SOUTH STREET
Monday, September 26th, 2011RECOMMENDED
A phenomenal cast of Broadway and regional theater triple threats open the Pasadena Playhouse’s 2011-2012 season with South Street: A New Musical Comedy, directed by the multitalented Roger Castellano and choreographed by the always terrific Dana Solimando. If only the World Premiere musical matched their talents.
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TWIST: AN AMERICAN MUSICAL
Sunday, June 26th, 2011
Simply put, the first fifteen to twenty minutes of Twist: An American Musical are as breathtakingly thrilling as any I’ve ever experienced inside a theater. An honest-to-goodness overture previews some of the tunes we’ll be hearing, and how exciting it feels to have this mostly lost tradition revived. Then comes “Back By Demand,” the kind of dazzling tap extravaganza one might have seen at Harlem’s legendary Prohibition-era Cotton Club, though here it is set in Louisiana’s Big Easy, aka New Orleans, and the applause it inspires seems to go on forever.
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HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY AND NEVER BE FOUND
Sunday, May 1st, 2011NOT RECOMMENDED
Theatre @ Boston Court’s Southern California Premiere of Fin Kennedy’s How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found has so much going for it, I wish I could say I enjoyed it more. Performances are superb, beginning with a tour de force star turn by Brad Culver. Direction by Nancy Keystone is imaginative and even inspired at times. Design elements, particularly John Zalewski’s striking sound design, are way up at the level of excellence theatergoers have come to expect @ Boston Court. The play was the first ever to win the prestigious John Whiting Award before being staged. British critics were ecstatic at the play’s World Premiere and I expect the Boston Court production will garner equal praise. And yet I failed to be engaged by its story or characters and in the end (and this is something I rarely say), I would have been happier accepting a different press invitation this past Sunday afternoon.
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CAMINO REAL
Thursday, February 24th, 2011RECOMMENDED
Imagine you could get inside Tennessee Williams’ head. More specifically, imagine you could witness one of his nightmares—a nearly three-hour-long one after an ingestion of LSD. What you’d see would likely resemble the playwright’s Camino Real, or at least Camino Real as envisioned by director extraordinaire Jessica Kubzansky at Pasadena’s Theatre @ Boston Court.
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DANGEROUS BEAUTY
Sunday, February 13th, 2011
If career options for women were limited in the decades before women’s lib, they were even fewer in the mid-16th Century when Veronica Franco was born, particularly if your mother had at one time been a courtesan, something Veronica found out the hard way when her dreams of marrying her life’s true love were dashed by the realities of Venetian society. For Veronica Franco, there was but one option—to follow in her mother’s footsteps, and if she couldn’t be Marco Venier’s wife, then his mistress she would be.
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AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS
Thursday, December 16th, 2010
No child growing up in the 1950s or 1960s’ could consider his or her Christmas complete without an annual viewing of Gian Carlo Monotti’s Amahl And The Night Visitors, the first opera specifically composed for American television. This fifteen year tradition ended in 1966, when the rights to a 1963 taping reverted to Menotti, who refused to allow this version (one which he disapproved of) ever to be shown again, thereby depriving later generations of one of the most extraordinary of holiday memories. An imperfect VHS-to-DVD transfer of a 1955 black-and-white kinescope is currently the only in-print version available to parents wanting to share the Amahl experience with their children, or boomers wishing to relive childhood memories.
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UPTOWN DOWNTOWN
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010
Not quite two years ago, the legendary Leslie Uggams electrified audiences at the Pasadena Playhouse as the legendary Lena Horne in the award-winning bio-musical Stormy Weather. Sadly, less than a year later, the Pasadena Playhouse announced that it was closing its doors. Fast forward to November of 2010 and both Leslie and the Playhouse are back—reunited (and it feels so good) in Uptown Downtown, a two-hour nightclub act-like musical bio of Miss Uggams herself—and a fabulous evening of song it is!
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FDR
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010NOT RECOMMENDED
The Pasadena Playhouse has reopened only nine months after the sad announcement that it was closing its doors for good, news worth celebrating in the streets with fireworks to light up the sky. If only FDR, the production chosen to welcome back Playhouse subscribers and friends, were equally deserving of a celebration.
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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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