THE BEAUX’ STRATAGEM


Frank Galati’s 1990 stage adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath, Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 take on Eurydice, and now Ken Ludwig and Thornton Wilder’s 2006 adaptation of The Beaux Stratagem…  Has A Noise Within ever had as contemporary (and 2013 audience-friendly) a season as the three plays now in rep at their Pasadena digs?
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AMERICAN MISFIT

RECOMMENDED
America’s first ever serial killers come back to surreal life in American Misfit, Dan Dietz’s overreaching yet frequently entertaining historical dramedy with music, now playing at The Theatre @ Boston Court under Michael Michetti’s imaginative direction.
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EURYDICE


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


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


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


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


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


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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