XANADU

posted on October 21st, 2013 at 4:30 PM by Steven Stanley


Xanadu has arrived at Cal State Fullerton’s Little Theater, proving once again that for big-stage professional-caliber musical theater, just about the only thing separating CSUF productions from those at Musical Theatre West or 3-D Theatricals is the uniformly young age of their talented casts. Case in point: Douglas Carter Beane’s 2005 Broadway treat.
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posted in Musical, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

SUNNY AFTERNOON

posted on October 20th, 2013 at 10:53 PM by Steven Stanley


On November 22, 1963, at about half-past-noon Dallas time, President John F. Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository … and thirty minutes later was pronounced dead. On November 24, the President’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself fatally shot by local nightclub operator Jack Ruby as a nation sitting glued to their TV screens looked on in horror.

But what about the forty-eight hours separating these two America-shattering events?

Playwright-director Christian Levatino and his gangbusters theatre company* let us be flies on the walls of the Dallas Police Headquarters where Oswald spent his last two days under police interrogation in Levatino’s gripping new play Sunny Afternoon, now getting its official World Premiere following its Best-Of-Fringe-winning workshop at last June’s Hollywood Fringe Festival.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Theater Review, WOW!

KISS ME KATE

posted on October 19th, 2013 at 2:29 PM by Steven Stanley


It’s been six-and-a-half decades since William Shakespeare met Cole Porter in Kiss Me Kate, though with director extraordinaire Richard Israel in the driver’s seat, Cabrillo Music Theatre’s 2013 revival of the Tony Award-winning 1948 Broadway smash feels fresh and alive and gay and young for all its years.
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posted in Musical, Theater Review, Ventura County, WOW!

WAIT UNTIL DARK

posted on October 19th, 2013 at 11:37 AM by Steven Stanley


Some plays simply cannot be updated to the 21st Century. Take for example Wait Until Dark, Frederick Knott’s classic 1966 thriller about a blind New York City newlywed targeted by a trio of thugs out to find the heroin-filled doll they believe to be hidden somewhere in the walk-down flat she shares with her photographer husband—a play entirely dependent on there being just one land-line phone in the apartment and a (now virtually non-existent) phone booth on a nearby corner.

That’s why, when I heard that playwright Jeffrey Hatcher was adapting Wait Until Dark for the Geffen Playhouse “in a new time/setting,” my first thought was “They must be kidding!” Then I found out that Hatcher was actually taking Knott’s thriller back in time to WWII New York City and that thought turned to “Wow! What a clever idea!” Not only a clever idea, it turns out, but one that proves as exiting in execution as in theory.
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posted in Drama, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

FAST COMPANY

posted on October 17th, 2013 at 11:41 PM by Steven Stanley


The Rag, the Spanish Prisoner, the Pig-in-a-Poke, the Badger Game, and the Glim Dropper are just five of the games that H, Blue, and Francis learned at their mother Mable’s knee—which will give you an idea of just what kind of family the three siblings grew up in in Carla Ching’s exhilarating World Premiere comedy Fast Company, the latest from South Coast Repertory.
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posted in Comedy, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

Cirque Du Soleil TOTEM

posted on October 16th, 2013 at 5:11 PM by Steven Stanley


Port Of Los Angeles Berth 46  is the place to be from now through November 10, and it’s not because some majestic ocean liner or USS Battleship has arrived at Los Angeles Harbor. Non, messieurs-dames. The big news down San Pedro way is that the world-famous Cirque Du Soleil has pitched its blue-and-yellow bigtop (aka “Le Grand Chapiteau”) there, treating Angelinos to its latest spéctacle, and ooh-la-la is this spéctacke spéctaculaire!
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posted in Long Beach/San Pedro, Special Event, WOW!

LEGALLY BLONDE

posted on October 14th, 2013 at 8:46 PM by Steven Stanley


3-D Theatricals gets everything right in its end-of-season staging of Legally Blonde The Musical. With director David F.M. Vaughn assuredly in charge, this is the very best production I’ve seen of one of Broadway’s best-crafted hits of the past ten years.
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posted in Musical, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

THE LIAR

posted on October 14th, 2013 at 4:11 PM by Steven Stanley


Silliness has rarely been cleverer or cleverness sillier than in David Ives’ translation/adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 1644 comedy The Liar, The Antaeus Company’s end-of-season offering and quite possibly the classical theater masters’ frothiest romp ever.
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posted in Comedy, North Hollywood, Theater Review, WOW!

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