TUNE IN
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025
Playwright Carlos Lacámara tackles university politics, mental illness, psychedelic drug therapy, childhood trauma, and women in academia in the early 1960s, stirs in at least one soap opera-worthy plot twist, and garners more than a few laughs along the way in Tune In, another fabulous Theatre Of NOTE World Premiere.
STRIFE
Tuesday, August 12th, 2025
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer in Strife, John Galsworthy’s more-relevant-than-ever look at the darker side of HBO’s The Gilded Age.
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SOMETHING ROTTEN
Monday, August 11th, 2025
Torrance Theatre Company has done it again, delivering a big-stage, big-cast, big-orchestra summer musical so professionally staged and performed, you just might find yourself thinking you’re seeing the 2015 Broadway hit Something Rotten being performed at one of our major SoCal regional theaters.
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GLORY DAYS
Saturday, August 9th, 2025
Four high school besties discover that life after graduation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in Nick Blaemire and James Gardiner’s engaging slice-of-teen-life musical Glory Days, a terrific (and terrifically entertaining) talent showcase for a quartet of up-and-coming triple threats at the Broadwater Black Box Theatre.
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THE FANTASTICKS
Sunday, August 3rd, 2025The ups and downs of first love are explored to engaging, tuneful effect in the Ruskin Group Theatre’s 65th-anniversary revival of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s The Fantasticks, though for me at least, the world’s longest-running musical begins somewhat to outstay its welcome at around the two-hour point.
THE HEIDI CHRONICLES
Saturday, August 2nd, 2025
Playwright Wendy Wasserstein encapsulates a quarter century of the American women’s movement as she recounts the Life and Loves of Heidi Holland in her Pulitzer Prize-winning dramedy The Heidi Chronicles, now being given an absorbing, illuminating 37th-anniversary revival at the Group Rep Theatre.
SOME LIKE IT HOT
Thursday, July 31st, 2025
Not everybody things hot, but it’s hard to imagine any Broadway musical lover not being smitten by the quadruple-Tony-winning stage adaptation of the Billy Wilder movie classic Some Like It Hot now playing at the Hollywood Pantages, a song-and-dance-and-laugh-packed entertainment bonanza with an updated sensibility where race and gender are concerned.
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REEL TO REEL
Monday, July 28th, 2025Ever notice how the minutes can go by lickety-split or seem to move at a snail’s pace depending who you’re with? In the case of the octogenarian couple whose 55-plus-year relationship playwright John Kolvenbach has us spending an hour and a half with in his 2018 four-actor two-hander Reel To Reel, I found the latter to be the case.
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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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