THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE
Friday, August 29th, 2014
For a Broadway hit that won six Tony awards (including Best Musical of 2002), Thoroughly Modern Millie has made relatively few Southland appearances in the intervening twelve years, just one of many reasons to celebrate the Thoroughly Modern (circa 1922) Miss’s arrival at Glendale Centre Theatre under the thoroughly marvelous co-direction of Danny Michaels and Orlando Alexander.
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SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD
Wednesday, August 27th, 2014RECOMMENDED
Inland Valley Repertory Theatre celebrates the end of summer with Jason Robert Brown’s Songs For A New World, the song cycle that put the future Tony winner’s name on the map, and if not the inspired vision of Brown’s 1995 debut that I’ve seen previously, a number of fine performances (and one in particular) make this a mostly effective, ultimately affecting revival of the very first JRB hit.
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MEET & GREET
Monday, August 25th, 2014
“A+ CAST PLUS BOFFO SCRIPT EQUALS FRINGE FEST SMASH” is how I concluded my review of Meet & Greet, Stan Zimmerman and Christian McLaughlin’s outrageously funny tale of a quartet of fictional Broadway/Hollywood divas vying for a sitcom pilot lead, when it played this past June at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Now, Meet & Greet is back for a second run at Theatre Asylum, and as evidenced by the nonstop laughter at yesterday’s SRO matinee, Meet & Greet 2.0 is even more outrageously funny the second time around than it was the first.
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OKLAHOMA!
Sunday, August 24th, 2014
Director-choreographer Dan Mojica and an exciting young cast offer Welk Theatre San Diego audiences an Oklahoma! certain to delight both blue-haired Welk regulars and the Glee generation of its late teens-early 20s ensemble, sixteen talented performers who enrich the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic with a freshness and life belying its 71 years of age.
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TRYING
Saturday, August 23rd, 2014
Two-character plays don’t get much more entertaining or ultimately moving than Joanna McClelland Glass’s Trying, a humungous hit for the Colony Theatre back in 2007. Now, seven years later, the same lightning could easily strike for Long Beach’s International City Theatre with performances as memorable as those being given by Tony Abatemarco and Paige Lindsey White on the ICT stage.
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I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND
Friday, August 22nd, 2014
Seven years ago, Erik Patterson’s best friend’s head “exploded,” or at least that’s how the playwright describes the brain aneurysm that sent him rushing to the Manhattan ICU where best friend Uma and her fellow aneurysm victims waged their life-and-death struggle while loved ones watched and waited, hoped and prayed, and bonded with similarly concerned strangers in the hospital waiting room.
Cut to 2014, and the author of the multiple Scenie-winning He Asked For It has taken these real-life events as the point of departure for his latest, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, now getting its World Premiere at Hollywood’s Theatre Of NOTE, and in words I used to describe its predecessor, Patterson’s newest play is “fresh, entertaining, gripping and entirely unpredictable” … and beautifully acted to boot.
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BROADWAY BOUND
Thursday, August 21st, 2014
Neil Simon plays don’t get any finer than his semi-autobiographical 1986 dramedy Broadway Bound, nor intimate theater revivals any more flawless than the Broadway Bound revival now playing at West L.A.’s Odyssey Theatre under Jason Alexander’s inspired direction.
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ONCE
Wednesday, August 20th, 2014
Sometimes execution can be everything. It certainly is in the case of Once, the multiple Tony-winning Best Musical of 2012. The story and the songs are the same as those in the film on which it is based (a movie I found quite unbearable), and yet as brought to freshly inspired life on the musical theater stage, Once The Musical turns out to be one of the best, and quite possibly the most original Broadway smashes, of the past decade.
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