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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LITTLE WOMEN [a multicultural transposition]
Tuesday, November 7th, 2017
If Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March had come of age in post-WWII L.A. as the Mayeda sisters, offspring of a Japanese-American father and a Chinese-American mother, Louisa Mae Alcott’s classic novel might look and sound just like Little Women [a multicultural transposition], Velina Hasu Houston’s unabashedly G-rated World Premiere rewrite that had me in its spell from ebullient start to heartwarming finish.
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CRY-BABY
Tuesday, November 7th, 2017
Cal State Fullerton Theatre & Dance is putting on quite a show this month, a rarer-than-rare big-stage production of Cry-Baby, aka The other John Waters Musical, and what a delightfully nostalgic, deliciously twisted, not-quite-for-all-ages alternative to Hairspray it turns out to be, especially as performed by CSUF’s Musical Theater BFA program triple-threats.
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END OF THE RAINBOW
Sunday, November 5th, 2017
Even the words “definitive” and “tour de force” seem inadequate to describe Angela Ingersoll’s astonishing transformation into Judy Garland in End Of The Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s powerful, probing examination of the last months Judy’s not-so-storybook life, superbly directed by Michael Matthews for La Mirada Theatre and McCoy Rigby Entertainment.
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MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY
Saturday, November 4th, 2017
With each of its three acts performed on a different stage of Sacred Fools’ newly renamed (and spiffily remodeled) Broadwater complex on Santa Monica Blvd. and Lillian, the company’s sensationally directed, performed, and designed Los Angeles Premiere of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play achieves event status. Whether or not Washburn’s audacious Drama Desk-nominated take on a post-Apocalyptic civilization is your cup of tea, for its adventurous execution alone, Mr. Burns is a fall-season must-see.
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