AVENUE Q
Thursday, June 8th, 2017
A beefed-up cast of fourteen terrifically talented student performers and some inspired directorial tweaks make UC Irvine’s Avenue Q the best of the five productions I’ve seen since first discovering it on Broadway a baker’s-dozen years ago.
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CARRIE THE MUSICAL
Wednesday, June 7th, 2017
Director Nick DeGruccio amps up the horror movie thrills at UCLA as two-dozen of the most talented musical theater up-and-comers in town give Carrie The Musical as exciting a big-stage production as any scary-musical buff could possibly wish for.
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LES BLANCS
Wednesday, June 7th, 2017
Mid-20th-century colonial Africa serves as a metaphor for the then ongoing American civil rights movement in Lorraine Hansberry’s rarely produced posthumous epic Les Blancs, a Rogue Machine revival that transcends the play’s inherent didacticism to electrifying effect.
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HOLD THESE TRUTHS
Monday, June 5th, 2017
The time could not be riper for Jeanne Sakata’s Hold These Truths to make its powerful, compelling, inspiring Pasadena Playhouse debut, the extraordinary tale of one American’s fight for his inalienable rights at a time when his own government wished to deny them.
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THE LAST BREAKFAST CLUB
Sunday, June 4th, 2017
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
Saturday, June 3rd, 2017
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
Friday, June 2nd, 2017Following 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
Wednesday, May 31st, 2017
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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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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