SERRANO THE MUSICAL

posted on January 17th, 2015 at 2:24 PM by Steven Stanley

SoCal’s major regional houses can eat their hearts out they didn’t get first dibs on the World Premiere of Serrano The Musical, while L.A. musical theater aficionados can rejoice that this sensational contemporary adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac told Goodfellas style is making its debut in the up-close-and-personal intimacy of the Matrix on Melrose.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, Theater Review, World Premiere, WOW!

PROOF

posted on January 17th, 2015 at 10:52 AM by Steven Stanley

How many plays can you name that have won the Drama Desk Award for Best New Play, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, the Tony and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Play, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama?

David Auburn’s Proof is that rarity, a major prize-winner now making a welcome return to Los Angeles in an impeccably directed intimate production by Moth Theatre’s John Markland, ingeniously designed by Justin Huen and sensationally performed by Amanda Brooks, Chris Marquette, Felicity Price, and John Cirigilano, a foursome any major American theater would be thrilled to have grace their stage.
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posted in Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, WOW!

THE WHIPPING MAN

posted on January 14th, 2015 at 1:56 AM by Steven Stanley

On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House, at long last ending what is still the deadliest war in United States history. Five days later, President Abraham Lincoln was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet. Coincidentally, during this fateful week in our country’s history, Jews in both North and South observed Pesach, the festival of Passover, celebrating the freeing of the Israelites from centuries of slavery in Egypt.

Inspired by this bit of historical happenstance, and armed with the knowledge that there were indeed Jewish slaveholders (and Jewish slaves) in the pre-Civil War Deep South, playwright Matthew Lopez sat down to write The Whipping Man, a gripping, eye-opening look at three Jews—two black, one white—in the days just following Appomattox, a play now brought to compelling life in a spectacular South Coast Repertory debut set to transfer next month to the Pasadena Playhouse.
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posted in Drama, Orange County, Pasadena, Theater Review, WOW!

RANSOM, TEXAS

posted on January 11th, 2015 at 6:15 PM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED

San Francisco’s Virago Theatre Company has come south to offer L.A. its production of William Bivins’ edgy psychological thriller Ransom, Texas, and there is much to recommend in it, particularly Dixon Phillips’ intensely raw lead performance, though Phillips’ costar’s vaguely non-native accent makes it hard to buy the pair as a West Texas father and son.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Recommended, Theater Review

BLONDE POISON

posted on January 11th, 2015 at 12:46 PM by Steven Stanley

Salome Jens gives an absolutely riveting performance as Stella Goldschlag, the Berliner whose collaboration with the Gestapo sent thousands of her fellow German Jews to the death camps, in the American Premiere of Gail Louw’s Blonde Poison, now playing at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.
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posted in Drama, Solo Performance, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

LEND ME A TENOR

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

Glendale Centre Theatre follows this past summer’s staging of Ken Ludwig’s Leading Ladies with the master playwright’s 1986 smash Lend Me A Tenor, a revival that hits all the right comedic notes as performed by an expert cast under James Castle Stevens’ snappy direction.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Comedy, Theater Review, WOW!

THE KING AND I

posted on January 9th, 2015 at 4:44 PM by Steven Stanley

NOT RECOMMENDED

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s score is as glorious today as it ever has been, the now iconic “Small House Of Uncle Thomas” ballet remains a thing of unique beauty and charm, and Victoria Strong and Richard Bermudez not only prove sensational choices to play Anna and the King of Siam, they give the visiting English schoolmarm and the Siamese monarch a romantic, sexual chemistry almost unheard of since The King And I made its 1951 Broadway debut.

Unfortunately, the current Welk Resort Theatre staging of the R&J classic also features some racially insensitive casting choices straight out of the 1950s that underline the creakiness of book writer Hammerstein’s depiction of the Thai people and their centuries-old culture.
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posted in Musical, Not Recommended, San Diego County, Theater Review

WIT

posted on January 5th, 2015 at 2:06 AM by Steven Stanley

Too much meddling with a Pulitzer Prize winner, along with an otherwise effective Kelly Carlton’s unwillingness to “go all the way,” make Stage Against The Machine’s revival of Margaret Edson’s Wit a no-go despite co-director Carlton’s often quite moving work as Vivian Bearing PhD and a couple of terrific supporting turns.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Not Recommended, Theater Review

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