BEEHIVE
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010
Beehive: a) a structure housing a colony of bees; b) a hairstyle for women, popular around 1960, in which the hair is arranged in a high rounded shape on top of the head; c) a fabulous musical revue featuring the greatest hits of the top girl singers and girl groups of the swingin’, turbulent 1960s.
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MISALLIANCE
Sunday, September 19th, 2010
South Coast Repertory opens its 2010-2011 season with a deliciously staged and performed revival of George Bernard Shaw’s 100-year-old comedy Misalliance, a production so all-around splendid that it makes one of Shaw’s earliest plays seem half its age—or even younger.
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JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS
Sunday, September 19th, 2010
Anyone under a certain age who hears the title Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris may well wonder, “Who the hell is this Jacques Brel?”—a question likely to provoke a cry of “Sacrilege!” from more seasoned theater aficionados.
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MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG
Saturday, September 18th, 2010
For a show that lasted only sixteen performances in its original 1981 Broadway run, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along has had a remarkable “afterlife.” Over the past three decades, there’s probably not an American musical theater company that hasn’t staged it at least once. This reviewer alone has seen five productions of Merrily in the last four and a half years, Actors Co-op’s current revival being the latest and quite possibly the overall best of the bunch—and that’s saying a lot.
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THE WEB
Friday, September 17th, 2010
While surfing the Internet, Chris Quiñones makes a shocking discovery—someone with the very same name as his, a Chris Quiñones who graduated with very same high school class, has the same date, place, and even hospital of birth, the same Columbian father and Jewish mother… The very same Chris Quiñones, yet subtly different in small details like the fact that for one Chris a particular time of import is a.m. but for the other p.m. Chris stays online all night searching, until finally the trail left by Chris II ends about a year ago, in Djibouti, after which his doppelganger has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.
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RUINED
Thursday, September 16th, 2010
Playwright Lynn Nottage puts a human face on the ongoing Civil War in the Democratic Republic of Congo in her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Ruined, now in its West Coast Premiere engagement at the Geffen Playhouse.
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MYSTERIOUS SKIN
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Mysterious Skin, Scott Heim’s powerful 1995 novel about two teenagers with a shared secret almost too horrendous to talk about, is the kind of book that would seem unadaptable to screen or stage, if only for its scenes of child sexual abuse. Still, miracle of miracles, Mysterious Skin The Movie and Mysterious Skin The Play did end up written, produced, and presented to audience bravos, the former by film maker Gregg Araki and the latter by playwright Prince Gomolvilas. It’s Gomolvilas’ ingenious stage adaptation that now gets an absolutely stunning Los Angeles Premiere at Little Tokyo’s East West Players in a production easily the Asian-American theater’s finest non-musical since Durango, three years ago.
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YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010
When the very first Broadway musical for which you write book, music, and lyrics wins a record-breaking twelve Tony awards and runs for over 2500 performances, what do you do for an encore?
If you’re Mel Brooks, your follow-up to The Producers is Young Frankenstein, and though the comic master’s sophomore musical ran less than 500 performances, it’s nonetheless a tuneful, laugh-filled treat for Brooks fans and horror buffs alike.
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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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