ANGELS IN AMERICA: A GAY FANTASIA ON NATIONAL THEMES
Monday, November 28th, 2011
If ever there’s been a reason for Los Angeles playgoers to plan a road trip to San Diego, it’s ion theatre company’s current revival of Tony Kushner’s rarely produced Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, presented in two parts, making for a total of over six hours of thrilling, event-status theater.
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CRIMES OF THE HEART
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
Having earlier this year joined forces to bring Los Angeles their multiple Scenie Award-winning production of David Auburn’s Proof, Open Fist Theatre Company and Aquila Morong Studio For Actors are reunited once again for a terrific intimate theater revival of Beth Henley’s Crimes Of The Heart.
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THE WEDDING SINGER
Monday, November 21st, 2011
The Department Of Theatre And Dance at Cal State Fullerton follows last spring’s Footloose: The Musical with yet another sensational salute to the 1980s, Chad Beguelin, Tim Herlihy, and Matthew Sklar’s The Wedding Singer, an adroitly concocted blend of music, comedy, and ‘80s nostalgia. Utterly delightful from start to finish, this is a “student production” in name only, and one that easily rivals the best our local CLOs have to offer.
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AS IS
Saturday, November 19th, 2011
The year was 1985 and New York City’s gay male population was gripped by a fear akin to that which the citizens of London must have felt in 1665 at the outbreak of the Great Plague. Only four years had passed since a New York Native news article headlined “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded” had reassured its readers not to worry about grapevine tales of a so-called “gay cancer.” By 1985, that disease, or more accurately put, that syndrome had its very own acronym, though it was not until that very year that President Ronald Reagan finally said the word AIDS in public. There were 5636 known AIDS-related deaths in the United States in 1985.
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DAVID DEAN BOTTRELL MAKES LOVE: A ONE-MAN SHOW
Thursday, November 17th, 2011
As a boy growing up in a state whose motto is “If you can catch it, you can fuck it,” young David Dean Bottrell probably never dreamed that he would one day become a successful actor, comedian and screenwriter, pen a monthly column for MetroSource Magazine and write for the Huffington Post, win seventeen awards for his short film Available Men, be one of the stars of the L.A. stage smash Streep Tease, or direct the current Colony Theatre hit Travels With My Aunt. And even if he had dreamed this impossible dream, he probably never would have imagined that just talking about his life on a nearly bare stage would turn into one of Summer 2011’s hottest tickets.
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TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT
Monday, November 14th, 2011
Imagine for a moment that Patrick Dennis had met his Auntie Mame when he was well into middle age rather than as a child. Imagine too that this meeting had occurred in the swinging ‘60s instead of the Roaring ‘20s, and that aunt and nephew had been British and not American. Imagine all this and what you’d come up with would be Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, the famed author’s 1969 novel which playwright Giles Havergal adapted for the stage in 1989. It is this oh-so-clever stage adaptation that Burbank’s Colony Theatre now brings to vivid, imaginative life under the truly inspired direction of David Dean Bottrell.
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THE GOD OF ISAAC
Friday, November 11th, 2011
The neo-Nazi National Socialist Party Of America’s planned march through the heavily Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, sends Isaac Adams on a quest to discover what it means to be a Jew in James Sherman’s hilariously original comedy The God Of Isaac, now playing at West Los Angeles’s Pico Playhouse.
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THE LANGUAGE ARCHIVE
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
“It’s estimated that every two weeks, a language dies. I don’t know about you, but this statistic moves me far more than any statistic on how many animals die or people die in a given time, in a given place. Because when we say a language dies, we are talking about a whole world, a whole way of life.”
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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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