STONEFACE
Monday, June 4th, 2012
Imagine you’re writer-director Jaime Robledo, and your play Watson won you just about every award in the book, including a pair of Scenies. Then imagine you’re writer-performer Vanessa Claire Stewart, whose Louis And Keely Live At The Sahara and its holiday spin-off won you just about every award in the book, including a grand total of four Scenies. Now try to think of what to do for an encore.
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PETER PAN
Sunday, June 3rd, 2012
Hear the words “I won’t grow up” and the name most likely to pop into your head will surely be Peter Pan, the boy who has become so synonymous with a refusal to grow older, he’s even got a syndrome named after him. That’s why it makes perfect sense for the ageless Cathy Rigby to once again be starring in the Broadway/TV smash Peter Pan, whose title role she first played in the first of four separate Broadway engagements way back in 1990 … when she was a mere thirty-eight. As to the question of whether she can still pull it off twenty-two years later in the musical’s latest National Tour, the answer is a resounding “Yes!”
THE PAJAMA GAME
Saturday, June 2nd, 2012
Carousel, Funny Girl, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, South Pacific … Probably no local Civic Light Opera so consistently revives classic musical comedies from Broadway’s Golden Age as Downey CLO, and their first-ever production of 1954’s The Pajama Game is one of their best revivals ever.
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COMPLEAT FEMALE STAGE BEAUTY
Friday, June 1st, 2012
When Restoration-era diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about “the prettiest woman in the whole house” and “the handsomest man,” in both cases he was referring to the same person—English actor Edward Kynaston. Known throughout mid-17th Century London for his portrayals of Shakespearean heroines Desdemona, Ophelia, and Juliet, Kynaston achieved more recent fame when Billy Crudup played him on the big screen opposite Claire Danes in 2004’s Stage Beauty. North Hollywood’s Crown City Theatre Company now presents the fascinating play upon which Stage Beauty was based—Jeffrey Hatcher’s Compleat Female Stage Beauty, and a gem of a production it is.
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AMERICAN IDIOT
Wednesday, May 30th, 2012
Green Day’s American Idiot has arrived in the OC for a head-bangingly exciting one-week engagement at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts.
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A5678
Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
Escondido’s Welk Resort Theatre brings back the good old-fashioned Musical Comedy Revue with its “World Premiere Revival” of Barbara Epstein’s A5678, a show which debuted at L.A.’s The Zephyr Theatre way back in 1976.
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WHERE THE GREAT ONES RUN
Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
Mark Roberts writes plays about abuse, adultery, addiction, illness, incest, and suicide in the American Midwest, or at least that’s the terrain he covered in Parasite Drag, reviewed here a couple years back. Rogue Machine Theatre produces dark, edgy dramas like Small Engine Repair and Blackbird, which swept virtually every major theater award in town this past year. That’s why Roberts’ and Rogue Machine’s maiden collaboration, Where The Great Ones Run, comes as such a surprise. Though alcoholism, domestic violence, homosexuality, and a rather long bit of full-frontal male nudity would doubtless make this Mark Roberts play rather too daring for, say, Actors Co-op, coming from Rogue Machine, Where The Great Ones Run seems downright sunny, more Horton Foote than Sam Shepard, and if you’re anything like this reviewer you’ll love every minute of Roberts’ only slightly acidic valentine to small-town Indiana life. (read more)
REX PICKETT’S SIDEWAYS THE PLAY
Saturday, May 26th, 2012
Longtime best friends Miles and Jack set off on “the ultimate road trip, the last hurrah” in Rex Pickett’s Sideways The Play, now getting a terrific World Premiere staging by Santa Monica’s The Ruskin Group Theatre Co.
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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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