THE WORLD GOES ‘ROUND
Monday, September 10th, 2012
A bunch of Kander & Ebb songs assigned to Man 1, Man 2, Woman 1, Woman 2, and Woman 3. That’s pretty much what a theater company gets when Music Theatre International grants it the rights to The World Goes ‘Round, and that’s pretty much what audiences have been getting since the Kander & Ebb revue made its Off-Broadway debut back in 1991. Five singers performing songs from the Broadway classics Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss Of The Spider Woman and lesser know Kander & Ebb gems like The Rink, The Happy Time, and Woman Of The Year.
Audiences expecting more of the same from Actors Co-op’s intimate-stage The World Goes ‘Round can instead plan on being bowled away by director-choreographer Robert Marra’s brilliant reconception of the Kander & Ebb revue as a sung-through musical. That’s right. The World Goes ‘Round is now a bona fide musical, and which manages to tell the stories of seven authentic, distinct, fully developed characters without a word of spoken dialog.
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THE FULL MONTY
Saturday, September 8th, 2012
Richard Israel’s intimate staging of the 2001 Broadway hit The Full Monty is so perfect on just about every level that a visit to the Third Street Theatre ought to be required of anyone aiming to produce, direct, appear in, musical direct, or design a 99-seat-plan musical—or by anyone who’s ever foolishly asserted that L.A. doesn’t know how to “do theater.”
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THE COMPANY MEN
Tuesday, September 4th, 2012
With their snazzy business suits and skinny neckties, they might seem at first glance to be a quartet of ad execs straight out of TV’s Mad Men. Place them onstage in front of mikes and backed by a four-piece rock band and they turn into the hot new singing group The Company Men, now wowing audiences in a limited series of Sunday appearances at the Key Club on world famous Sunset Strip.
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A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
Sunday, September 2nd, 2012
Performance Riverside introduced its patrons to the musical theater genre known as the Concert Staged Reading in last night’s script-in-hand, one-performance-only “reading” of Ahrens and Flaherty’s A Man Of No Importance. And the result?
A nearly flawless production entirely deserving of its standing ovation.
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FISHING
Friday, August 31st, 2012
Playwright David J. Duman has taken his years of toiling in assorted San Francisco Bay Area restaurants and used them as food for laughter in Fishing, his sexy, spicy, fly-on-the-wall look at the staff and customers of a trendy seafood eatery, now getting its first Los Angeles production at Downtown L.A.’s Archway Studio/Theatre.
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DADDY LONG LEGS
Monday, August 27th, 2012
A brand new cast makes PCPA Theaterfest’s production of Daddy Long Legs, Paul Gordon and John Caird’s exquisite gem of a musical, seem fresh and new, even for those like this reviewer who fell in love with it in previous engagements at the Rubicon and La Mirada. Though Jean Webster’s 1912 novel Daddy-Long-Legs fits squarely in the Children’s Books section of your local library or Barnes And Noble, its musical adaptation (minus hyphens) once again proves absolutely right for ages eight to eighty.
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MISS SAIGON
Monday, August 27th, 2012
Having now seen a grand total of seven major productions of Miss Saigon, I’m going to go out on a limb and say: If Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre’s reimagining of the 1991-2001 Broadway megasmash isn’t the very best of the bunch (which it may well be), it is certainly the freshest, grittiest, and most original staging I’ve seen since first experiencing Miss Saigon’s First National Tour at the Ahmanson way back in 1995.
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GHOST-WRITER
Saturday, August 25th, 2012
Wikipedia defines a “ghostwriter” as someone who “writes books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person.” Add a hyphen and a “ghost-writer” is something quite different indeed—or so we learn in Michael Hollinger’s Ghost-Writer, now getting a classy West Coast Premiere at Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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