HOW THE WORLD BEGAN
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
Ask a big city Blue State high school science teacher and a rural Bible Belt high school student how the world began and you’ll probably get two quite different answers. Put this teacher and this student in the same classroom in small town Kansas and sparks are likely to fly.
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PSYCHO BEACH PARTY
Monday, October 3rd, 2011NOT RECOMMENDED
No one sends up popular film genres with a campier (i.e. gayer) sensibility than Charles Busch, whether it’s the “Oriental” melodramas of Hollywood’s Golden Era in Shanghai Moon, or those ’50s/’60s Ross Hunter soap operas in Die! Mommy! Die!, or WWII “Women In Peril” thrillers in The Lady In Question, or the red-baiting propaganda films of the late ’40s/early ’50s in Red Scare On Sunset.
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UP
Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
The recent spate of It Gets Better videos could easily have been made with the teenage protagonists of Bridget Carpenter’s Up in mind. Fifteen-year-old Mikey, though not gay, is “different” enough to get pushed around and called “faggot.” As for Mikey’s new friend Maria, the six-months-pregnant sixteen-year-old was sent packing when her “drunk bitch” of a mom found out her little girl had gotten herself knocked up.
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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
Pride And Prejudice. Is there anyone who isn’t familiar with Jane Austen’s romantic classic in one form or another? True, not everyone has read the novel (and that includes this reviewer), but between the 1980 and ’95 TV adaptations, the 1940 and 2005 movie versions, and the innumerable romcoms (novels, plays, films, TV series, etc.) which have taken Austen’s tale as inspiration, there’s hardly one of us who won’t feel at least a spark of recognition while watching P&P’s latest adaptation at South Coast Repertory, all the way from Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s scrappy first meeting to the blissful happy ending we know awaits them.
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WEST SIDE STORY
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
As any Broadway buff will tell you, there’s Broadway pre-West Side Story, and everything else since then.
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RENT
Friday, September 2nd, 2011RECOMMENDED
After more than a dozen years’ wait for the rights to produce Jonathan Larson’s Rent, it’s no wonder that droves of regional, university, and community theaters have been jumping at the chance to stage the smash Broadway musical. Rent’s grungy look back at the young denizens of an AIDS-riddled late-‘80s New York City doesn’t require fancy sets or costumes and its edgy themes and youthful cast of characters give it undeniable appeal to up-and-coming performers, making it seem, at least on the surface, not all that tough a show to put on.
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HIGH FIDELITY
Sunday, July 31st, 2011
“I just can’t understand critics. If a musical isn’t completely unique it gets trashed. I read some of the reviews and could not believe what I read. Good Songs, Good Acting, Good Chemistry, Good Creative team, etc, etc, etc. So what was wrong? Well, the answer is … nothing!”
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MARY POPPINS
Friday, July 15th, 2011
Mary Poppins has soared into Costa Mesa (by umbrella of course), the arrival of the London/Broadway hit the best possible news for Los Angeles and Orange County children of all ages, from today’s kindergartners to the 50&60something Boomers who first fell in love with the 1964 Walt Disney film on which it is based. Heck, you can make that children in their nineties, Mary Poppins having first debuted way back in the 1930s as a series of novels by P.L. Travers.
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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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