A CHICAGO CHRISTMAS CAROL
Friday, November 19th, 2010
What do you get when you combine Charles Dickens’ classic tale of Christmastime redemption (you know the one) with The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s exposé of meat packing conditions in early 20th Century Chicago, then add a musical score with much of the stark dissonance of Kurt Weill’s collaborations with Bertolt Brecht?
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THE AUTUMN GARDEN
Friday, October 29th, 2010
It’s September of 1949 and summer is drawing to an end at the Tuckerman home-turned-guesthouse on the Gulf of Mexico, about a hundred miles from New Orleans. Proprietress Constance Tuckerman, her house filled with the usual mix of longtime summer guests, is about to welcome Nicholas Denry, the man who broke her heart twenty-three years earlier, into their midst, thereby setting the scene for the Chekhovian weekend Lillian Hellman brings to life in 1951’s The Autumn Garden.
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THE BUTCHER OF BARABOO
Friday, October 8th, 2010
The Coen Brothers meet Beth Henley in Marisa Wegrzyn’s The Butcher Of Baraboo, a quirky bit of Fargo crossed with Crimes Of The Heart, now getting its Los Angeles premiere at North Hollywood’s The Road Theater Company.
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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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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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