HOMEFREE
Sunday, September 27th, 2015
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
Monday, September 7th, 2015
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
Monday, August 31st, 2015
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
Monday, August 24th, 2015
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
Monday, August 17th, 2015
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
Saturday, August 15th, 2015
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
Thursday, August 13th, 2015RECOMMENDED
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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THE GREAT DIVIDE
Friday, July 24th, 2015NOT RECOMMENDED
The Elephant Theatre goes out with a fizzle instead of a bang with the World Premiere of Lyle Kessler’s family dysfunction-fest The Great Divide, a play so credibility-defying that not even the best efforts of director David Fofi and an excellent cast can save it—and its audience—from the dull-drums.
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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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