CARRIE: THE MUSICAL
Saturday, October 8th, 2022
Director extraordinaire Kari Hayter strips Carrie: The Musical down to basics to better reveal the heart and soul of the Broadway adaptation of the Brian De Palma horror classic, and the results, performed by an all-student cast at USC’s McClintock Theatre, are nothing short of spectacular, even minus the spectacle that’s been a hallmark of previous productions.
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A GREAT WILDERNESS
Wednesday, October 5th, 2022
Idaho playwright Samuel D. Hunter tackles gay conversion therapy in his expectations-defying, cliché-free 2014 drama A Great Wilderness, the riveting latest from Rogue Machine Theatre.
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THE ELABORATE ENTRANCE OF CHAD DEITY
Monday, October 3rd, 2022
In all my years of theatergoing, I’ve never seen a play or production quite like Chance Theater’s Orange County Premiere of Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance Of Chad Deity, at once a hilariously spot-on look at the wild, weird, and wacky world of professional wrestling and a subtly scathing critique of the American Melting-Pot Dream.
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REVENGE PORN OR THE STORY OF A BODY
Saturday, October 1st, 2022
A disgruntled ex gets back at his onetime bed partner in the most publicly demeaning of ways by posting online the nude selfies she’d sent him years earlier in Carla Ching’s Revenge Porn or The Story of a Body, the thrillingly hot-button latest from Ammunition Theatre Company.
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BABE
Monday, September 26th, 2022Cliffhangers are perfectly fine if you’re writing a series pilot or season finale. Not so much if you’ve written what purports to be a full-length play, which is why, engaged as I was throughout Echo Theater Company’s Babe, I left feeling frustrated, angry, and confused as to why playwright Jessica Goldberg didn’t finish what she’d started so provocatively sixty-five minutes earlier in a more satisfyingly conclusive way.
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EVERYBODY
Saturday, September 24th, 2022If 90 minutes of occasionally amusing but more often longwinded philosophizing about the meaning of (among other things) Life, Love, Friendship, Beauty, Material Possessions, and Death sounds like your thing, then Antaeus Theatre Company’s Everybody, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 21st-century adaptation of a 600-year-old morality play, might just be your cup of tea. It wasn’t mine.
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SANCTUARY CITY
Monday, September 19th, 2022
Martyna Majok puts a personal face on the plight of undocumented Americanized teens in Sanctuary City, a riveting, thought-provoking Los Angeles Premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse.
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OKLAHOMA!
Friday, September 16th, 2022
Forget every Oklahoma! you’ve ever seen. Forget everything you’ve ever heard or said or thought about the 79-year-old classic. Director Daniel Fish’s radically revisionist revival of the Broadway musical that reinvented the genre back in 1943 now feels every bit as revolutionary in 2022 as Rent did in 1994, Spring Awakening in 2006, and Hamilton just a handful of years back.
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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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