THE UNTRANSLATABLE SECRETS OF NIKKI CORONA
Friday, September 14th, 2018An intriguing premise and promising first act are sabotaged by a ridiculous post-intermission trek to the hereafter that bodes little to no regional theater afterlife for José Rivera’s The Untranslatable Secrets Of Nikki Corona, a Jo Bonney-directed Geffen Playhouse World Premiere.
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SCHOOL GIRLS; OR, THE AFRICAN MEAN GIRLS PLAY
Monday, September 10th, 2018Regina George has met her Ghanaian match in Jocelyn Bioh’s side-splittingly funny, acerbically perceptive, unexpectedly touching School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play, imported to the Kirk Douglas Theatre from its hit off-Broadway run with most of its original MCC Theater cast intact.
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THE WORLD GOES ‘ROUND
Thursday, September 6th, 2018Five of L.A.’s most talented triple-treats performing twenty-nine Kander & Ebb gems add up to one non-stop entertaining evening of musical theater as Reprise 2.0 treats audiences to its sensationally performed, imaginatively directed, gorgeously designed The World Goes ‘Round.
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THE CHALK GARDEN
Tuesday, August 28th, 2018Brits don’t get more delightfully eccentric than the residents of Mrs. St. Maugham’s Sussex manor house in Enid Bagnold’s 1955 charmer The Chalk Garden, the latest Theatricum Botanicum gem.
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YELLOW FACE
Saturday, August 18th, 2018Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang blurs fact and fiction in the most devilishly clever of ways while tackling issues of racism and race in his 2007 off-Broadway hit Yellow Face, now provoking gales of laughter, plenty of post-performance discussion, and an unexpected tear or two at Beverly Hills Playhouse.
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THE CRUCIBLE
Monday, August 13th, 2018The Topanga hills prove the ideal setting for Theatricum Botanicum’s gut-punchingly powerful revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the first of the six Crucibles I’ve seen to get everything right.
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HAITI
Monday, July 30th, 2018Theatricum Botanicum breathes new life into William DuBois’ swashbuckling historical soap opera Haiti, giving the long-forgotten look back at the Haitian Revolution its very first production—and a rip-roaring one at that—since the New Deal-funded melodrama made theatrical history in 1938 by featuring a black-and-white cast performing side by side on a Harlem stage.
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SCREWBALL COMEDY
Friday, July 27th, 2018If Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (The Front Page, Twentieth Century) were alive today, they might have written Screwball Comedy, a Norm Foster/Theatre 40 gem that more than does justice to the genre whose name it bears.
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