ARCADIA
Monday, September 12th, 2016
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia can prove quite a head-scratcher when not done right. Fortunately, despite brain-teasing elements that can challenge even the sharpest intellect, all-around superb acting and incisive direction make A Noise Within’s 25th-season opener as entertaining and accessible as Arcadias get.
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THE GOLDEN DRAGON
Monday, May 9th, 2016RECOMMENDED
Five exceptional performances, Michael Michetti’s highly imaginative direction, and a breathtaking Theatre @ Boston Court production design add up to reason enough to check out Roland Schimmelpfennig’s The Golden Dragon despite a script more pretentious than profound.
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SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR
Tuesday, April 5th, 2016
A Noise Within revives Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 absurdist classic Six Characters In Search Of An Author with enough exciting theatricality to largely overcome the dated melodrama of the play-within-a-play that its sextet of author-seeking Characters are hoping to see performed.
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CASA VALENTINA
Monday, March 21st, 2016
Casa Valentina, Harvey Fierstein’s fact-inspired gender-bending trip down Catskills memory lane, now gets a sensational Pasadena Playhouse West Coast Premiere, one you’ll be talking and thinking about long after the 2014 Best Play Tony nominee’s stunning final fade to black.
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YOU NEVER CAN TELL
Sunday, March 13th, 2016
The words “frothy romp” may not be the first to pop into a theatergoer’s head when describing a George Bernard Shaw comedy, but this is precisely what the author of Man And Superman, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Saint Joan confectioned back in 1897 when he wrote You Never Can Tell (his “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better” response to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest), evidence of which can currently be savored at A Noise Within’s ever so frothy, ever so rompy revival of this lesser-known Shaw gem.
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COLONY COLLAPSE
Monday, February 22nd, 2016
Overambitious Colony Collapse may well be, and run about fifteen minutes longer than it should, but Stefanie Zadravec’s interweaving of five crisscrossing monologs with a realistic family drama plus a mysterious girl inhabiting a world of her own add up to a compelling World Premiere for The Theatre @ Boston Court, one sure to provoke much post-performance discussion with its themes of children gone missing, family relationships broken by drug-addiction, and a mysterious disease that has caused the death of over ten million North American bees in the past ten years.
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ROMEO AND JULIET
Sunday, February 21st, 2016
Graffiti-covered inner-city walls, dumpsters, and assorted skid-row detritus provide a startling but effective backdrop for A Noise Within’s Romeo And Juliet, director Dámaso Rodríguez’s electrifying new look at the age-old classic.
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FLY
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2016
The Tuskegee Airmen take off to exhilarating, spellbinding, emotionally powerful effect as the Pasadena Playhouse presents Trey Ellis and Ricardo Khan’s Fly, a West Coast Premiere destined to be one of the year’s most lauded, most unforgettable productions.
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