CITY OF ANGELS
Monday, August 26th, 2013
They said it couldn’t be done, but Musical Theatre West went and did it—gave a sold-out house Broadway’s Tony-winning Best Musical of 1989 City Of Angels in concert staged reading form (i.e., without the design elements so much a part of its Broadway and post-Broadway success), and come out with a winner—and all with a mere twenty-five hours of rehearsal.
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IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play)
Sunday, August 25th, 2013
Debuting its new home at North Hollywood’s Secret Rose Theatre, L.A.’s award-winning The Production Company opens its seventh season with a sparkling Los Angeles Intimate Stage Premiere of Sarah Ruhl’s delightful, provocative, ultimately uplifting In The Next Room (or the vibrator play), a 2010 Best Play Tony nominee and one that more than matches Ruhl’s previous The Clean House, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and Eurydice in quirky originality and charm.
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RED
Sunday, August 25th, 2013
Following its six 2010 Tony wins (including Best Play), John Logan’s Red now gets its very first from-the-ground-up Los Angeles-area staging at Long Beach’s International City Theatre, and what a splendid production ICT has mounted under the astute, nuanced direction of its Artistic Director caryn desai.
RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN
Friday, August 23rd, 2013
Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright Gina Gionfriddo examines the changing roles of women from the pre-Betty Friedan 1950s to the post-post-Feminist now in Rapture, Blister, Burn—and if this sounds like a potentially dry (i.e. boring) way to spend a night at the theater, think again. I haven’t had a more exhilarating time with four fabulous women and one not-so-fabulous man in I don’t know how long.
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THE ROYAL FAMILY
Tuesday, August 20th, 2013
Theatrical royalty play theatrical royalty as Will Geer’s own “royal family” bring George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s The Royal Family to hilarious, effervescent life—with enough star power to rival those twinkling orbs shining down on the Topanga hills Theatricum Botanicum calls home.
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A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY
Monday, August 19th, 2013
Director Jeremy Lelliott works wonders with Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, turning a play that in other hands might seem stuffy or talky or dated into an exciting, utterly relevant evening of theater.
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PRAIRIE-OKE!
Saturday, August 17th, 2013
Any resemblance between the show being reviewed here and a certain TV series that ran from 1974 to 1983 on NBC and starred Michael Landon, Melissa Gilbert, and Karen Grassle as a family living on a farm in Walnut Grove, Minnesota in the 1870s and 1880s is “entirely coincidental,” as Silverlake’s Cavern Club Celebrity Theater welcomes back master parodist Dane Whitlock’s Prairie-oke!, aka “That Totally Unauthorized Karaoke Parody Musical Formerly Known As Something Else.”
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THE KITCHEN WITCHES
Thursday, August 15th, 2013
A pair of lifelong best enemies catfight it out on the set of a community access cable TV cooking show in Caroline Smith’s entertaining if minor comedy The Kitchen Witches, now playing at San Pedro’s Little Fish Theatre.
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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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