FUNNY GIRL
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
If the best reason to see Broadway’s Funny Girl in 1964 could be summed up in a name (Barbra Streisand, for those living under a rock), then the same can be said for its current revival at Downey Civic Light Opera. That name is Karen Volpe, the triple threat who first caught this reviewer’s attention as Ado Annie in DCLO’s Oklahoma! a few years back and now dazzles in the proverbial role of a lifetime.
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LUV
Thursday, June 2nd, 2011
This out-and-out hilarious blend of the absurd, the romantic, and the slapstick opens with a chance late night meeting between old school chums Harry Berlin (Michael Goldstrom) and Milt Manville (Rob Roy Cesar), reunited on a big city bridge for the first time in fifteen years. An overjoyed Milt can’t wait to update Harry on his life, which includes a wife, a home in the suburbs, a twenty-two carat gold watch, a designer suit, silk underwear, the works. As for his college friend’s sorry state of affairs, the crummily dressed Harry gives him the bad news. “It couldn’t be worse. I’m at the end of the line. Everything’s falling apart.” The worst of the worst had to be when a fox terrier peed all over the poor schlump’s gabardine pants, then turned right around and walked off. That’s why tonight, Harry confesses, “I was going to end it all, make one last stupid gesture of disgust and … that would be it.”
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THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
Of all the hit Broadway musicals of the past decade, there’s none more terrifically fit for school productions than The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. To begin with, it offers student actors a grand total of nine leading roles, each of which has at least one star-turn song and all of which provide ample opportunities for performers to strut their triple-threat talents. In addition, the show’s central conceit (that its elementary school-aged spellers are to be brought to life by actors in their twenties) means that not only its six pre-teen spellers but its three adult characters as well can be played by performers twenty-two and under. Merge this with a BFA program as esteemed as that of UC Irvine and the result is one of the very best Spelling Bees you’re likely to see anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
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NO WORD IN GUYANESE FOR ME
Sunday, May 29th, 2011
Anna Khaja returns to the stage in Wendy Graf’s powerful solo piece No Word In Guyanese For Me, the recent Ovation-award winner bringing to vivid life a young Guyanese who discovers after her family’s move to New York City that she is a lesbian—and that there is no word in her native language for the person she is.
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FINDING THE BURNETT HEART
Sunday, May 29th, 2011
You’d think by now there’d be no need for yet another teenage coming out story, nor would you be likely to expect a playwright to have anything new to offer on the subject.
You’d be wrong.
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iGHOST
Saturday, May 28th, 2011
The halls of Canterville Chase are alive with the sounds of spirits in Doug Haverty and Adryan Russ’s tunefully entertaining new musical iGhost, now getting its World Premiere at the Lyric Theatre.
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100 SAINTS YOU SHOULD KNOW
Friday, May 27th, 2011
Matters of love, sex, faith, and family are explored with utmost originality in Kate Fodor’s engrossing, deeply moving 100 Saints You Should Know, now getting an impeccable West Coast Premiere at the Elephant Theatre Company under the inspired direction of Lindsay Allbaugh.
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THREE DAYS OF RAIN
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Tony-winning playwright Richard Greenberg might well have called his fourteenth play Sins Of The Fathers, so heavily do the sins (or at least the perceived sins) of Walker Janeway’s parents continue to weigh on the life of this angry young man in Three Days Of Rain, now getting a pitch-perfect revival at South Coast Repertory, the same theater that world premiered it in 1997.
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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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