THE BLUE LAGOON: A MUSICAL
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
(*At 45 minutes, The Blue Lagoon: A Musical gets a lower-case wow!)
When Henry De Vere Stacpoole wrote his romance novel The Blue Lagoon back in 1908, little did he know that a century later, his teenaged heroine Emmeline Lestrange would be singing “(Oh Dear God Above) Please Keep Us Safe On This Ocean” to her first cousin Richard, who would then reply with an encouraging “With Dick around, you don’t have to frown.”
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MAMMA MIA!
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
Is there any show in the world that can rival the success of Mamma Mia!? Since its 1999 World Premiere in London’s West End, there have been at least 30 “sit-down” productions across the globe. Sydney, Las Vegas, Madrid, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Paris, and Oslo are just a handful of the cities where Mamma Mia has “sat down” and stayed for months or even years. Then there are the tours, beginning with the First U.S. tour that played the Ahmanson back in 2002, stretching up to the musical’s four current tours—North American, European, Japanese, and Korean. As for Mamma Mia!’s Broadway run, just a couple weeks ago it hit 4000 performances and counting. All this is to say that a) you shouldn’t expect your local CLO to mount its own production in the foreseeable future and b) if you want to see Mamma Mia! live on stage, you’d better head on down to Costa Mesa where the North American tour is making an all-too-brief one-week stop.
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THE WILD PARTY
Sunday, June 19th, 2011
Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party is a tough show to nail. In fact, one of the few times I’ve left a production at intermission was a well-intentioned but mostly disastrous attempt at meeting TWP’s many challenges. That’s why Theatre Out’s intimate staging down Santa Ana way comes as such a thrilling surprise, one which marks director-choreographer Frankie Marrone as One To Watch and spotlights a revelatory performance by a never better Andrea Dennison-Laufer.
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BASH’d: A GAY RAP OPERA
Saturday, June 18th, 2011
If the words Gay Rap Opera sound to you like a three-way oxymoron, then you haven’t heard Feminem and T-Bag rap to the sounds of DJ Jedi in BASH’d: A Gay Rap Opera, now playing at Hollywood’s Celebration Theatre. Take rhymes like “Get off my fuckin’ back okay, I like to suck dick / Now fuck me in the ass and I’ll write rhymes about it,” set them to a gangsta beat, find a pair of hip-hopping triple threats like Sean Bradford and Chris Ferro to bust those rhymes, give the whole shebang one of the most exciting stagings in town, and you’ve got another great big Celebration hit to shout out about.
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FOUR CLOWNS: ROMEO AND JULIET
Saturday, June 18th, 2011
When you think of clowns, you probably don’t think of Romeo And Juliet, and when you think of Romeo And Juliet, you probably don’t imagine Juliet telling her beloved, “You are the sun in the sky. I can’t wait for you to be that guy … who fucks me tonight.”
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DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER: THE SONGS OF DAME SHIRLEY BASSEY
Thursday, June 16th, 2011
Jennifer Leigh Warren and Shirley Bassey are a match made in entertainment heaven, or so you will discover in Diamonds Are Forever: The Songs Of Dame Shirley Bassey, Warren’s one-woman tribute to Britain’s most successful female artist ever.
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BAT BOY: THE MUSICAL
Monday, June 13th, 2011
If it weren’t for the Musical Theatre Guild, Southern California audiences might never have had the chance to see and hear bygone Broadway shows like this season’s 70, Girls, 70 (1971), Little Me (1962), and One Touch Of Venus (1943), or last season’s Stop The World, I Want To Get Off (1962), Fade Out Fade In (1964), High Spirits (1964), and Irma La Douce (1960)—and for that, musical theater fans owe MTG a sincere debt of gratitude.
A MEMORY OF TWO MONDAYS
Sunday, June 12th, 2011
“Attention must be paid to such a person,” declares Linda Loman at the end of Arthur Miller’s 1949 masterpiece Death Of A Salesman, eulogizing a husband who woke up one morning to find that the thirty-four years he’d spent as a traveling salesman had been for naught.
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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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