014A World War I-era interracial love story seen through a 1960s Civil Rights Movement lens gets revived for 21st Century audiences as The Antaeus Company presents Alice Childress’s Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story In Black And White, a compelling, thought-provoking look at how things were, how they have changed, and how much remains the same.
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MELISSA ARCTIC
Saturday, October 4th, 2014Magic is being made at North Hollywood’s Road Theatre, and not just the slight-of-hand illusions in Alby Selznick’s much-extended Smoke And Mirrors at the Road-on-Lankershim. Magic of the purely theatrical sort lights up the stage of The Road’s spiffy new Magnolia space with the West Coast Premiere of Craig Wright’s Melissa Arctic, as enchanted (and enchanting) a production as any theater lover could possibly wish for.
SCARY MUSICAL The Musical
Friday, October 3rd, 2014RECOMMENDED
Stellar performances and a laugh-packed book are the best reasons to catch Richard Hochberg and Michael Paternosto’s SCARY MUSICAL The Musical. What’s still missing are the kind of catchy, hummable tunes that would take the creative duo’s deliciously campy send-up of Psycho, Carrie, Halloween, and other assorted scream-fests beyond its current NoHo Arts Center World Premiere run.
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CABARET
Friday, September 26th, 2014It 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, 2014A 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, 2014No 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, 2014Secretly 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, 2014You 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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