PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2013
The rainbow-colored bus known around the world as Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert has just pulled into the Costa Mesa station (make that Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts), and as anyone who’s seen Stephen Elliott’s 1994 cult hit movie of the same name can tell you, that’s just about the most fabulous news any OC resident or neighbor to the north could possibly ask for this week.
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XANADU
Monday, October 21st, 2013
Xanadu has arrived at Cal State Fullerton’s Little Theater, proving once again that for big-stage professional-caliber musical theater, just about the only thing separating CSUF productions from those at Musical Theatre West or 3-D Theatricals is the uniformly young age of their talented casts. Case in point: Douglas Carter Beane’s 2005 Broadway treat.
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SUNNY AFTERNOON
Sunday, October 20th, 2013
On November 22, 1963, at about half-past-noon Dallas time, President John F. Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository … and thirty minutes later was pronounced dead. On November 24, the President’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself fatally shot by local nightclub operator Jack Ruby as a nation sitting glued to their TV screens looked on in horror.
But what about the forty-eight hours separating these two America-shattering events?
Playwright-director Christian Levatino and his gangbusters theatre company* let us be flies on the walls of the Dallas Police Headquarters where Oswald spent his last two days under police interrogation in Levatino’s gripping new play Sunny Afternoon, now getting its official World Premiere following its Best-Of-Fringe-winning workshop at last June’s Hollywood Fringe Festival.
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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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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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