ROTTERDAM
Tuesday, November 21st, 2017
Imagine that your husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend suddenly announced that they were no longer the person you believed them to be, could you still remain coupled, or would this be a deal-breaker? It is precisely this question that lies at the heart of Jon Brittain’s Olivier Award-winning Rotterdam, now getting a riveting, thrillingly staged West Coast Premiere at Skylight Theatre on Vermont.
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ONCE UPON A MATTRESS
Monday, November 20th, 2017
A book and lyrics every bit as captivating in 2017 as they were when Broadway audiences first discovered them back in 1959. Tunes that make it clear that Richard was not the only Rodgers with a gift for infectious melody. A director/choreographer and cast more than up to the task of bringing said book, music, and lyrics to crowd-pleasing life. Mix all of the above and you’ve got Musical Theatre West’s one-performance-only concert staged reading of Once Upon A Mattress, one of MTW’s Reiner Reading Series’ very best.
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THE WILD PARTY
Sunday, November 19th, 2017
Musicals don’t get much wilder, nor university productions much finer than the USC School Of Dramatic Arts’ sensational staging of Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party, concluding its sold-out five-performance run this afternoon at USC’s intimate McClintock Theatre.
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CHASING MEM’RIES: A DIFFERENT KIND OF MUSICAL
Friday, November 17th, 2017Tyne Daly rises above the material she’s been given in Chasing Mem’ries: A Different Kind Musical, though if by “different,” book writer Josh Ravetch means clichéd, maudlin, sitcommy, and song-deficient, then this Geffen Playhouse World Premiere “musical” is indeed quite different from the rest.
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KING CHARLES III
Friday, November 17th, 2017
William Shakespeare is dead. Long live Mike Bartlett, author of Charles III, a “future history” The Bard himself might have written had he been looking back, not at Kings crowned Richard or Henry but at a 21-century monarch facing the crisis of his or any sovereign’s reign. Now getting a spectacular Southern California Premiere at a newly revitalized Pasadena Playhouse, King Charles III is the best play William Shakespeare never wrote.
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SPAMILTON: AN AMERICAN PARODY
Tuesday, November 14th, 2017
Imagine you’ve spent the past three-and-a-half decades spoofing New York’s buzz-worthiest musicals but this year there’s one megasmash that dwarfs the competition like no musical ever has before. If you’re Gerard Alessandrini, you write Forbidden Broadway 2017 and call it Spamilton, eighty minutes of Broadway satire at its funniest, cleverest, and most tuneful now getting its West Coast Premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.
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THE SECRET IN THE WINGS
Monday, November 13th, 2017
Life is no fairytale for the dozens of fairytale characters who people Mary Zimmerman’s dark and dazzling The Secret In The Wings, the latest from L.A.’s “Pay What You Want” Coeurage Theatre Company and as spellbinding a theatrical experience as I’ve had since Coeurage’s equally stunning Failure: A Love Story.
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THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER
Saturday, November 11th, 2017
Radio superstar Sheridan Whiteside is at it again, terrorizing the Ohio Stanleys, fomenting family rebellions, and scheming to get his own egomaniacal way in Actors Co-op’s pitch-perfect revival of the 1939 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart screwball classic The Man Who Came To Dinner.
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