MUD BLUE SKY

posted on May 11th, 2015 at 12:14 AM by Steven Stanley

If three middle-aged flight attendants spending the night with a 17-year-old high school boy in a Chicago hotel room sounds like the setup for a 1960s sex farce à la Boeing-Boeing, think again. Marisa Wegrzyn’s Mud Blue Sky, the latest from The Road Theatre Company, turns out to be not just a laugh-out-loud comedy but a touching look at friendship, parenting, life choices, sisterhood, loneliness, growing older, and coming of age in the 21st Century.
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posted in Comedy, North Hollywood, Theater Review, WOW!

SAMSARA

posted on May 10th, 2015 at 12:27 PM by Steven Stanley

A 30something NoCal couple hire a surrogate in faraway India to give birth to the child neither is biologically capable of conceiving in Lauren Yee’s imaginative, funny, at times overly cutesy, but ultimately quite moving Samsara, now getting a splendidly acted and directed West Coast Premiere at Anaheim Hills’ Chance Theater.
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posted in Comedy, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS

posted on May 9th, 2015 at 2:35 PM by Steven Stanley

It took legendary Hollywood producer Mike Todd around $50,000,000 in today’s currency to bring science fiction writer Jules Verne’s Around The World In Eighty Days to the Todd-AO 70mm big screen back in 1958.

Actors Co-op does the same in 2015 with maybe about one-half-percent the budget, and I defy anyone to find the Co-op’s supremely imaginative, endlessly inventive small-stage revival any less entertaining than its Hollywood blockbuster predecessor.
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posted in Comedy, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Theater Review, WOW!

GUS’S FASHIONS & SHOES

posted on May 8th, 2015 at 4:57 PM by Steven Stanley

Plays don’t get much more testosterone-fueled than Gus’s Fashions & Shoes, the grittily dramatic, darkly comedic latest from writer-director Ron Klier, whose Cops And Friends Of Cops kept Vs. Theatre audiences glued to the edge of their seats two years back.
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posted in Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, World Premiere, WOW!

RUTHLESS! THE MUSICAL

posted on May 7th, 2015 at 4:37 PM by Steven Stanley

The Bad Seed meets All About Eve meets Gypsy as the musical theater majors of Cal State Fullerton’s illustrious BFA program bring the murderously funny off-Broadway cult spoof Ruthless! The Musical to lethally hilarious life on the intimate stage of Santa Ana’s Grand Central Theatre.
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posted in Musical, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

CIRCUS UGLY

posted on May 5th, 2015 at 3:18 PM by Steven Stanley

NOT RECOMMENDED

Some plays are so unexpectedly marvelous and/or so deeply thought-provoking that you can’t stop talking about them long after the house lights have gone back up. Gabriel Rivas Gomez’s Circus Ugly, the latest from Playwrights’ Arena, is likely to inspire almost as much post-performance conversation as those, but for a different reason. Yes, several of its performers manage to impress and so does a topnotch production design, but not even a lukewarm recommendation is possible for a play that still has me scratching my head and wondering, “WTF was that?!”
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posted in Drama, Los Angeles, Not Recommended, Theater Review

SPRING AWAKENING

posted on May 4th, 2015 at 11:13 AM by Steven Stanley


Master director Richard Israel joins Cal State Fullerton choreography whiz William F. Lett and CSUF’s phenomenally talented Musical Theater BFA majors for as fine a production of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s Spring Awakening as any professional theater could hope to present.
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posted in Musical Revue, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM

posted on May 3rd, 2015 at 8:24 PM by Steven Stanley

The theater company whose recent reinvention of Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret for the intimate stage earned it both critical and audience raves now returns with a “downsized” staging of the Stephen Sondheim classic A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, and the result is one of the funniest—and most ingenious—Forums ever.
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posted in Musical, North Hollywood, Theater Review, WOW!

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