THE BLUEST EYE
Monday, September 4th, 2023Performances are uniformly topnotch and the A Noise Within season opener is imaginatively directed and stylishly designed. I only wish I had enjoyed Lydia R. Diamond’s undoubtedly faithful stage adaptation of Toni Morrison’s downer of a novel The Bluest Eye even half as much as the Grade A treatment it’s been given.
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KILL SHELTER: THE BLUE CAST
Saturday, September 2nd, 2023
Not only is Ashley Rose Wellman’s Kill Shelter one of the most remarkable new plays I’ve seen in a very long time, it’s the best Theatre of NOTE production I’ve reviewed since the company’s streak of winners in the mid-2010s.
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OUR DEAR DEAD DRUG LORD
Tuesday, August 29th, 2023The four complex, authentic teen characters Alexis Scheer has created and the direction, performances, and design of Our Dear Dead Drug Lord’s West Coast Premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre are all so rave-worthy, it’s disappointing that the play’s gratuitously violent, deliberately unintelligible, and “WTF is that supposed to mean?” last twenty minutes are not.
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A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
Tuesday, August 29th, 2023
Arthur Miller and Santa Monica’s Ruskin Group Theatre once again prove a match made in heaven with A View From The Bridge, magnificently performed in an intimate staging that turns every single audience member into a fly on the wall of this gritty Greek tragedy set on the waterfront of 1950s Brooklyn.
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HUNGRY GHOST
Tuesday, August 29th, 2023A pregnant woman is visited nightly by the Stevie Nicks-loving adult ghost of her as yet unborn child in Hungry Ghost, Lisa Sanaye Dring’s surreal, supernatural head-scratcher of a play now getting its Skylight Theatre Company World Premiere.
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EXIT WOUNDS
Saturday, August 26th, 2023
A father at the end of his rope seeks help for his delinquent teenage son from a woman he hasn’t seen in twenty-five years in Wendy Graf’s compelling, cathartic family drama Exit Wounds, now getting an absorbing World Premiere at Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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HEROES OF THE FOURTH TURNING
Sunday, August 20th, 2023
If the idea of spending two hours listening to Catholic conservatives inveigh against abortion, LGBT rights, and other left-wing causes sounds off-putting, think again.
There’s a reason why Will Arbery’s Heroes Of The Fourth Turning, now getting an absolutely sensational Rogue Machine Theatre Los Angeles Premiere, was a 2020 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Drama. There’s a reason why the New York Times called it “astonishing and riveting.”
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A PERFECT GANESH
Tuesday, August 15th, 2023Theatricum Botanicum takes a break from the Bard in its otherwise entirely Shakespearean 2023 season with Terrence McNally’s A Perfect Ganesh, a play not nearly as appealing as McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, It’s Only A Play, Master Class, Corpus Christi, and Love! Valour! Compassion!
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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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