PATRICK ALAN CASEY CD
Friday, November 19th, 2010
Singer-songwriter Patrick Alan Casey makes a memorable recording debut with Leaving California, a terrific alternative adult rock CD filled with some of the most gorgeous, powerful rock ballads you’re likely to hear this or any year.
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INTO THE WOODS
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
Over the past quarter century or so, Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods has become one of the most performed musicals in the U.S.—in regional CLOs, on college and high school campuses, and in intimate theaters. Its first act, which magically combines some of the best loved of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and its second, which explores with considerable depth what happens after “happily ever after,” make for a show which retains its freshness and originality two decades after it first captivated Broadway audiences.
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WALT DISNEY’S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
Walt Disney’s Beauty And The Beast made movie history in 1992 when it became the first full-length animated feature to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Major musical sequences like “Belle,” “Gaston,” and “Be Our Guest” felt so much like Broadway production numbers that its 1994 transfer to The Great White Way made perfect sense, leading to nine Tony nominations, three National Tours, English and foreign language productions the world round, and regional productions like the one staged by Cabrillo Music Theater in 2007. February of this year marked the start of Beauty And The Beast’s Fourth National Tour, a sensational production now making a one-week stop at Costa Mesa’s Orange County Performing Arts Center.
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THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW
Sunday, November 14th, 2010
Few musicals have enjoyed the success of The Rocky Horror Show. Its 1973 West End World Premiere was followed by a ’74 Los Angeles run at the Roxy, a ’75 Broadway premiere, and subsequent productions throughout the world leading to what may well be a record number of cast recordings—a grand total of twenty-eight, plus the movie soundtrack. Audience participation at live productions and midnight movie screenings has become legendary, with Rocky fans showing up in costume, throwing food, toilet paper, and confetti on the stage at appropriate moments, and shouting out punch lines in unison.
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LITTLE FLOWER OF EAST ORANGE
Friday, November 12th, 2010
“Dysfunctional” doesn’t begin to describe the O’Connor family in Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Little Flower Of East Orange, now in its West Coast Premiere engagement by the Elephant Theatre Company. Indeed, elderly matriarch Marie Therese Sullivan O’Connor, and her grown son and daughter Danny and Justina are so totally f*cked up as to make Amanda, Tom, and Laura Wingfield seem positively well-adjusted by comparison.
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CRIMES OF THE HEART
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010
East West Players 2010-11 season continues with its second smash hit in a row—an absolutely splendid staging of the quirky Southern comedy Crimes Of The Heart. The third major Southern California revival of Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play since May, East West’s is the first to feature an all-Asian American cast—and why not? As Artistic Director Tim Dang has stated, “Asians do live in the South, Asians do speak with Southern accents and Asians historically have been part of the American landscape for well over a century.” Since Hollywood casting directors remain for the most part blithely unaware of this reality, it’s up to theater companies like East West to give members of the Asian American acting community roles like Henley’s delightfully quirky Magrath sisters—parts which Elizabeth Liang, Kimiko Gelman, and Maya Erskine bring to vivid, authentic, hilarious, and emotionally resonant life.
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HELLO AGAIN
Monday, November 8th, 2010
Michael John LaChiusa’s Hello Again has inspired Musical Theatre Guild’s very best production since 2009’s two-in-a-row stagings of Kiss Of The Spider Woman and Violet. Under Michele Spears’ inspired direction and starring ten of the country’s finest musical theater talents, this seductive chamber musical, based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 classic La Ronde, proved again that when MTG members and guest artists have the right material, their “concert staged readings” can the equal the very best fully staged productions in town.
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BLITHE SPIRIT
Sunday, November 7th, 2010
WWII London had just undergone the eight months of sustained bombing by Hitler’s Luftwaffe (and seen tens of thousands of its citizens killed, and even more injured) when Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit opened in June of 1941, offering shell-shocked Londoners a welcome escape from the horrors of the night skies and keeping them laughing throughout the war—for a grand total of 1997 performances.
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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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