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

YOHEN

posted on November 2nd, 2017 at 11:37 AM by Steven Stanley

Danny Glover gives East West Players/Robey Theatre Company’s revival of Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yohen plenty of movie-star box-office draw, but Gotanda’s delicate, perceptive “portrait of a marriage” and Yohen’s luminous leading lady June Angela deserve better than Glover’s lackadaisical performance as a retired African-American soldier estranged from his Japanese wife of thirty-plus years.
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posted in Theater Review, Two-Hander

THIS LAND

posted on October 31st, 2017 at 5:18 PM by Steven Stanley

At once epic and intimate, Evangeline Ordaz’s This Land weaves two centuries of Watts history—from the Mexican ranchers who seized Tongva Indian land in the 1880s, to the white homeowners who took flight in the 1950s when blacks moved in, to the Latinos who became the majority four decades later, to today’s white gentrifiers—into two absorbing, illuminating hours of Los Angeles theater at its best.
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posted in Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, World Premiere, WOW!

SINNER’S LAUNDRY

posted on October 30th, 2017 at 4:05 PM by Steven Stanley

No playwright could ask for a better cast or finer production design than IAMA Theatre Company has given John Lavelle’s Sinner’s Laundry. Audiences, on the other hand, may find themselves leaving the Lounge Theatre clueless to the message, meaning, or simple raison d’être of Lavelle’s World Premiere absurdist existentialist comedy. I certainly did.
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posted in Comedy, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Theater Review, World Premiere

REDLINE

posted on October 29th, 2017 at 5:48 PM by Steven Stanley

A decades-estranged father and son meet for the first time since a car crash ripped their family to shreds in Christian Durso’s gripping, emotionally-charged Redline, an IAMA Theatre Company World Premiere that held me in its grip from the bombshell revelation that sets it in motion to its life-and-death final seconds.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Theater Review, Two-Hander, World Premiere, WOW!

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