GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES
Monday, April 13th, 2015
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes may have played nearly 750 performances on Broadway, turned Carol Channing into a star, featured hit songs like “Bye, Bye, Baby” and “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” and got turned into a Hollywood Movie Classic starring Marilyn Monroe, but when’s the last time you saw it onstage?
The answer may well be “Never,” because that’s what happens to 60something Broadway hits that aren’t Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, or Guys And Dolls … or rather that’s what would happen without Musical Theatre Guild’s much-loved concert staged readings, the latest of which brings that “little girl from Little Rock,” aka blonde bombshell Lorelei Lee, and her brunette chum Dorothy Shaw, back to entertaining 21st-century musical life.
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LES MISÉRABLES
Sunday, April 12th, 2015
A twenty-year wait for the rights to the international phenomenon that is Boublil And Schönberg’s Les Misérables pays off at long last for Musical Theatre West in an absolutely spectacular big-stage, big-cast, big-budget production that gives Broadway a run for its money.
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SWEENEY TODD
Saturday, April 11th, 2015
A cast of eighteen, ten of them members of Actors’ Equity, bring Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street to thrilling life on the intimate stage of North Hollywood’s Monroe Forum Theatre, a powerful reminder that should Equity’s 99-seat plan bite the dust per AEA’s wishes, productions of this size, scope, and caliber may soon be a much-mourned memory of our Los Angeles theater past.
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FIGARO
Friday, April 10th, 2015
The very first West Coast staging of a 2012 World Premiere may not be what folks expect from A Noise Within given the company’s usual slate of Shakespeare, Shaw, Racine, Moliere, and other long-deceased playwrights, but that is precisely what California’s Home For The Classics now offers its audiences in Charles Moray’s Figaro, the frothiest, funniest, most farcical romp I’ve yet seen at ANW.
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OF GOOD STOCK
Monday, April 6th, 2015
“Sisters. Sisters. There were never such devoted sisters,” warbles one of the three female siblings created by playwright Melissa Ross in her crowd-pleasing new comedy Of Good Stock, though considering the squabbling going on in their Cape Cod family home at this weekend’s summer family reunion, “devoted” might not be the first word that comes to mind when describing the oh-so dysfunctionally bound Jess, Amy, and Celia.
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WOLVES
Sunday, April 5th, 2015
Little Red Riding Hood’s Big Bad Wolf was a mere puppy dog compared to the wolves that roam wild in the big city where ex-lovers/still-roommates Ben and Jack make their home in Steve Yockey’s Wolves, now getting its Orange County Premiere at Theatre Out, and though assorted Grimms’ Contes De Fées may be its inspiration, Yockey’s dark, sexy fairy tale for adults is about the farthest thing from grim.
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MINE EYES HATH SEEN
Saturday, April 4th, 2015
Theatre Banshee commemorates the sesquicentennial of end of the bloodiest war in our nation’s history in their tenth-anniversary revival of Mine Eyes Hath Seen, Sean Branney and Leslie Baldwin’s theatrical montage of Civil War tales told “in their own words,” and powerfully so, under Branney’s imaginative direction.
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GREASE
Friday, April 3rd, 2015
You know from the great-big boy-band/girl-group/cast-of-thirty title-song production number that opens USC’s revival of the Broadway/Hollywood smash Grease that you’re in for something out of the ordinary, and here’s the even better news. USC’s big-stage production turns out to be by far the most exciting of the eight Grease revivals I’ve seen.
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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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