THE WILD PARTY

posted on November 19th, 2017 at 11:55 AM by Steven Stanley

Musicals don’t get much wilder, nor university productions much finer than the USC School Of Dramatic Arts’ sensational staging of Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party, concluding its sold-out five-performance run this afternoon at USC’s intimate McClintock Theatre.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, Theater Review, WOW!

CHASING MEM’RIES: A DIFFERENT KIND OF MUSICAL

posted on November 17th, 2017 at 3:26 PM by Steven Stanley

Tyne Daly rises above the material she’s been given in Chasing Mem’ries: A Different Kind Musical, though if by “different,” book writer Josh Ravetch means clichéd, maudlin, sitcommy, and song-deficient, then this Geffen Playhouse World Premiere “musical” is indeed quite different from the rest.
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posted in Musical, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls, World Premiere

KING CHARLES III

posted on November 17th, 2017 at 12:00 AM by Steven Stanley

William Shakespeare is dead. Long live Mike Bartlett, author of Charles III, a “future history” The Bard himself might have written had he been looking back, not at Kings crowned Richard or Henry but at a 21-century monarch facing the crisis of his or any sovereign’s reign. Now getting a spectacular Southern California Premiere at a newly revitalized Pasadena Playhouse, King Charles III is the best play William Shakespeare never wrote.
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posted in Drama, Pasadena, Theater Review, WOW!

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!

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