tick, tick… BOOM!
Monday, February 3rd, 2025
Chance Theater does Jonathan Larson proud with the absolute best of the nine productions I’ve seen of tick, tick… BOOM!, the Rent legend’s early-1990s autobiographical one-man show turned musical three-hander.
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JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA: THE MUSICAL
Monday, December 9th, 2024
The meddling matchmaker you can’t help but love has returned to Chance Theater for the holidays—and in finer, feistier fettle than ever—in Mandy Foster’s incandescent star turn as Emma Woodhouse in the captivating return engagement of Chance’s 2018 holiday treat, Jane Austen’s Emma: The Musical.
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GLORIA
Monday, October 7th, 2024
Everyone’s out for their fifteen minutes of fame in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ ripped-from-today’s-headlines gut-puncher Gloria, now being given an electrifying Orange County premiere at Chance Theater.
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SWEENEY TODD
Sunday, July 21st, 2024Late 18th-century London is a living nightmare in Chance Theater’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and while the scaled-down revival’s pitch-black tone and bare-minimum number of players do not make it the best introduction to this Stephen Sondheim classic, there’s still a lot for Sondheim aficionados to applaud.
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THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE
Tuesday, July 16th, 2024
Whether you’ve seen The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee umpteen times or it’s your first time at the Bee, I guarantee you will fall head over heels for the dazzlingly fresh reinterpretation it’s being given at Santa Ana’s The Wayward Artist.
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BLACKBIRD
Sunday, June 16th, 2024
Dakota Wolf and Ron Hastings deliver powerhouse performances as a 20something woman and the decades-older man who had sex with her when she was only 12 in David Harrower’s Blackbird, a harrowing, disturbing, utterly compelling guest production at Anaheim’s Chance Theater.
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PRELUDE TO A KISS THE MUSICAL
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024
A gorgeous score, appealing performances, and a book that will have you reflecting on the very meaning of love are just three reasons to fall for South Coast Repertory’s World Premiere musical adaptation of Craig Lucas’s Prelude To A Kiss.
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TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS
Sunday, April 14th, 2024
Dear Abby and Ann Landers could learn a thing or two from Sugar, the advice columnist whose empathetic, profound, deeply moving responses to folks in dire need of counsel make Chance Theater’s Orange County Premiere of Tiny Beautiful Things the most heartstrings-tugging show in town.
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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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