PUNK ROCK
Thursday, April 13th, 2017
The Breakfast Club’s all-American teen quintet may have found themselves holed up in the high school library like the seven English “sixth-formers” of Simon Stephens’ Punk Rock, but the world inhabited by those 1980s John Hughes archetypes seems positively Disneyesque compared to the dystopia their contemporary UK counterparts call home in Stephens’ riveting slice of middle-class private-school life, now being given an edge-of-your-seat Los Angeles Premiere by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble.
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JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR
Tuesday, April 11th, 2017
Candlelight Pavilion hits the Easter-season jackpot with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, a spellbinding big-stage revival that earns highest marks for Chuck Ketter and John LaLonde’s dynamic, imaginative direction, its all-around stunning production design, and a cast to rival regional theater’s finest. (Oh, and there’s not a note of prerecorded instrumentals to be heard.)
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THE BELLE OF AMHERST
Monday, April 10th, 2017
Ferrell Marshall is luminous as Emily Dickinson in Sierra Madre Playhouse’s gorgeously staged intimate revival of William Luce’s the Belle Of Amherst, impeccably directed by Todd Nielsen.
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MACBETH: REVISITED
Sunday, April 9th, 2017
Shakespeare’s Scottish Play is back, in streamlined form, as The New American Theatre debuts Macbeth: Revisited, and if the newfangled title suggests a more radically rethought Macbeth that this one actually is, director/star Jack Stehlin and his company of actors do indeed deliver the bloody goods.
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APRIL, MAY, & JUNE
Saturday, April 8th, 2017April, May, & June may be more Lifetime Channel sitcom than Chekhov, but once the play gets past its expository-dialog crash course in four decades of family dysfunction, Gary Goldstein’s entertaining World Premiere look at three sisters so close in age they could almost be triplets yields its fair share of both laughter and emotional rewards.
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EVITA
Friday, April 7th, 2017
Just when you thought the life and loves of Eva Peron had been done to death, along comes director Tim Dang and choreographer Cindera Che’s thrillingly reimagined Evita, this year’s USC School Of Dramatic Arts spring musical, a big-stage production that differs from regional theater’s finest only in the youth of its sensationally talented cast.
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INTO THE WOODS
Thursday, April 6th, 2017
Revivals don’t come any more thrillingly imaginative than Fiasco Theater’s brilliantly re-imagined Into The Woods, now paying a visit to the Ahmanson Theatre in a production no musical theater lover will want to miss.
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THE SIEGEL
Wednesday, April 5th, 2017
An out-of-the-blue wedding proposal a full two years after a couple’s breakup is hardly a conventional way to start off a romantic comedy, but the originality of this opening salvo is just one reason why Michael Mitnick’s The Siegel is such a South Coast Repertory treat.
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