THE LAST BREAKFAST CLUB

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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DOGFIGHT

It’s taken five years for Dogfight, the Louise Lortel Award-winning Outstanding Musical of 2012, to finally make it to Los Angeles proper, and praise be the gods of L.A. musical theater, Dogfight’s Hudson Mainstage debut is (to quote from one of the show’s best songs) “Nothing Short Of Wonderful.”
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SEPARATE TABLES

Following their superb 2014 revival of Terence Rattigan’s WWII-era Flare Path, Theatre 40 returns to Rattigan territory with a less successful Separate Tables, the mid-twentieth-century English playwright’s pair of one-acts whose second half crosses the line from period piece to uncomfortably dated.
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THE BODYGUARD

Over a dozen of Whitney Houston’s Greatest Hits performed by an electrifying Deborah Cox in the screen-to-stage tale of a superstar pop diva and her obsessed, life-threatening stalker may not be great art. Indeed, it’s not even a traditional song-propelled musical per se. But no matter. I enjoyed just about every minute of The Bodyguard, the West End smash now touring the U.S.A. and stopping this week and next at the Segerstrom Center For The Arts.
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SHOCKHEADED PETER

Bizarre, demented, disturbing, ghoulish, grotesque, gruesome, macabre, nightmarish, twisted, warped, and wickedly funny, Cygnet Theatre’s Shockheaded Peter is a stunningly designed musical treat filled with hilariously over-the-top characters and weirdly infectious tunes that will make any child (no matter how aged) think twice about misbehaving.
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LETTERS TO EVE

A young Japanese-American couple fall in love in a WWII relocation center as an African-American jazz musician imprisoned in a Nazi death camp falls for a Jewish inmate in Letters To Eve, an ambitious new musical by Daniel Sugimoto whose reach ultimately exceeds its grasp despite some effective moments, performances, and songs.
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ANNIE GET YOUR GUN

Glendale Centre Theatre once again does what it does best—revive classic Broadway musicals in-the-round—with Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, the song-and-dance tale of legendary 1880s “cham-peen” sharpshooter Annie Oakley.
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KISS

You must remember this. A kiss is not always just a kiss, or at least not in Guillermo Calderón’s compelling, confounding vision of life and love and death in today’s Syria, the appropriately—or metaphorically—titled Kiss, now being given a never-less-than-daring Odyssey Theatre Ensemble West Coast Premiere.
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