YOHEN
Thursday, November 2nd, 2017Danny Glover gives East West Players/Robey Theatre Company’s revival of Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yohen plenty of movie-star box-office draw, but Gotanda’s delicate, perceptive “portrait of a marriage” and Yohen’s luminous leading lady June Angela deserve better than Glover’s lackadaisical performance as a retired African-American soldier estranged from his Japanese wife of thirty-plus years.
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THIS LAND
Tuesday, October 31st, 2017
At once epic and intimate, Evangeline Ordaz’s This Land weaves two centuries of Watts history—from the Mexican ranchers who seized Tongva Indian land in the 1880s, to the white homeowners who took flight in the 1950s when blacks moved in, to the Latinos who became the majority four decades later, to today’s white gentrifiers—into two absorbing, illuminating hours of Los Angeles theater at its best.
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SINNER’S LAUNDRY
Monday, October 30th, 2017No playwright could ask for a better cast or finer production design than IAMA Theatre Company has given John Lavelle’s Sinner’s Laundry. Audiences, on the other hand, may find themselves leaving the Lounge Theatre clueless to the message, meaning, or simple raison d’être of Lavelle’s World Premiere absurdist existentialist comedy. I certainly did.
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REDLINE
Sunday, October 29th, 2017
A decades-estranged father and son meet for the first time since a car crash ripped their family to shreds in Christian Durso’s gripping, emotionally-charged Redline, an IAMA Theatre Company World Premiere that held me in its grip from the bombshell revelation that sets it in motion to its life-and-death final seconds.
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9 TO 5: THE MUSICAL
Sunday, October 29th, 2017
A trio of resourceful secretaries put their sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot of a boss in his place while serving up a heaping helping of Dolly Parton songs in the Broadway musical adaptation of the 1980 movie smash 9 To 5, the terrifically entertaining latest from Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre.
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LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES
Saturday, October 28th, 2017
Decadence and deception prove downright delicious in The Antaeus Theatre Company’s pitch-perfectly partner-cast Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton’s 1985 stage adaptation of the 18th-century French literary classic directed with supreme flair by Robin Larsen.
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GEM OF THE OCEAN
Thursday, October 26th, 2017
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson sheds informative, compelling light on early twentieth-century African-American life in Gem Of The Ocean, now being given an absolutely spectacular production at South Coast Repertory.
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HOME
Tuesday, October 24th, 2017Onetime Vietnam draft dodger Cephus Miles has an epic story to tell, and told in a more realistic, straightforward manner, I might have enjoyed it a good deal more than the hour-and-forty-minute theatrical poetry slam that is Samm-Art Williams’s Home, a play whose flowery language seldom engaged me despite impeccable staging and performances at Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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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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