DORIAN’S DESCENT
Saturday, May 31st, 2014NOT RECOMMENDED
A quartet of stellar performers, a gifted composer/musical director, and L.A.’s costume designer du jour at his most over-the-top fabulous can’t, unfortunately, save the Oscar Wilde-based World Premiere musical Dorian’s Descent from descending into three hours’ worth of clichéd dialog and lyrics, jarring tonal shifts, and good intentions gone disastrously bad.
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DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
Friday, May 30th, 2014
An accusation of plagiarism is but the opening shot in Death Of The Author, Steven Drukman’s academia-set World Premiere drama that unfolds like an edge-of-your-seat suspense-thriller from its “gotcha” hook to the unexpectedly satisfying way Drukman manages to tie the whole thing up some ninety minutes later.
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THE HYPOCHONDRIAC
Tuesday, May 13th, 2014RECOMMENDED
Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid gets trimmed down from three acts to a fast-moving fifty-minutes as Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre presents Roger K. Weiss’s The Hypochondriac, and thought results fall short of the brilliance of December’s A Christmas Carol, there are laughs aplenty to be had.
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UNORGANIZED CRIME
Friday, May 9th, 2014
Oscar nominee Chazz Palminteri and Tony nominee Elizabeth Rodriguez bring their Hollywood/Broadway talent/star power to Kenny D’Aquila’s savagely funny goodfellas comedy Unorganized Crime, now getting its World Premiere at Hollywood’s Lillian Theatre under David Fofi’s razor-sharp direction.
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FIVE MILE LAKE
Thursday, April 24th, 2014
Some plays grab you from their first moments and hold you in their grasp till the lights go out. Others sneak up on gradually until at a certain point you realize that you’ve been hooked … and hooked you stay till the final curtain. Rachel Bonds’ Five Mile Lake, the latest World Premiere from South Coast Repertory, falls into the latter category, and quite a small wonder of a play it is.
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EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH
Tuesday, April 15th, 2014
There’s no L.A. theater quite like The Theatre @ Boston Court for challenging audiences with plays that can, when things go as right as they do in Sheila Callaghan’s initially mystifying Everything You Touch, both stimulate the brain cells and touch the heart.
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REST
Saturday, April 12th, 2014
Native Idahoan Samuel D. Hunter once again turns the lives of ordinary folk into world-class drama in his latest play, Rest, being given an all-around superb World Premiere production at South Coast Repertory under Martin Benson’s inspired direction.
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DOCTOR ANONYMOUS
Tuesday, April 1st, 2014NOT RECOMMENDED
The gay liberation movement may have started in earnest with the 1969 Stonewall riots, but homosexuality was still deemed a “curable” mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association in 1972 when a masked Dr. John E. Fryer addressed the annual APA conference as “Dr. H. Anonymous,” beginning his speech with the simple words “I am a homosexual. I am a psychiatrist.”
A year later homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Inspired by Fryer’s speech, psychiatrist/playwright Guy Fredrick Glass has written Doctor Anonymous, now getting its World Premiere at the Zephyr Theatre, and though several of its actors rise above the material, neither their performances nor a topnotch production design can mask Doctor Anonymous’s many serious flaws.
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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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