EURYDICE
Sunday, March 17th, 2013
A Noise Within continues its Spring 2013 season, one with a decidedly more modern spin than is usual at California’s Home For The Classics, with Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl’s magical, mystical, poetic retelling of the Orpheus myth from the point of view of his bride.
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THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Monday, February 25th, 2013
For a textbook example of how to turn an epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel into a Tony-winning play, and then make it one of the most powerful—and breathtakingly theatrical—productions around town, head on over to Pasadena to catch the gritty magic that director Michael Michetti has conjured up at A Noise Within.
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CHESS
Tuesday, February 12th, 2013
After their phenomenal concert staged reading of Titanic The Musical, a production I dubbed “one of Musical Theatre Guild’s crowning achievements,” you might think that the triple-threats of MTG would want to take it easy for the rest of the 2012-2013 season.
Not so, as last night’s titanic staging of Chess (In Concert) at Glendale’s Alex Theatre made abundantly clear, and for those who missed this phenomenal achievement, you have but one more chance to catch it this coming Sunday afternoon in Thousand Oaks.
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FALLEN ANGELS
Tuesday, February 5th, 2013
The Pasadena Playhouse has come up with a surefire recipe for crowd-pleasing comedy. Start with a script by a master playwright, hire a cast of crackerjack comedic whizzes, surround them with a production that looks as smashing as Broadway’s best, and above all, entrust the entire project to director Art Manke, who has taken an early Noël Coward gem and turned it into a hilarious hit that would do Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance proud.
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THE SNOW QUEEN
Saturday, December 1st, 2012
That particularly English form of musical entertainment called “panto” is back for the holidays in Dale Sandlin and Steve Apostolina’s “Frosty Fractured Fable” The Snow Queen, now keeping audiences in stitches at South Pasadena’s Fremont Centre Theatre under the imaginative, effervescent direction of McKerrin Kelly.
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INTIMATE APPAREL
Monday, November 12th, 2012
Elegant writing, a fascinating place and time, and an African-American heroine rarely given center-stage status transform Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel from soap opera to Outer Critics Circle Award-winning drama, as Los Angeles audiences can now (re)discover in its impeccable big-stage revival at the Pasadena Playhouse.
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THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA
Saturday, November 10th, 2012
Two men facing imminent death from a terminal illness and a doctor with the means to save only one of them. Who will live? Who will die?
If this sounds like a made-for-TV movie or an episode of a weekly medical drama, think again. It’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw’s smart, funny, still thought-provoking 1906 comedy and the latest classic to be revived—smashingly—by A Noise Within.
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CYMBELINE
Saturday, October 27th, 2012
A plucky young heroine who dons male apparel as disguise. A villain who plots to make our hero suspect his young wife of adultery. A potion that simulates death without that pesky fatal result. A royal father who rejects his beloved daughter. Children separated at birth and reunited at long last in adulthood. An ambitious queen without a moral scruple to her name. A bit of Ancient Roman history thrown in for good measure.
Care to venture a guess as to which Shakespeare play I’m talking about?
The answer, as any true Shakespeare buff will surely tell you, is neither As You Like it, Othello, Romeo And Juliet, King Lear, A Comedy Of Errors, Hamlet, or Antony And Cleopatra (though the abovementioned plot threads appear to have been borrowed from this half-dozen or so of Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits). No, it’s Cymbeline, reputedly Shakespeare’s fifth-from-last play, originally classified as a tragedy, later redubbed a romance, and as performed at A Noise Within under the truly inspired direction of Bart DeLorenzo, about as hilarious a comedic romp as any theatergoer seeking escapist entertainment could wish for.
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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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