SWEET CHARITY

posted on June 22nd, 2018 at 7:59 AM by Steven Stanley

Three-time Tony-winner Kathleen Marshall and Broadway’s original Elle Woods team up with some of L.A.’s finest musical theater talents as Reprise 2.0 treats audiences to Sweet Charity, both the 1966 Neil Simon-Cy Colemen-Dorothy Fields gem and the irrepressibly plucky title character brought to irresistible life by a sensational Laura Bell Bundy on the UCLA Freud Playhouse stage.
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posted in Musical, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

THE COLOR PURPLE

posted on June 20th, 2018 at 4:00 PM by Steven Stanley

Swing Nikisha Williams’ star turn as Celie, a fabulous supporting cast, and imaginative staging make the Broadway Revival Tour of The Color Purple, Alice Walker’s powerful recounting of a young black woman’s road to self-discovery and self-assertion, well worth seeing despite a minimalist scenic design ill suited to (and volume levels turned way too low for) a hall as mammoth as the Segerstrom Center For the Arts.
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posted in Musical, National Tour, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME

posted on June 19th, 2018 at 3:02 PM by Steven Stanley

Victor Hugo’s classic tale of a deformed orphan and the tempestuous gypsy who wins his love while inflaming the lustful heart of the Catholic priest who raised him comes to musical life in PCPA Solvang’s mostly quite effective under-the-stars staging of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame marred only by a weak link in the romantic quadrangle that propels it.
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posted in Musical, Santa Barbara County, Theater Review

LEGALLY BLONDE

posted on June 17th, 2018 at 1:40 PM by Steven Stanley

Rising musical theater star Callandra Olivia is a pretty-in-pink Harvard Law School stunner as Elle Woods in Candlelight Pavilion’s irresistible big-stage production of the 2007 Hollywood-to-Broadway hit Legally Blonde.
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posted in Musical Play, San Gabriel Valley, Theater Review, WOW!

MEXICAN DAY

posted on June 16th, 2018 at 4:59 PM by Steven Stanley

Following the hallucinogenic surrealism of Plunge and the real-time fireworks of Tar, playwright Tom Jacobson concludes his mammoth Bimini Bath Trilogy with no less than an old-fashioned 1940s-style screwball comedy (with dramatic overtones) called Mexican Day, like its predecessors an enthralling, enlightening look at 20th-century L.A. history.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, World Premiere, WOW!

SKELETON CREW

posted on June 15th, 2018 at 4:50 PM by Steven Stanley

If Arthur Miller had written a play about auto workers facing the personal and professional consequences of a possible plant closure, it might have been Skeleton Crew, which is about the highest praise I can bestow upon Dominique Morisseau’s powerful blue-collar drama, now making a breathtakingly designed, directed, and performed Geffen Playhouse debut.

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posted in Drama, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

PLUNGE

posted on June 13th, 2018 at 5:02 PM by Steven Stanley


Long-buried secrets of power, passion, and perversion propel Plunge, the first installment of Tom Jacobson’s concurrently running Bimini Baths Trilogy, as provocative a World Premiere play as you’re likely to experience any time soon.
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posted in Los Angeles, Theater Review, Two-Hander, World Premiere, WOW!

CLYBOURNE PARK

posted on June 11th, 2018 at 11:07 PM by Steven Stanley

White flight circa 1959 and urban gentrification five decades later fuel Bruce Norris’s button-pushing, political-correctness-be-damned comedy Clybourne Park, winner of both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play, the finest production I’ve seen at Laguna Playhouse and one of the year’s very best.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

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