COME FLY AWAY
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
The dance moves of premier choreographer Twyla Tharp and the vocals of Ol’ Blue Eyes himself combine to captivating perfection in Tharp’s Come Fly Away, brought to vivid life by a troupe of extraordinary young dancers and an onstage big band to rival the best of Nelson Riddle, Billy May, or Neil Hefti.
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THE RECOMMENDATION
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
What starts out as an Odd Couple-like comedy about a pair of mismatched Brown University roommates soon develops into something considerably more edgy (and edge-of-your-seat) in Jonathan Caren’s The Recommendation, a terrific World Premiere drama at San Diego’s Old Globe that will keep you guessing from its exhilarating start to its suspenseful finish.
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DIVIDING THE ESTATE
Monday, January 30th, 2012
The late, great Horton Foote returned to the small-town Texas he knew so well—in comedic mode this time round—in his Dividing The Estate, Tony-nominated as Best Play of 2009 and now playing at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre with two-thirds of its New York cast intact, including Foote’s daughter Hallie in the role that scored her a Tony nomination.
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BOEING-BOEING
Saturday, January 28th, 2012
There’ll be no louder peals of laughter in the South Bay over the next few weekends than those emanating from Rolling Hills Estates as the Norris Center For The Performing Arts presents an all-around splendid revival of Marc Camoletti’s saucy, sexy French farce Boeing-Boeing under James W. Gruessing’s sparkling direction.
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NOgoodDEED
Friday, January 27th, 2012
“No good deed goes unpunished,” or so Richard Jewell discovered when the mass media, having previously heralded his heroism at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, turned viciously against him, dragging the security guard through the mud without a shred of proof—or even evidence, all because he “fit” an FBI criminal profile.
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WHAT THE BUTLER SAW
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Here’s a quick quiz for theater aficionados:
Who can name a screwball comedy which deals with, features, or mentions all of the following: depravity, disguises, gender identity, the government, hanky-panky, hermaphroditism, homosexuality, incest, insanity, marriage, mistaken identities, nymphomania, pederasty, psychiatry, rape, religion, reunited orphan siblings, slapstick, and transvestitism?
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
Woody Allen is back on screen—and better than ever—in his critically acclaimed box-office smash Midnight In Paris, making the Morgan-Wixson Theatre’s decision to program one of Allen’s earliest hits as part of their 2011-12 season a stroke of prescient genius. That Morgan-Wixson’s staging of Play It Again Sam, Allen’s late-1960s comedy about a Humphrey Bogart-obsessed nebbish, turns out to be quite a gem of a production is icing on the cake.
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THE 39 STEPS
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
A quarter century before Cary Grant found himself pursued across the United States by enemy spies mistakenly believing him to be a CIA agent in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller North By Northwest, a young man named Richard Hannay wound up in similar straits in The 39 Steps, one of the master of the suspense’s earliest hits, and one whose now iconic sequences include a train-top chase leading to Hannay’s daredevil jump onto the Forth Bridge, a seemingly fatal shooting of our hero midway through, hero handcuffed to Hitchcock Blonde heroine as he searches for a villain recognizable only by the missing top joint on one of his fingers, and a very public climactic scene at the London Palladium, much like the one Hitchcock later filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
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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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