THE RAINMAKER
Tuesday, July 30th, 2013
You’d think that a play that ran a mere 125 performances on Broadway way back in 1954 would have faded into almost instant obscurity. Not so with L. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker, which is doing just fine and dandy nearly sixty years later, as The Old Globe’s captivating, innovative revival makes abundantly clear.
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BRENDAN
Monday, July 29th, 2013
A young Irish immigrant adjusts to life in contemporary New York City in Ronan Noone’s Brendan, one of the best—and most entertaining and emotionally resonant—plays I’ve seen this past year, now getting an absolutely superb intimate West Coast Premiere at Theatre Banshee.
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TANGLIN’ HEARTS
Saturday, July 27th, 2013
Ten singin’, dancin’ Texans get their hearts all tangled up romantically in Tanglin’ Hearts, a tuneful new musical “loosely based” on Shakespeare’s As You Like It, now getting a promising World Premiere production at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.
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KIMBERLY AKIMBO
Friday, July 26th, 2013
Kimberly Levaco is not your average, everyday teenager. After all, how many teens do you know who are saddled with an alcoholic dad, a hypochondriac mom, and a con artist of an aunt? And how many of them suffer from all of the above, plus a body that’s aging at supersonic speed? Sixteen-year-old Kimberly lives her life in the body of someone more than four times her age, someone with a life expectancy of sixteen, give or take a year or so. How many teens do you know who are saddled with that?
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire makes Kimberly the heroine of his funny, touching 2000 dramedy Kimberly Akimbo, the latest offering from The Theatricians, a company of actors whose youth turns out to be the only major strike going against an otherwise excellent production.
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MONTY PYTHON’S SPAMALOT
Thursday, July 25th, 2013
The hills around Solvang will be alive with the sound of laughter over the next several weeks as PCPA Theaterfest presents their couldn’t-be-better, couldn’t-be-funnier production of the 2005 Broadway smash Monty Python’s Spamalot.
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THE ISLAND
Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013RECOMMENDED
It’s one thing (and an admirable one at that) for Skypilot Theatre to have as its slogan “New Plays, Written, Developed, and Performed In Los Angeles.” It’s something even more noteworthy for the company to undertake that most difficult genre of all, the musical. After all, it’s hardly uncommon for a new musical to be “in development” for half a dozen years or more.
I don’t know where The Island is on its trajectory from inspiration to final form. There are certainly aspects of this World Premiere’s book and songs that could, as they say, “use some work.” Notwithstanding, I quite enjoyed this “musical re-imagining of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, flaws and all.
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LES MISÉRABLES
Monday, July 22nd, 2013RECOMMENDED
A quarter century after its Broadway debut, rights to the international musical phenomenon Les Misérables have at long last been released to community theaters across the U.S., news that may lead diehard Les Miz lovers to wonder if community theaters should even attempt to put on one of the world’s most spectacular musicals (emphasis on spectacle).
If the community theater in question is Actors Repertory Theatre Of Simi, the answer is a qualified yes.
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SHREK THE MUSICAL
Monday, July 22nd, 2013
3-D Theatricals follows its phenomenal revival of Jason Robert Brown’s deep, dark, fact-based Parade with its polar opposite, the bright, breezy, and entirely fanciful Shrek The Musical, in its own way every bit as triumphant as its extraordinary predecessor.
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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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