THE MARVELOUS WONDERETTES
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Quite possibly the biggest L.A. theater success story of past decade has been that of The Marvelous Wonderettes, Roger Bean’s wonderfully marvelous look back at the pop music of the 1950s and ‘60s as sung by a quartet of high school girls at their 1958 prom and their 1968 class reunion. From its original incarnation (a 45-minute workshop in Milwaukee) to its two-year run at North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre to its successful off-Broadway engagement, The Marvelous Wonderettes has truly conquered the American musical theater world.
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DREAMGIRLS
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
Dreamgirls is back, bigger, brighter, bolder, and more dazzling than ever. In fact, the National Tour which has just begun a two-week run at Costa Mesa’s Orange County Performing Arts Center is one of the most visually spectacular and spectacularly performed touring productions ever. In many ways, it’s in a class all by itself.
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BUDDY—THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
February 3, 1959 will forever be known in the world of Rock & Roll as “the day the music died,” for it was on that date that 22-year-old Buddy Holly lost his life in a plane crash just five miles from Clear Lake, Iowa’s Surf Ballroom, the site of the pop star’s final concert.
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SEE WHAT I WANNA SEE
Friday, April 16th, 2010
Michael John LaChiusa’s See What I Wanna See is not your grandmother’s musical. There’s no star-struck romantic couple. There are no melodic love songs. There’s not a single dance number. No chorus line. No strings in the orchestra. And not a happy ending in sight.
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THE BOYS IN THE BAND
Thursday, April 15th, 2010
“You’re a sad and pathetic man. You’re a homosexual and you don’t want to be, but there’s nothing you can do to change it.” Thus speaks birthday boy Harold to his party host Michael in Mart Crowley’s 1968 off-Broadway hit The Boys In The Band, to which Michael later replies, his voice laced with bitterness, “Show me a happy homosexual, and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”
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SQUABBLES
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Every so often one comes across a little-known play that turns out to be a true theatrical gem. Squabbles, by Marshall Karp, is one such comedic treat, and Los Angeles audiences can find out exactly why in a terrific new production now playing at Glendale Centre Theatre.
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DOCTOR CERBERUS
Sunday, April 11th, 2010
It’s the mid-1980s and Franklin Robertson is a “husky” 13-year-old geek with a passion for late night scary movies. If horror host Doctor Cerberus is on the air, you can be sure that young Franklin will be in front of his TV set, enraptured. Tonight, the Transylvanian-accented Doctor (“with a Ph.D in Fear”) is screening “an American classic in the tradition of Citizen Kane and Gone With The Wind,” 1984’s Firestarter, starring Drew Barrymore and George C. Scott “just before he fired his agent.”
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ACTING: THE FIRST SIX LESSONS
Friday, April 9th, 2010
There’s an old black-and-white fan magazine snapshot of TV star Lloyd Bridges and his then teenage son Beau circa Sea Hunt. In the shot, Bridges Sr. and Bridges Jr. are reading a copy of Richard Boleslavsky’s 1933 guide to Acting: The First Six Lessons. Now, some fifty or so years later, 68-year-old Beau and his 23-year-old daughter Emily are staging Boleslavky’s classic text at Theatre West, and the result is an often enthralling and edifying hour and a half of theater, brought to life by a multi-award-winning actor at the peak of his gifts and a exciting young actress just beginning her journey.
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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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