BOYS WILL BE BOYS


Boys Will Be Boys is Naked Boys Singing with a cast about half the size (no pun intended), a girl among the boys—and not a trace of nudity. If that sounds not at all like NBS, then think again. Both are musical revues filled with plenty of R-rated double entendre lyrics, both shows feature a young, attractive cast, both include a same sex love song (and a serious song or two thrown in for depth), and like Naked Boys Singing, Boys Will Be Boys is a heck of a lot of fun, even with clothes on.
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TERRE HAUTE


Imagine you were allowed to conduct a series of brief interviews with the man responsible for killing 168 Americans and injuring over 500 more in the then deadliest act of terrorism ever perpetrated on U.S. soil. Assuming you even wanted to talk to him, what would you say? What would you want to know?
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MEASURE FOR MEASURE


A powerful government official offers to suspend a sex offender’s death sentence in exchange for a night of love-making with the convicted man’s virginal sister. Sound like a scene from a day or nighttime soap? It certainly could be, but is in fact the central conflict of William Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, about as contemporary a play as the Bard ever wrote, even four-plus centuries after its first performance. No wonder A Noise Within’s “present time” setting in a “modern capital city” works so well in this first production of its 2010-2011 repertory season.
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SPOTLIGHT CABARET: BROADWAY NU SKOOL


There’s been an explosion of New York style cabaret in Los Angeles over the past few years, with Aaron Jacobs’ second-Sunday-of-the-month Spotlight Cabaret providing audiences the chance to enjoy the vocal talents of some of our finest musical theater talents while savoring some of Café Metropol’s tasty dinner treats or a cocktail, beer, or glass of wine.
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SOUTH PACIFIC


Rodgers & Hammerstein fanatics may cry sacrilege, but I never quite understood why South Pacific was considered such a classic. Then came the National Tour of the 2009 Tony-winning (Best Revival Of A Musical) Lincoln Center Theatre production, and I became a believer. Not only is South Pacific one of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s finest, it stands as one of the greatest musicals ever to grace a Broadway theater, at least when done right.
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FUTURA


What do you call a play that starts with a 35-minute university lecture on “From Pen To Pixel: A History Of Typography,” turns in an instant into an edge-of-your-seat thriller, and finally becomes something quite lyrical which leaves you breathless?

You call it brilliant.
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THEY’RE PLAYING OUR SONG


Two years after Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical Chapter Two chronicled the widowed playwright’s second-chanceat-happiness marriage to Marsha Mason, his They’re Playing Our Song brought to the Broadway stage a fictionalized version of another real-life romance, that of songwriting partners Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager, this time told as a musical comedy featuring a dozen original songs by the selfsame team.
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THE BUTCHER OF BARABOO


The Coen Brothers meet Beth Henley in Marisa Wegrzyn’s The Butcher Of Baraboo, a quirky bit of Fargo crossed with Crimes Of The Heart, now getting its Los Angeles premiere at North Hollywood’s The Road Theater Company.
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