THE ELLIOTS
Friday, May 15th, 2015RECOMMENDED
Readers have been rooting for Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth to rekindle their long-lost love since Jane Austen’s Persuasion first hit the book stalls back in 1817. L.A. theatergoers can now follow their example as South Pasadena’s Fremont Centre Theatre debuts A.J. Darby’s 2015 adaptation, retitled The Elliots. Yes, both Darby’s play and its World Premiere production could stand some tweaking, but Persuasion fans will find much to enjoy in two hours spent with Austen’s now iconic characters.
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MY BARKING DOG
Sunday, April 26th, 2015RECOMMENDED
Performances are outstanding and the production design sensational, the director is Michael Michetti (need I say more?), and the ideas put forth are provocative, but an overreliance on monologs proves off-putting in the West Coast Premiere of Eric Cable’s two-hander My Barking Dog, the latest from The Theatre @ Boston Court.
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FIGARO
Friday, April 10th, 2015
The very first West Coast staging of a 2012 World Premiere may not be what folks expect from A Noise Within given the company’s usual slate of Shakespeare, Shaw, Racine, Moliere, and other long-deceased playwrights, but that is precisely what California’s Home For The Classics now offers its audiences in Charles Moray’s Figaro, the frothiest, funniest, most farcical romp I’ve yet seen at ANW.
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JULIUS CAESAR
Sunday, March 29th, 2015
When staging Shakespeare for a contemporary audience who’s seen each of the Bard’s plays a gazillion times, it all comes down to acting, design, and execution, and A Noise Within scores three for three in their Spring 2015 season production of Julius Caesar.
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PYGMALION
Tuesday, March 24th, 2015
Witty comedy, incisive social commentary, unconventional love story, and the inspiration for what many consider the greatest Broadway musical ever—George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion is all this and (as revived for a 21st-century audience at the Pasadena Playhouse) much, much more.
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THE THREEPENNY OPERA
Monday, February 23rd, 2015
A Noise Within kicks off its Spring 2015 season with a sensationally performed and designed revival of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. Theatergoers who’ve not acquired a taste for Brecht’s brand of early 20th-century avant-garde or Weill’s dirge-like melodies may find its three-hour running time a bit of a long haul, however those with a fondness for Threepenny (and they are, I am told, legion) will find themselves in Brecht/Weill heaven.
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THE WHIPPING MAN
Wednesday, February 4th, 2015
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House, at long last ending what is still the deadliest war in United States history. Five days later, President Abraham Lincoln was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet. Coincidentally, during this fateful week in our country’s history, Jews in both North and South observed Pesach, the festival of Passover, celebrating the freeing of the Israelites from centuries of slavery in Egypt.
Inspired by this bit of historical happenstance, and armed with the knowledge that there were indeed Jewish slaveholders (and Jewish slaves) in the pre-Civil War Deep South, playwright Matthew Lopez sat down to write The Whipping Man, a gripping, eye-opening look at three Jews—two black, one white—in the days just following Appomattox, a play now brought to compelling life in a spectacular new production just transferred from South Coast Rep to the Pasadena Playhouse.
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THE MISSING PAGES OF LEWIS CARROLL
Sunday, February 1st, 2015
Playwright Lily Blau speculates on one of the most controversial real-life relationships in literary history—that of the then 31-year-old Charles Dotson, better known as Lewis Carroll, and Alice Liddell, the 11-year-old inspiration for Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland—in her provocative new play The Missing Pages Of Lewis Carroll, now getting a superbly acted and directed (and gorgeous-to-look-at) World Premiere at Pasadena’s The Theater @ Boston Court.
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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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