ONE IN THE CHAMBER
Monday, August 4th, 2014
Playwright Marja-Lewis Ryan focuses an up-close-and-personal lens on the epidemic of gun violence plaguing our country in her World Premiere drama One In The Chamber, one of the most powerful new plays I’ve seen in a good long while, and as superbly acted a production as any writer/director could possibly wish for.
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GODSPELL
Sunday, August 3rd, 2014
It’s not your grandparents’ Godspell anymore, just one of several reasons to catch Actors Repertory Theatre Of Simi’s revival of the 1971 Stephen Schwartz off-Broadway-to-Broadway classic as reconceived for The Great White Way in 2011 and now brought to effervescent life by an impressive young cast at the Simi Valley Performing Arts Center.
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SMOKEY JOE’S CAFÉ
Sunday, August 3rd, 2014
Want to hear “Kansas City,” “Yakety Yak,” “Love Potion No. 9,” “On Broadway” and a few dozen other 1950s rock and pop hits as performed by an all-around splendid young cast and enjoy a yummy dinner to boot? Then head on over to Claremont for dinner and a show as Candlelight Pavilion revives the longest-running musical revue in Broadway history, Smokey Joe’s Café, featuring forty of the greatest hits of rock-and-roll songwriting legends Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.
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THE MAX FACTOR FACTOR
Saturday, August 2nd, 2014
Secretly gay 1930s film star Lance Grant falls head-over-heels for the equally famous—and equally closeted—Hoyt Baxter in Adrian Bewley, Joe Blodgett, and Chana Wise’s delightful new musical The Max Factor Factor, a fortuitous first collaboration between New Musicals Inc. and Celebration Theatre.
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GHOST THE MUSICAL
Wednesday, July 30th, 2014
What do you do when the musical you’ve produced ends up flopping on The Great White Way, but has enough going for it to merit a post-Broadway National Tour?
One possible solution is to mount a cost-saving non-union tour, and hope that even without an Equity cast and budget, whatever magic brought the show to Opening Night on Broadway will somehow survive.
In the case of Ghost The Musical, now playing at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts, the magic mostly does.
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INTO THE WOODS
Tuesday, July 29th, 2014
Fiasco Theatre Company’s re-imagined revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods is the most thrillingly imaginative production I’ve seen of the 1987 triple-Tony-winner, and trust me … I’ve seen a forest-ful of Into The Woodses, fourteen in all since the First National Tour stopped at the Ahmanson in 1989.
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ANDRONICUS
Saturday, July 26th, 2014
”14 killings, 9 of them on stage, 6 severed members, 1 rape (or 2 or 3 depending on how you count), 1 live burial, 1 case of insanity, and 1 of cannibalism” is how critic S. Mark Hulse sums up William Shakespeare’s vengeance-fueled Titus Andronicus, and Coeurage Theatre Company gives us each and every one of the above in a mere two hours (including intermission) in Jeremy Lelliott’s exhilarating new adaptation of Shakespeare’s contribution to the “revenge play” genre, redubbed Andronicus to befit this leaner, zippier incarnation of the 16th-Century classic.
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MARY POPPINS
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014
Moonlight Stages in San Diego-adjacent Vista once again trumps L.A. and Orange Counties by offering Southland audiences the much-awaited First Regional Production of a Big Broadway Smash, this time a terrifically staged and performed Big-Stage, Big-Cast, Big-Orchestra Disney’s And Cameron Mackintosh’s Mary Poppins.
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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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