SEPARATE TABLES
Friday, June 2nd, 2017Following their superb 2014 revival of Terence Rattigan’s WWII-era Flare Path, Theatre 40 returns to Rattigan territory with a less successful Separate Tables, the mid-twentieth-century English playwright’s pair of one-acts whose second half crosses the line from period piece to uncomfortably dated.
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LETTERS TO EVE
Monday, May 29th, 2017A young Japanese-American couple fall in love in a WWII relocation center as an African-American jazz musician imprisoned in a Nazi death camp falls for a Jewish inmate in Letters To Eve, an ambitious new musical by Daniel Sugimoto whose reach ultimately exceeds its grasp despite some effective moments, performances, and songs.
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KISS
Friday, May 26th, 2017
You must remember this. A kiss is not always just a kiss, or at least not in Guillermo Calderón’s compelling, confounding vision of life and love and death in today’s Syria, the appropriately—or metaphorically—titled Kiss, now being given a never-less-than-daring Odyssey Theatre Ensemble West Coast Premiere.
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DRY LAND
Monday, May 15th, 2017
Teagan Rose and Connor Kelly-Eiding reprise their fearless star turns in Ruby Rae Spiegel’s darkly comic, graphically disturbing Dry Land, a 2016 Echo Theater Company smash now returning to riveting, larger-sized life as the third and final offering of Center Theatre Group’s Kirk Douglas Theatre Block Party 2017.
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ACTUALLY
Friday, May 12th, 2017
We all know that “No” means “No,” but what’s a college student to think and do when the young woman with whom he thinks he’s having consensual, albeit drunken sex tells him “Actually, um…” mid-coitus?
Anna Ziegler takes this question as her point of departure in Actually, the New York playwright’s darkly comedic, compellingly dramatic look at sex, race, gender, and booze now getting a first-class co-World Premiere* production at the Geffen.
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FARRAGUT NORTH
Monday, May 8th, 2017
Farragut North, Beau Willimon’s riveting look at the behind-the-scenes maneuverings and back-stabbings of a Presidential primary campaign, a Geffen Playhouse hit just months after the first Obama win, now gets a solid Odyssey Theatre guest production with a far different man in the White House.
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HAROLD AND MAUDE
Monday, May 1st, 2017The strokes of inspiration that made last year’s Private Eyes one of Morgan-Wixson Theatre’s best are occasionally evident in Colin Higgins’ Harold And Maud, but this time around director Brandon Baer is hampered by casting missteps, pacing problems, and a stage too cavernous for the inventive look he and his design team have conceived.
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FAILURE: A LOVE STORY
Monday, April 17th, 2017
Center Theatre Group opens Block Party, its three-play salute to the best of Los Angeles intimate theater, with an exquisitely expanded Kirk Douglas Theatre staging of Coeurage Theatre Company’s multiple-award-winning Failure: A Love Story, Philip Dawkins’ whimsical meditation on the fragility of life and the resiliency of those who live it.
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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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