SPAMILTON: AN AMERICAN PARODY

posted on November 14th, 2017 at 4:47 PM by Steven Stanley

Imagine you’ve spent the past three-and-a-half decades spoofing New York’s buzz-worthiest musicals but this year there’s one megasmash that dwarfs the competition like no musical ever has before. If you’re Gerard Alessandrini, you write Forbidden Broadway 2017 and call it Spamilton, eighty minutes of Broadway satire at its funniest, cleverest, and most tuneful now getting its West Coast Premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre.
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posted in Musical Spoof, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

THE SECRET IN THE WINGS

posted on November 13th, 2017 at 6:39 PM by Steven Stanley

Life is no fairytale for the dozens of fairytale characters who people Mary Zimmerman’s dark and dazzling The Secret In The Wings, the latest from L.A.’s “Pay What You Want” Coeurage Theatre Company and as spellbinding a theatrical experience as I’ve had since Coeurage’s equally stunning Failure: A Love Story.
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posted in North Hollywood, Play With Songs, Theater Review

THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER

posted on November 11th, 2017 at 12:43 PM by Steven Stanley

Radio superstar Sheridan Whiteside is at it again, terrorizing the Ohio Stanleys, fomenting family rebellions, and scheming to get his own egomaniacal way in Actors Co-op’s pitch-perfect revival of the 1939 George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart screwball classic The Man Who Came To Dinner.
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posted in Comedy, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Theater Review, WOW!

LITTLE WOMEN [a multicultural transposition]

posted on November 7th, 2017 at 4:07 PM by Steven Stanley

If Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March had come of age in post-WWII L.A. as the Mayeda sisters, offspring of a Japanese-American father and a Chinese-American mother, Louisa Mae Alcott’s classic novel might look and sound just like Little Women [a multicultural transposition], Velina Hasu Houston’s unabashedly G-rated World Premiere rewrite that had me in its spell from ebullient start to heartwarming finish.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, World Premiere, WOW!

CRY-BABY

posted on November 7th, 2017 at 10:13 AM by Steven Stanley

Cal State Fullerton Theatre & Dance is putting on quite a show this month, a rarer-than-rare big-stage production of Cry-Baby, aka The other John Waters Musical, and what a delightfully nostalgic, deliciously twisted, not-quite-for-all-ages alternative to Hairspray it turns out to be, especially as performed by CSUF’s Musical Theater BFA program triple-threats.
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posted in Musical, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

END OF THE RAINBOW

posted on November 5th, 2017 at 10:57 AM by Steven Stanley

Even the words “definitive” and “tour de force” seem inadequate to describe Angela Ingersoll’s astonishing transformation into Judy Garland in End Of The Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s powerful, probing examination of the last months Judy’s not-so-storybook life, superbly directed by Michael Matthews for La Mirada Theatre and McCoy Rigby Entertainment.
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posted in Downey/La Mirada, Play With Songs, Theater Review, WOW!

MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY

posted on November 4th, 2017 at 11:31 PM by Steven Stanley

With each of its three acts performed on a different stage of Sacred Fools’ newly renamed (and spiffily remodeled) Broadwater complex on Santa Monica Blvd. and Lillian, the company’s sensationally directed, performed, and designed Los Angeles Premiere of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play achieves event status. Whether or not Washburn’s audacious Drama Desk-nominated take on a post-Apocalyptic civilization is your cup of tea, for its adventurous execution alone, Mr. Burns is a fall-season must-see.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Theater Review, WOW!

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

posted on November 3rd, 2017 at 4:09 PM by Steven Stanley

Theatre Unleashed offers Halloween season audiences an entertaining and occasionally shiver-and-gasp-worthy intimate staging of the three-decades-long-running West End smash “ghost play” The Woman In Black minus the full quotient of horror-movie chills a bigger-bucks production could provide.
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posted in Drama, North Hollywood, Theater Review, Two-Hander

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