NEXT TO NORMAL
Saturday, August 20th, 2016
The 99-seat Pico Playhouse proves a just-right setting for a compelling, powerfully-performed intimate staging of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Next To Normal, one of only nine musicals in Broadway history to have won the Pulitzer Prize.
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GO BACK TO WHERE YOU ARE
Thursday, August 18th, 2016
There’s a whole lot of fourth-wall-breaking going on in Go Back To Where You are, David Greenspan’s magical seventy-five minute bit of meta-theatrical romance and whimsy now getting an admittedly brain-challenging but absolutely captivating West Coast Premiere by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble.
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PETER AND THE STARCATCHER
Monday, August 15th, 2016
Theatrical magic doesn’t get much more magical than the magic being made at the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center as Actors Repertory Theatre Of Simi enchants audiences of all ages with their supremely imaginative albeit scaled-down production of Broadway’s Peter And The Starcatcher.
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THE IMAGINARY INVALID
Sunday, August 14th, 2016
Theatricum Botanicum legend Ellen Geer follows her 2014 Queen Lear with another gender-bending star turn, this time as Molière’s Malade Imaginaire, aka The Imaginary Invalid, Constance Congdon’s 21st-century adaptation turning a three-and-a-half-century-old farce into a playfully raunchy laughfest that would do Mel Brooks proud.
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D DEB DEBBIE DEBORAH
Friday, August 12th, 2016RECOMMENDED
Twilight Zone meets Theater Of The Absurd in D Deb Debbie Deborah, Jerry Lieblich’s trippy journey to a land where no one, not even the title character, is who they seem, and though it’s anyone’s guess what Lieblich is getting at throughout most of his play’s seventy-five minutes, confusion hardly matters till a sudden eleventh-hour try for profundity takes Quadruple D from entertaining to exasperating.
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CABARET
Wednesday, August 10th, 2016
Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret, radically re-imagined by Sam Mendes, has arrived at the Segerstrom Center For The Performing Arts to thrill and devastate audiences with its vision of 1930s Berlin at its darkest and most decadent.
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ELECTRICITY
Monday, August 8th, 2016
Opposites not only attract, they generate Electricity in Terry Ray’s captivating World Premiere tale of two gay men who just happen to meet Same Time Next Decade in the same Ohio motel room from the early 1980s to the present day and (as the song goes) can’t help falling in love.
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FOOTLOOSE THE MUSICAL
Sunday, August 7th, 2016
Ren McCormack is back at Bomont High and fighting for his fellow students’ right to “cut footloose” as Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre treats its audiences to a finger-snapping, toe-tapping revival of Broadway’s Footloose The Musical.
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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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