THE SPITFIRE GRILL
Sunday, June 11th, 2017
A young woman fresh out of prison seeks a second chance at life in James Valcq and Fred Alley’s powerhouse chamber musical The Spitfire Grill, the gorgeously directed-and-performed latest from Solana Beach’s North Coast Repertory Theatre.
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CRIMES OF THE HEART
Saturday, June 10th, 2017
The Mississippi Magrath sisters have set up housekeeping at Long Beach’s International City Theatre with all their quirks and charms and ups and downs intact in the best of the seven productions I’ve now seen of Beth Henley’s crowd-pleasing down-home comedy gem Crimes Of The Heart.
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NICKY
Friday, June 9th, 2017
Chekhov’s melancholy antihero Nikolai Ivanov is alive and well and living unhappily ever after in today’s Palm Springs as Nicky, the titular protagonist of Boni B. Alvarez’s rewardingly adventurous reinvention of a late-19th-century Russian classic.
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AVENUE Q
Thursday, June 8th, 2017
A beefed-up cast of fourteen terrifically talented student performers and some inspired directorial tweaks make UC Irvine’s Avenue Q the best of the five productions I’ve seen since first discovering it on Broadway a baker’s-dozen years ago.
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CARRIE THE MUSICAL
Wednesday, June 7th, 2017
Director Nick DeGruccio amps up the horror movie thrills at UCLA as two-dozen of the most talented musical theater up-and-comers in town give Carrie The Musical as exciting a big-stage production as any scary-musical buff could possibly wish for.
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LES BLANCS
Wednesday, June 7th, 2017
Mid-20th-century colonial Africa serves as a metaphor for the then ongoing American civil rights movement in Lorraine Hansberry’s rarely produced posthumous epic Les Blancs, a Rogue Machine revival that transcends the play’s inherent didacticism to electrifying effect.
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HOLD THESE TRUTHS
Monday, June 5th, 2017
The time could not be riper for Jeanne Sakata’s Hold These Truths to make its powerful, compelling, inspiring Pasadena Playhouse debut, the extraordinary tale of one American’s fight for his inalienable rights at a time when his own government wished to deny them.
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THE LAST BREAKFAST CLUB
Sunday, June 4th, 2017
Imagine John Hughes’ archetypal Brain, Athlete, Basket Case, Princess, and Criminal performing twenty or so ‘80s hits to a live band inside the Shermer High School library as the only kids left in “an apocalypse of nuclear zombies” and you’ve got The Last Breakfast Club, the latest from Rockwell Table And Stage and the ab-fab first in a series of The Fuse Project musical movie spoofs.
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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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