OUR FAVORITE SINGS
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010What do you call a blend of musical revue and cabaret?
RECOMMENDED
The Tre Stage calls it Our Favorite Sings, an entertaining hour and a quarter of musical theater talents singing their favorite songs live and un-miked in an intimate black box space.
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THE PRODUCERS
Saturday, June 26th, 2010RECOMMENDED
They said it couldn’t be done. They said that there was no way a non-Equity company of performers could possibly stage Mel Brook’s multimillion-dollar Broadway smash The Producers on a tiny stage with a reduced company of actors and a fraction of the original production’s budget.
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ARCADIA
Saturday, June 19th, 2010RECOMMENDED
The venerable Sierra Madre Playhouse challenges its subscribers and theatergoing regulars with something quite different in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, an intellectual comedy whose characters discuss physics, thermodynamics, computer algorithms, fractals, population dynamics, and chaos theory—as well as others of a slightly less scientific bent.
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DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS
Sunday, June 13th, 2010RECOMMENDED
The Relevant Stage, which bills itself as San Pedro’s Musical Theatre Company, has come a long way since Bat Boy, its freshman offering of a year and a half ago. Though its current production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels qualifies more as high-end community theater than as a fully professional staging of the Tony Award-winning hit, there are enough good to excellent performances (plus the show’s terrific songs and absolutely hilarious book) to make this an entertaining two and a half hours of wild and crazy fun.
BEHIND THE GATES
Sunday, May 23rd, 2010RECOMMENDED
Bethany Lieberman’s adoptive parents are at their wits’ end. The privileged seventeen-year-old has turned to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll to the point that she now sees Mom and Dad as the devil incarnate. Fearing that their child, born to a crack-addicted mother, may possibly be beyond saving, Susan and Jerry Lieberman ship Bethany off to Israel, kicking and screaming.
What the Liebermans are hoping for is a miracle. What they get is the same kind of nightmare Sally Field faced in Not Without My Daughter.
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THE ICE-BREAKER
Sunday, May 16th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Global warming is both a matter of scientific concern and a metaphor for Sonia and Lawrence’s relationship in David Rambo’s The Ice-Breaker, now playing at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40. Though ultimately too talky to hold this reviewer’s attention as much as I would have liked, the production is distinguished by fine acting, direction, and design.
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BENT
Sunday, April 18th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Recent years have seen great strides for the LGBT movement in the United States and even more so in certain other parts of the world. At the same time, as a visit to Towleroad.com will attest, anti-gay violence occurs on a daily basis, and in countries like Uganda, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, the mere fact of being gay can mean death, and not merely by your garden variety basher but by the government itself. Thus, Theatre Out’s production of Martin Sherman’s Bent comes at a propitious time indeed, and though a key directorial decision dilutes its power, a committed cast and one performance in particular make this an important piece of theater for LGBT playgoers and general audiences as well.
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THE BLUE ROOM
Sunday, April 11th, 2010RECOMMENDED
Austrian playwright Arthur Schnitzler’s 1900 play La Ronde so shocked the early 20th Century European theatrical world that it didn’t get its first public performance until 1920, and even then the play (and Schnitzler) were roundly attacked by critics and theatergoers alike. Hardly surprising, considering its plot—a sequence of not two or three, but ten sexual encounters. No matter that the most the play showed was a bit of foreplay, the actual sex taking place entirely in the audience’s imagination during brief blackouts. It was too much for Europe, let alone America, to take.
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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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