STATE OF THE UNION
Sunday, September 26th, 2010
The Republican Party has lost control of the White House and wants it back in the next election. “If we get a strong candidate, we’ve got a better than fighting chance,” remarks newspaper publisher Kay Thorndyke at a meeting with party bigwig James Conover and reporter/political strategist Spike MacManus. “The party’s best chance is to put up a candidate who’s never been identified with politics,” Kay goes on, and the trio set their sights on wealthy, self-made tycoon Grant Matthews. It just so happens that Kay and Grant have been carrying on an affair under the nose of Grant’s justifiably suspicious wife Mary, but no matter. What the public doesn’t know won’t hurt the Republican candidate, whoever he may turn out to be. Now, if they can just get Grant and Mary to play the parts of happily married man and wife and persuade Grant to tone down those speeches that have riled the special interest groups, thereby presenting a more homogenized image to the American public, they may just have an electable candidate.
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BOYS’ LIFE
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Howard Korder writes insightfully—and hilariously—about the male psyche in his 1988 comedy Boys’ Life, smashingly revived (and smoothy updated to the 21st Century) by Crown City Theatre Company. Impeccably acted and directed, this is a production which ought to disprove once and for all any notion of Los Angeles not being the great theater town it is.
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40 IS THE NEW 15
Saturday, July 17th, 2010
What a difference a few tweaks can make!
40 Is The New 15, Larry Todd Johnson and Cindy O’Connor’s musical about five former high school classmates turning 40 and reflecting on the ways their lives have changed over the past quarter century, has made a triumphant return to North Hollywood a year after its workshop run. What was already an entertaining, moving, and very promising evening of musical theater has come back the polished gem that only years of rewrites and workshops can achieve.
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BEYOND
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010
Beyond is like nothing you’ve ever seen before in a Los Angeles theater—a spectacular blend of glitz, glamour and feathers galore, Paris via Las Vegas transported to NoHo, replete with statuesque sequined dancing showgirls, aerialists soaring above the stage, gorgeous costumes, and did I mention feathers?
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KING LEAR
Sunday, June 27th, 2010
When L.A.’s Classical Theatre Ensemble sets out to do its very first fully staged production of a William Shakespeare play, the result truly merits event status, especially when it is the Antaeus Company staging King Lear with not one His Majesty but two royal monarchs—Dakin Matthews and Harry Groener—and two entirely different casts to support them.
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AMADEUS
Friday, June 18th, 2010
For the past several years, August Viverito and T L Kolman have been stripping down big stage, big budget Broadway productions to their brilliant essentials on the matchbox stage of the Chandler Studio Theatre in North Hollywood. Now, to the ranks of their superb downscalings of M Butterfly, Equus, and Sweeney Todd can be added The Production Company’s equally outstanding re-envisioning of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.
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ALL MY SONS
Sunday, June 6th, 2010
There’s no greater work of 20th Century American theater than Arthur Miller’s now classic All My Sons. Debuting on Broadway less than two years after World War II ended with Japan’s surrender, Miller’s examination of personal responsibility in time of war remains every bit as powerful—and relevant—sixty-three years after its New York premiere.
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USS PINAFORE
Sunday, May 30th, 2010
From its title, you might guess that Crown City Theatre’s USS Pinafore was simply an Americanized version of Gilbert & Sullivan’s classic comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore—but you’d be wrong. What adapter/director Jon Mullich has up his sleeve is something considerably more outer spacey than that—a cleverly written transformation of the British warship Pinafore into the Starship Pinafore. Yes, that’s Starship, à la Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise.
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