MONTY PYTHON’S SPAMALOT


You don’t need Broadway sets and costumes and professional credits a mile long to put on a bang-up show, not if you’re the talented team of artists at the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center and the show in question is Monty Python’s Spamalot.
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ALL SHOOK UP


With its hit-filled score made up of over two dozen Elvis classics, its clever, funny book by Joe DiPietro, its delicious cast of characters, and ample opportunities for a choreographer to strut his or her stuff, All Shook Up, “The Elvis Musical,” is not only one of the most thoroughly entertaining Broadway shows of the past decade, it makes for an ideal talent showcase for the gifted Cal State Fullerton students who play its ten leading roles and for its sensational triple-threat ensemble as well.
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[title of show]


Following last fall’s gem of a production of Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days, the students of Cal State Fullerton’s prestigious Musical Theater BFA program have returned to Santa Ana’s blackbox Grand Central Theatre for Hunter Bell and Jeff Bowen’s [title of show], which like Ordinary Days serves as a couldn’t-be-better showcase for a quartet of triple-threats (two juniors and two seniors) on their way to successful careers in musical theater.
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CABARET


The “Great War” had ended and Berlin was uncontested as Europe’s nightlife capital, a city of booze and drugs and sex of just about every permutation, that is until Nazism began to cast its dark shadow over the entire continent … and the world exploded.

Director-choreographer Cate Caplin captures Berlin at its most glitzy and at its most grim as Inland Valley Repertory Theatre presents the 1966 Broadway classic Cabaret, its 50th production, a revival sparked by a pair of stellar performances and choreography as imaginative and ably-executed as you’d see in many an Equity production.
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BILLY ELLIOT


Musicals don’t get much bigger or more spectacular than the international smash Billy Elliot, a nearly three-hour song-and-dance extravaganza that never forgets that it is, at heart, the intimate story of a boy who, in the words of Gene Kelly, has simply “Gotta Dance.”

L.A./Orange County audiences now have the next two weeks to experience the laughter, the tears, the thrills, and the sheer joy that is Billy, winner of ten 2009 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical, and in a Broadway first, a Best Leading Actor Tony awarded to all three Broadway Billys.
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A CATERED AFFAIR


While it may be true that no musical is too big for Broadway, Spider Man being a case in point, it’s equally true that some musicals are simply too small, too intimate, too “chamber” to make it on the Great White Way, one more reason to celebrate Musical Theatre Guild for bringing these delicate gems back to life, if only for an evening or afternoon of musical theater bliss.

Such is the case with 2008’s A Catered Affair, which despite its pedigree (music and lyrics by John Bucchino and book by Harvey Fierstein, based on a screenplay by Gore Vidal and a teleplay Paddy Chayefsky) and a cast which included Tom Wopat, Faith Prinze, and Fierstein, closed on Broadway after a mere 143 performances and previews.
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SLIPPING


A young man’s traumatic journey from adolescence to adulthood comes to vivid, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful life in Daniel Talbott’s 2009 drama Slipping, whose Los Angeles premiere reunites its pair of New York stars under the incisive direction of its multitalented writer.
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A CHORUS LINE


Musical Theatre West follows its superb 70th Anniversary revival of Oklahoma! with a first-rate production of the considerably more recent yet equally groundbreaking A Chorus Line.

Now the fifth-longest-running musical in Broadway history, A Chorus Line (book by James Kirkwood, Jr. and Nicholas Dante, music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward Kleban, and concept and original direction/choreography by Bennett) remains as fresh, as entertaining, and as powerful as ever with Roger Castellano directing and recreating Bennett’s iconic choreography.
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