DAMES AT SEA


The campy 42nd Street spoof affectionately titled Dames At Sea proves a terrific showcase for the musical theater talents of UC Irvine in the Department Of Drama’s annual end-of-school-year big-stage musical, directed with oodles of imagination by UCI’s brand new Head Of Directing Jane Page.
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NO WAY AROUND BUT THROUGH


Actor, writer, director, photographer, musician Scott Caan, star of TV’s Hawaii 5-0, spotlights the first two of these talents in his entertaining new comedy No Way Around But Through, now getting its World Premiere at Burbank’s Falcon Theater, an engagement made even more noteworthy by the presence of Oscar-nominated film star Melanie Griffith among its talented cast of five.
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STONEFACE


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

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!”

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THE PAJAMA GAME


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


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


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


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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