KISS ME KATE
Saturday, October 19th, 2013
It’s been six-and-a-half decades since William Shakespeare met Cole Porter in Kiss Me Kate, though with director extraordinaire Richard Israel in the driver’s seat, Cabrillo Music Theatre’s 2013 revival of the Tony Award-winning 1948 Broadway smash feels fresh and alive and gay and young for all its years.
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WAIT UNTIL DARK
Saturday, October 19th, 2013
Some plays simply cannot be updated to the 21st Century. Take for example Wait Until Dark, Frederick Knott’s classic 1966 thriller about a blind New York City newlywed targeted by a trio of thugs out to find the heroin-filled doll they believe to be hidden somewhere in the walk-down flat she shares with her photographer husband—a play entirely dependent on there being just one land-line phone in the apartment and a (now virtually non-existent) phone booth on a nearby corner.
That’s why, when I heard that playwright Jeffrey Hatcher was adapting Wait Until Dark for the Geffen Playhouse “in a new time/setting,” my first thought was “They must be kidding!” Then I found out that Hatcher was actually taking Knott’s thriller back in time to WWII New York City and that thought turned to “Wow! What a clever idea!” Not only a clever idea, it turns out, but one that proves as exiting in execution as in theory.
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FAST COMPANY
Thursday, October 17th, 2013
The Rag, the Spanish Prisoner, the Pig-in-a-Poke, the Badger Game, and the Glim Dropper are just five of the games that H, Blue, and Francis learned at their mother Mable’s knee—which will give you an idea of just what kind of family the three siblings grew up in in Carla Ching’s exhilarating World Premiere comedy Fast Company, the latest from South Coast Repertory.
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LEGALLY BLONDE
Monday, October 14th, 2013
3-D Theatricals gets everything right in its end-of-season staging of Legally Blonde The Musical. With director David F.M. Vaughn assuredly in charge, this is the very best production I’ve seen of one of Broadway’s best-crafted hits of the past ten years.
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THE LIAR
Monday, October 14th, 2013
Silliness has rarely been cleverer or cleverness sillier than in David Ives’ translation/adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 1644 comedy The Liar, The Antaeus Company’s end-of-season offering and quite possibly the classical theater masters’ frothiest romp ever.
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DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS
Saturday, October 12th, 2013
The multi-talented student triple-threats of USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory are back onstage again in their latest student-directed, designed, and performed musical hit, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and though its lead characters are indeed the dirtiest of scoundrels, there’s nothing at all rotten about MTR’s latest Broadway-to-blackbox gem. Quite the contrary, there’s not a more sensationally performed 99-seat musical now playing in all L.A.
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DON’T DRESS FOR DINNER
Saturday, October 12th, 2013
Let’s say you’re a married man. Let’s say you’re a married man with a mistress. Let’s say you’d like nothing more than to spend a romantic weekend with said mistress in the renovated farmhouse you call home. You’d send the wife off for a visit with Mommy and invite your best friend over to throw the missus off the scent, right?
Right … but what if your wife and that best of friends happened to be secret lovers and she thought your chum’s weekend visit would be the perfect opportunity for the two of them to engage in a bit of extramarital hanky-panky? She’d make a quick phone call to cancel plans with mother, and before you knew it, there’d be two sets of adulterous lovers under the same roof with the Cordon Bleu cook you’d hired to cater the weekend making it Five’s A Crowd.
If you think this sounds like the perfect set-up for a door-slamming, mistaken identity-filled French farce, you’d be absolutely right, since this is precisely how Marc “Boeing-Boeing” Camoletti sets up Don’t Dress For Dinner, the hilarious (and pitch-perfect) latest from Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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RII
Thursday, October 10th, 2013
William Shakespeare. The Theatre @ Boston Court. Two names you wouldn’t normally expect to see in the same sentence let alone in the first paragraph of a review. But wonder of wonders, Boston Court is currently wowing an audience of Shakespeare buffs and T@BC regulars with its very own version of Richard II, one they’ve redubbed RII if only to let the world know that, just as Boston Court isn’t your grandparents’ theater, this isn’t your grandparents’ Richard II—not by a long shot.
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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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