DOGFIGHT

posted on June 3rd, 2017 at 12:29 PM by Steven Stanley

It’s taken five years for Dogfight, the Louise Lortel Award-winning Outstanding Musical of 2012, to finally make it to Los Angeles proper, and praise be the gods of L.A. musical theater, Dogfight’s Hudson Mainstage debut is (to quote from one of the show’s best songs) “Nothing Short Of Wonderful.”
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posted in Hollywood/West Hollywood, Musical, Theater Review, WOW!

SEPARATE TABLES

posted on June 2nd, 2017 at 12:46 PM by Steven Stanley

Following their superb 2014 revival of Terence Rattigan’s WWII-era Flare Path, Theatre 40 returns to Rattigan territory with a less successful Separate Tables, the mid-twentieth-century English playwright’s pair of one-acts whose second half crosses the line from period piece to uncomfortably dated.
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posted in Drama, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls

THE BODYGUARD

posted on May 31st, 2017 at 12:35 PM by Steven Stanley

Over a dozen of Whitney Houston’s Greatest Hits performed by an electrifying Deborah Cox in the screen-to-stage tale of a superstar pop diva and her obsessed, life-threatening stalker may not be great art. Indeed, it’s not even a traditional song-propelled musical per se. But no matter. I enjoyed just about every minute of The Bodyguard, the West End smash now touring the U.S.A. and stopping this week and next at the Segerstrom Center For The Arts.
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posted in Musical, National Tour, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

SHOCKHEADED PETER

posted on May 30th, 2017 at 9:18 AM by Steven Stanley

Bizarre, demented, disturbing, ghoulish, grotesque, gruesome, macabre, nightmarish, twisted, warped, and wickedly funny, Cygnet Theatre’s Shockheaded Peter is a stunningly designed musical treat filled with hilariously over-the-top characters and weirdly infectious tunes that will make any child (no matter how aged) think twice about misbehaving.
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posted in Musical, San Diego County, Theater Review, WOW!

LETTERS TO EVE

posted on May 29th, 2017 at 9:22 AM by Steven Stanley

A young Japanese-American couple fall in love in a WWII relocation center as an African-American jazz musician imprisoned in a Nazi death camp falls for a Jewish inmate in Letters To Eve, an ambitious new musical by Daniel Sugimoto whose reach ultimately exceeds its grasp despite some effective moments, performances, and songs.
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posted in Musical, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls

ANNIE GET YOUR GUN

posted on May 27th, 2017 at 3:01 PM by Steven Stanley

Glendale Centre Theatre once again does what it does best—revive classic Broadway musicals in-the-round—with Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, the song-and-dance tale of legendary 1880s “cham-peen” sharpshooter Annie Oakley.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Musical, Theater Review

KISS

posted on May 26th, 2017 at 11:25 AM by Steven Stanley

You must remember this. A kiss is not always just a kiss, or at least not in Guillermo Calderón’s compelling, confounding vision of life and love and death in today’s Syria, the appropriately—or metaphorically—titled Kiss, now being given a never-less-than-daring Odyssey Theatre Ensemble West Coast Premiere.
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posted in Drama, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

DINNER WITH FRIENDS

posted on May 25th, 2017 at 10:15 AM by Steven Stanley

“The thing is, you never know what couples are like when they’re alone; you never do.”

This bit of wisdom is just one reason why Donald Margulies’ Dinner With Friends still packs a punch at Little Fish Theatre seventeen years after it won its playwright the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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posted in Drama, Long Beach/San Pedro, Theater Review, WOW!

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