IN YOUR ARMS

Dance and romance reign supreme in In Your Arms, as thrilling an Old Globe World Premiere as I’ve seen in a good long while and one that most definitely deserves to be Broadway-bound.
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HOMEFREE

When choosing Homefree, Lisa Loomer’s compelling, often devastating look at a trio of homeless teens, as the first production of its 2014-2015 season, the Road Theatre Company could not possibly have imagined that only four days after Opening Night, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti would publicly declare a “state of emergency” on homelessness, words that would render the latest Road World Premiere as timely as this week’s headlines.
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WHEN STARS ALIGN

A mixed-race slave comes of age on a Mississippi River cotton plantation during the Civil War years in Carole Eglash-Kosoff and John Henry Davis’s epic interracial love story When Stars Align, a mini-series worth of plot compacted into two hours (plus intermission) of gorgeously-staged historical melodrama that proves involving and ultimately quite moving despite some occasionally clunky dialog along the way.
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EL GRANDE CIRCUS DE COCA-COLA

Impresario extraordinario Pepe Hernandez is back, una sensacional bit of news for anyone looking for 90 minutos of nonstop hilardad. Simplemente put, El Grande Circus De Coca-Cola, now playing at the Skylight Theatre, is the funniest show you’re likely to see in todo el año de 2015.
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CAFÉ SOCIETY

Zaniness reigns supreme in Peter Lefcourt’s screwball Café Society, now getting a terrifically performed, imaginatively directed, cleverly designed World Premiere at West L.A.’s Odyssey Theatre, the ever so “Westside” laughfest marred only by a jarring 11th-hour tonal shift that bears rethinking.
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IN THE HEIGHTS

Candlelight Pavilion tops everything it’s done over the past year—and that includes Evita, The Producers, Spamalot, and last month’s Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—with a sensational mid-summer staging of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s In The Heights.
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LUKA’S ROOM

Leave it to Rob Mersola, the playwright who gave audiences Backseats & Bathroom Stalls and Dirty Filthy Love Story, to subvert the teenage coming-of-age tale in the most outrageously unexpected of ways in Luka’s Room, the latest Rogue Machine World Premiere and sure to be one of this summer’s most buzzed-about productions.
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UP HERE

RECOMMENDED

The voices inside a neurotic computer whiz’s head take on decidedly human form in the latest from the La Jolla Playhouse, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez’s tuneful if overly ambitious musical romcom Up Here, a show that earns high points for the Oscar-winning couple’s score (and the talents who bring its World Premiere to life in La Jolla) but could prove too Out There for future mainstream success.
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