DRIVING MISS DAISY
Sunday, February 3rd, 2013
Sierra Madre Playhouse follows last year’s superb, Scenie-winning Incident At Vichy with a beautifully acted, directed, and designed production of Driving Miss Daisy, Alfred Uhry’s award-winning one-acter about an elderly Southern Jewish widow and the African-American driver foisted upon her by her adult son in the years just preceding the Civil Rights Movement.
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I LEFT MY HEART: A Salute To The Music Of Tony Bennett
Monday, January 14th, 2013
“I Wanna Be Around,” “Rags To Riches,” “Stranger In Paradise,” “The Good Life,” “The Shadow Of Your Smile,” “Where Do I Begin,” and of course “I Left My Heart In San Francisco.” Hear this list of song titles and there’s only one name likely to pop into any music lover’s head—Tony Bennett, a star since his very first Number One record, “Because Of You,” topped the charts way back in 1951 and still going strong at age 86, with seven concert dates coming up in the next month alone.
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A CHRISTMAS TO REMEMBER
Sunday, December 2nd, 2012RECOMMENDED
Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre celebrates the holidays with a delightfully performed original musical certain to appeal to children and their grandparents (though perhaps not quite as much to those in-between).
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ANYTHING GOES
Sunday, October 7th, 2012
Way back in Broadway’s pre-Oklahoma! days, pretty much all that was required to create a hit musical was a a dozen or so songs (preferably by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George & Ira Gershwin, or Rodgers & Hart) and some lively dance numbers (the kind that Busby Berkeley was creating both in New York and in Hollywood). As for plot, three-dimensional characters, or any trace of the dramatic, well who needed those so long as a show’s zany characters made you laugh?
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MISS SAIGON
Monday, August 27th, 2012
Having now seen a grand total of seven major productions of Miss Saigon, I’m going to go out on a limb and say: If Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre’s reimagining of the 1991-2001 Broadway megasmash isn’t the very best of the bunch (which it may well be), it is certainly the freshest, grittiest, and most original staging I’ve seen since first experiencing Miss Saigon’s First National Tour at the Ahmanson way back in 1995.
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INCIDENT AT VICHY
Saturday, July 28th, 2012
The mind still boggles and the heart still recoils at the statistics. Nearly 6,000,000 Jews killed, including 90% of the Polish Jewish population, 90% of German and Austrian Jews, and similarly high percentages in the Baltics and Czechoslovakia. If Jews in France fared “better,” with 74% their 350,000 surviving the Holocaust, these figures provided cold comfort to the 90,000 exterminated by the Nazis.
Arthur Miller puts a personal face on a dozen or so of these French victims of Nazi terrorism in his powerful Incident At Vichy, now being revived at the Sierra Madre Playhouse in a proscenium-staged production that comes close to matching what you’d see at the Pasadena Playhouse or any major regional theater, albeit on a smaller scale.
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THE MUSIC MAN
Sunday, June 10th, 2012
Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre welcomes the upcoming Independence Day holiday with a terrific revival of The Music Man, one of the three longest-running musicals of the 1950s and one of the best Broadway shows ever. Refreshingly sophisticated, surprisingly deep, and more than a tad acidic at times, Meredith Willson’s self-described “valentine” to his home state of Iowa turns out to be far from the saccharine musical some have accused it of being
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ELTON JOHN & TIM RICE’S AIDA
Sunday, April 22nd, 2012RECOMMENDED
At any time in the 20th Century, if you’d asked a theatergoer to say the first word to pop into his or her head upon hearing the name Aida, chances are it would have been “opera” or “Verdi” or some other classical music reference. Then came the year 2000, and the smash Broadway hit of the same name, and a whole new bunch of word associations were born—composer Elton John, lyricist Tim Rice, original star Heather Headley, replacement stars Toni Braxton and Deborah Cox, “Written In The Stars” (the hit single by John and LeAnn Rimes), or any number of more contemporary references. These days, when you talk about Aida, more than Verdi’s heroine comes to mind.
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