SPAMILTON: AN AMERICAN PARODY
Tuesday, November 14th, 2017
Imagine you’ve spent the past three-and-a-half decades spoofing New York’s buzz-worthiest musicals but this year there’s one megasmash that dwarfs the competition like no musical ever has before. If you’re Gerard Alessandrini, you write Forbidden Broadway 2017 and call it Spamilton, eighty minutes of Broadway satire at its funniest, cleverest, and most tuneful now getting its West Coast Premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.
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THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER
Saturday, November 11th, 2017
Radio superstar Sheridan Whiteside is at it again, terrorizing the Ohio Stanleys, fomenting family rebellions, and scheming to get his own egomaniacal way in Actors Co-op’s pitch-perfect revival of the 1939 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart screwball classic The Man Who Came To Dinner.
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LITTLE WOMEN [a multicultural transposition]
Tuesday, November 7th, 2017
If Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March had come of age in post-WWII L.A. as the Mayeda sisters, offspring of a Japanese-American father and a Chinese-American mother, Louisa Mae Alcott’s classic novel might look and sound just like Little Women [a multicultural transposition], Velina Hasu Houston’s unabashedly G-rated World Premiere rewrite that had me in its spell from ebullient start to heartwarming finish.
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CRY-BABY
Tuesday, November 7th, 2017
Cal State Fullerton Theatre & Dance is putting on quite a show this month, a rarer-than-rare big-stage production of Cry-Baby, aka The other John Waters Musical, and what a delightfully nostalgic, deliciously twisted, not-quite-for-all-ages alternative to Hairspray it turns out to be, especially as performed by CSUF’s Musical Theater BFA program triple-threats.
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END OF THE RAINBOW
Sunday, November 5th, 2017
Even the words “definitive” and “tour de force” seem inadequate to describe Angela Ingersoll’s astonishing transformation into Judy Garland in End Of The Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s powerful, probing examination of the last months Judy’s not-so-storybook life, superbly directed by Michael Matthews for La Mirada Theatre and McCoy Rigby Entertainment.
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MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY
Saturday, November 4th, 2017
With each of its three acts performed on a different stage of Sacred Fools’ newly renamed (and spiffily remodeled) Broadwater complex on Santa Monica Blvd. and Lillian, the company’s sensationally directed, performed, and designed Los Angeles Premiere of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play achieves event status. Whether or not Washburn’s audacious Drama Desk-nominated take on a post-Apocalyptic civilization is your cup of tea, for its adventurous execution alone, Mr. Burns is a fall-season must-see.
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THIS LAND
Tuesday, October 31st, 2017
At once epic and intimate, Evangeline Ordaz’s This Land weaves two centuries of Watts history—from the Mexican ranchers who seized Tongva Indian land in the 1880s, to the white homeowners who took flight in the 1950s when blacks moved in, to the Latinos who became the majority four decades later, to today’s white gentrifiers—into two absorbing, illuminating hours of Los Angeles theater at its best.
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REDLINE
Sunday, October 29th, 2017
A decades-estranged father and son meet for the first time since a car crash ripped their family to shreds in Christian Durso’s gripping, emotionally-charged Redline, an IAMA Theatre Company World Premiere that held me in its grip from the bombshell revelation that sets it in motion to its life-and-death final seconds.
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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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