THE KINSEY SICKS: AMERICA’S NEXT TOP BACHELOR HOUSEWIFE CELEBRITY HOARDER MAKEOVER STAR GONE WILD!
Thursday, June 11th, 2015
The pulchritudinous potty-mouthed pretties who call themselves The Kinsey Sicks have treated West Hollywood to a taste of their NC-17 naughtiness before heading off for a week of West Coast touring, and as anyone who’s seen one of the queertastic quartet’s previous songfests could easily predict, The Kinsey Sicks: America’s Next Top Bachelor Housewife Celebrity Hoarder Makeover Star Gone Wild! makes for sixty sizzling minutes of double ententres and song.
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SPRING AWAKENING
Friday, May 29th, 2015
Deaf West’s smash revisal of the Broadway musical hit Spring Awakening has transferred from its Fall 2014 run in the heart of Skid Row to glamorous Beverly Hills, one of the most noteworthy success stories of Los Angeles’s endangered 99-Seat Theatre Plan … and mark my words. You won’t see direction more brilliant nor a cast more gifted nor a production more awe-inspiring than the one now playing at the Wallis Annenberg Center For The Performing Arts.
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THE POWER OF DUFF
Saturday, April 18th, 2015
All hell breaks loose—or is it heaven?—when TV anchor Charlie Duff offers an impromptu (and decidedly prayerful) tribute to his just-deceased father at the end of the nightly news, thereby setting off a firestorm of pro-and-con reactions in Stephen Belber’s The Power Of Duff, a play that is one part dark comedy, one part satire, but ultimately the deeply moving story of one man’s inadvertent quest for redemption.
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GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES
Monday, April 13th, 2015
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes may have played nearly 750 performances on Broadway, turned Carol Channing into a star, featured hit songs like “Bye, Bye, Baby” and “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” and got turned into a Hollywood Movie Classic starring Marilyn Monroe, but when’s the last time you saw it onstage?
The answer may well be “Never,” because that’s what happens to 60something Broadway hits that aren’t Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, or Guys And Dolls … or rather that’s what would happen without Musical Theatre Guild’s much-loved concert staged readings, the latest of which brings that “little girl from Little Rock,” aka blonde bombshell Lorelei Lee, and her brunette chum Dorothy Shaw, back to entertaining 21st-century musical life.
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AMERICAN WEE-PIE
Tuesday, March 31st, 2015
Cupcakes offer a down-on-his-luck textbook editor a new lease on life in Lisa Dillman’s magical, whimsical American Wee-Pie, now getting its Los Angeles Premiere in one of my favorite Theatre 40 productions ever.
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ENTER LAUGHING THE MUSICAL
Wednesday, February 18th, 2015
A long and winding road has at last led a long-forgotten musical comedy gem from its blink-and-you-missed 1976 Broadway run to a delightfully nostalgic, laugh-out-loud hilarious, infectiously tuneful intimate revival at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center For The Performing Arts Lovelace Studio Theatre.
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THE NIGHT ALIVE
Saturday, February 14th, 2015
Superb performances, a brilliant production design, plenty of chuckles (with a few gasps thrown in for good measure), and characters as weirdly idiosyncratic as any I’ve seen onstage spark the Geffen Playhouse’s West Coast Premiere of Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive. As to whether the play itself is worthy of the unqualified superlatives that out-of-town critics have showered upon McPherson’s oh-so quirky comedy, well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
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HELLMAN V. MCCARTHY
Thursday, February 12th, 2015
Hell hath no fury like a best-selling author dissed, or so Lillian “The Little Foxes” Hellman made abundantly clear when she sued fellow writer Mary McCarthy for disparaging words uttered during a 1980 TV interview with PBS talk show host Dick Cavett.
Playwright Brian Richard Mori returns to the scene of the alleged slander with none other than 78-year-old Dick Cavett playing a 40something Dick in Mori’s terrifically entertaining comedy-drama Hellman v. McCarthy, now getting its West Coast Premiere at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.
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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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