THE ROYAL FAMILY
Tuesday, August 20th, 2013
Theatrical royalty play theatrical royalty as Will Geer’s own “royal family” bring George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s The Royal Family to hilarious, effervescent life—with enough star power to rival those twinkling orbs shining down on the Topanga hills Theatricum Botanicum calls home.
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A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Friday, August 2nd, 2013
Take a superb cast and an inspired pair of directors and have them put on one of William Shakespeare’s most audience-friendly plays in the woodsy Topanga hills on a dreamy midsummer Thursday night … and you’ve got Theatricum Botanicum’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
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TANGLIN’ HEARTS
Saturday, July 27th, 2013
Ten singin’, dancin’ Texans get their hearts all tangled up romantically in Tanglin’ Hearts, a tuneful new musical “loosely based” on Shakespeare’s As You Like It, now getting a promising World Premiere production at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.
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IONESCOPADE
Thursday, June 20th, 2013
An elderly couple who spend the entire evening setting up chairs for invisible guests who’ve come to hear an invisible orator. French villagers transformed one by one into rhinoceroses. A soprano without a single hair on her head. Could there be anything more ridicule?
Welcome to the world of théâtre de l’absurde as epitomized by Eugène Ionesco, the French playwright whose plays The Chairs, Rhinoceros, and The Bald Soprano express the meaninglessness of life in the most amusing of ways … and now form the basis of Ionescopade, Robert Allan Ackerman and Mildred Kayden’s wacky vaudeville currently being revived at the Odyssey Theatre three decades after its Los Angeles debut.
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YES, PRIME MINISTER
Friday, June 14th, 2013
The country is England, the time is now, and the PM’s country house retreat Chequers is in crisis mode. The coalition government finds itself representing a divided electorate, the British Pound Sterling is waning in value, and an ongoing European Council conference seems headed for disaster. With all these problems and more on his table, what’s a Prime Minister to do?
In Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s hilariously farcical Yes, Prime Minister (now getting its US Premiere at the Geffen Playhouse), the answer comes in the form of a potential ten-trillion dollar bailout from a former Soviet republic the authors have dubbed Kumranistan. All the PM has to do is provide the Kumranistani foreign secretary with a trio of call girls for a totally illegal (and immoral and unethical) sex orgy.
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OPENING NIGHT
Friday, May 31st, 2013
Opening Night mayhem at a second-rate Canadian theater makes for first-rate crowd-pleasing fun as Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40 presents the West Coast premiere of Norm Foster’s hilarious—and surprisingly touching—Opening Night.
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AMERICAN BUFFALO
Friday, April 12th, 2013
The four-letter words fly fast and furious in the Geffen Playhouse’s latest, American Buffalo, and though David Mamet’s 1977 Broadway debut remains unlikely to be a traditional theatergoer’s cup of tea, it’s hard to imagine a better cast, acted, directed, or designed revival of this 1977 groundbreaker than the one at the Geffen.
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REMEMBRANCE
Sunday, March 31st, 2013
His Protestant son was murdered by an IRA hit squad in the driveway of his father’s Belfast home. Her Catholic son was tortured, then shot to death by a vigilante Protestant street gang. Their late-in-life romance is at the heart of Graham Reid’s powerful 1987 drama Remembrance, not only one of the finest plays to be part of a Theatre 40 season, but quite possibly the best overall production I have seen at Beverly Hills’ premier 99-seat theater.
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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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