DRAMA QUEENS FROM HELL
Sunday, August 21st, 2016NOT RECOMMENDED
Significant trimming and tweaking is needed to make Peter Lefcourt’s Hollywood-spoofing Drama Queens From Hell the comedy hit it aspires to be despite some occasional insider hilarity and several deliciously scene-stealing performances.
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NEXT TO NORMAL
Saturday, August 20th, 2016
The 99-seat Pico Playhouse proves a just-right setting for a compelling, powerfully-performed intimate staging of Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s Next To Normal, one of only nine musicals in Broadway history to have won the Pulitzer Prize.
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GO BACK TO WHERE YOU ARE
Thursday, August 18th, 2016
There’s a whole lot of fourth-wall-breaking going on in Go Back To Where You are, David Greenspan’s magical seventy-five minute bit of meta-theatrical romance and whimsy now getting an admittedly brain-challenging but absolutely captivating West Coast Premiere by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble.
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THE IMAGINARY INVALID
Sunday, August 14th, 2016
Theatricum Botanicum legend Ellen Geer follows her 2014 Queen Lear with another gender-bending star turn, this time as Molière’s Malade Imaginaire, aka The Imaginary Invalid, Constance Congdon’s 21st-century adaptation turning a three-and-a-half-century-old farce into a playfully raunchy laughfest that would do Mel Brooks proud.
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A RAISIN IN THE SUN
Sunday, July 31st, 2016
Star turns you’d expect to see at the Pasadena Playhouse or the Geffen distinguish Ruskin Group Theatre’s 57th-anniversary revival of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning A Raisin In The Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s piercing look at racial discrimination, gender roles, family values, and burgeoning African-American identity—a modern American classic that remains as relevant today as it was in the pre-Civil Rights Era 1950s.
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RECORDED IN HOLLYWOOD
Sunday, July 17th, 2016
Last year’s 99-seat World Premiere musical smash Recorded In Hollywood has returned big time as a Kirk Douglas Theatre guest production in a much retooled upscale transfer that promises even greater things ahead for the crowd-pleasing, get-up-and-dance Memphis/Motown-style tribute to 1950s/60s African-American R&B groundbreaker John Dolphin.
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THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE
Sunday, June 26th, 2016
Ginna Carter gives quite possibly the year’s most brilliant dramatic performance as Alma Winemiller in Pacific Resident Theatre’s absolutely superb revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale, impeccably directed by Dana Jackson.
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BIG SKY
Thursday, June 16th, 2016
Neil Simon meets Euripides in Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros’s Big Sky, a Geffen Playhouse World Premiere that ends up far more than simply the one-liner-packed comedic romp its first act would lead you to expect.
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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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