TARTUFFE: BORN AGAIN
Tuesday, August 13th, 2024
That Bible-thumping scoundrel Tartuffe is once again bound and determined to rob a wealthy family blind, albeit this time in the big-haired, big-shouldered 1980s, in Tartuffe: Born Again, Freyda Thomas’s Baton Rouge-set translation of the 1664 Moliere classic, now tickling audience funny bones under Topanga skies at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum.
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IF I NEEDED SOMEONE
Tuesday, August 6th, 2024
Drunken hookups aren’t what they used to be, at least according to Neil LaBute in his undeniably provocative, bitingly funny, and potentially button-pushing World Premiere two-hander If I Needed Someone at Santa Monica’s City Garage Theatre.
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THE PITCH
Monday, July 29th, 2024A widowed single father finds himself in hot water with the IRS soon after embarking on a phone sales job he seems woefully ill suited for in Tom Alper’s overly padded but mostly entertaining The Pitch, an Odyssey Theatre visiting production.
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THE SUBSTANCE OF FIRE
Sunday, July 14th, 2024Five years after his acclaimed star turn as Willy Loman, Rob Morrow returns to the Ruskin Group Theatre in another powerhouse role, that of Holocaust survivor-turned-New York publisher Isaac Geldhart in Jon Robin Baitz’s The Substance Of Fire, a family drama unfortunately not in the same league as Death Of A Salesman.
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THE SPY WHO WENT INTO REHAB
Tuesday, July 9th, 2024
A debonair British secret agent faces his evilest and most nefarious foe, i.e., his own alcohol, nicotine, gambling, and sex addictions (with anger issues thrown in for good measure), in Gregg Ostrin’s deliciously clever, fiendishly funny The Spy Who Went Into Rehab, the latest from Pacific Resident Theatre.
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DESIGN FOR LIVING
Sunday, July 7th, 2024An Americanized trio of romantic protagonists and a gay subtext made explicit are two reasons Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s provocative but problematic staging of Noël Coward’s Design For Living is a far cry from the one Broadway audiences first discovered back in 1933.
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THE EXPLORERS CLUB
Tuesday, May 28th, 2024
Things get wild and wacky when a comely female anthropologist is proposed for membership in a heretofore all-male scientific society in Nell Benjamin’s madcap Victorian romp The Explorers Club, now getting a delectably acted West Coast Premiere at Theatre 40.
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THE BALD SOPRANO
Monday, April 29th, 2024Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco invented a whole new genre of comedy back in 1950 with his théâtre de l’absurde ground-breaker The Bald Soprano, and if its 2024 City Garage revival is still rough around the edges as of opening weekend, there remains plenty to entertain an audience.
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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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