TICKLED PINK
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012
Taking her comic novel Tickled Pink as inspiration, Las Vegas headliner Rita Rudner and husband Martin Bergman have penned a two-act comedy not coincidentally titled Tickled Pink—and the results now onstage at the Laguna Playhouse are likely to tickle the fancy of anyone in the mood for a couple hours of laughs … along with a well-earned tear or two thrown in for good measure.
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REBORNING
Sunday, April 29th, 2012
The past continues to haunt the present of the two women whose lives intersect in Zayd Dohrn’s powerful personal drama Reborning, now getting its Southern California Premiere—and only its second production—at Orange County’s illustrious Chance Theater, with Resident Artists Casey Long, Jennifer Ruckman, Karen Webster doing some of their best work ever under Artistic Director Oanh Nguyen’s inspired direction.
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MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
It takes you thrillingly by surprise, that first glance at Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins onstage together, and from then on the excitement never lags in Million Dollar Quartet, Tony-nominated as Best Musical of 2010 and now touring the country, its latest stop at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts.
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CLOUDLANDS
Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
Adam Gwon and Octavio Solis might well have subtitled Cloudlands, their World Premiere chamber musical now playing at South Coast Repertory, An American Musical Greek Tragedy, not all that bad an idea considering how much darker its story turns out to be than the airy romance its one-word title suggests. Regardless, if the idea of divinely preordained doom seems apter subject matter for Euripides or Sophocles (had the two tragedians teamed to write a musical with elements of both Medea and Oedipus), so it might be without Gwon’s gorgeous, haunting melodies to propel the tale of a suicidal San Franciscan teen whose depression is compounded by the discovery that Mom has been cheating on Dad.
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LITTLE WOMEN THE MUSICAL
Monday, April 23rd, 2012
Few recent Broadway shows offer as many fine roles for theater majors as Little Women The Musical, making it a terrific showcase for students of Cal State Fullerton’s illustrious BFA in Musical Theatre program. That CSUF’s spring musical 2012 also happens to be a delightful, entertaining family treat makes it well worth a drive down to the OC.
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THE PRINCE OF ATLANTIS
Thursday, April 12th, 2012
An adult adoptee attempts to connect with his birth father, who then concocts a cockamamie scheme to have his younger brother pretend to be Dear Old Dad, in Steven Drukman’s The Prince Of At Atlantis, now getting its World Premiere at South Coast Repertory.
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SPRING AWAKENING
Saturday, April 7th, 2012RECOMMENDED
Theatre Out brings Broadway’s Spring Awakening to Orange County in a down-to-basics staging that retains much of the musical’s power and entertainment value despite the absence of several key elements that helped make the original New York production such a smash.
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SIGHT UNSEEN
Friday, March 23rd, 2012
There are times when the order in which a writer sequences the scenes of a play or musical can be as crucial to the work’s impact as the scenes themselves. As in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal or Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years, the ordering of scenes in Donald Margulies’ Sight Unseen is of prime importance. Cleverly sequenced in a deliberately non-linear fashion, the eight scenes that make up Sight Unseen keep you thinking, keep you guessing, and may even provoke a gasp of surprise or recognition at key moments.
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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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