DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS

posted on October 12th, 2013 at 7:38 PM by Steven Stanley


The multi-talented student triple-threats of USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory are back onstage again in their latest student-directed, designed, and performed musical hit, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and though its lead characters are indeed the dirtiest of scoundrels, there’s nothing at all rotten about MTR’s latest Broadway-to-blackbox gem. Quite the contrary, there’s not a more sensationally performed 99-seat musical now playing in all L.A.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, Theater Review, WOW!

DON’T DRESS FOR DINNER

posted on October 12th, 2013 at 12:08 PM by Steven Stanley


Let’s say you’re a married man. Let’s say you’re a married man with a mistress. Let’s say you’d like nothing more than to spend a romantic weekend with said mistress in the renovated farmhouse you call home. You’d send the wife off for a visit with Mommy and invite your best friend over to throw the missus off the scent, right?

Right … but what if your wife and that best of friends happened to be secret lovers and she thought your chum’s weekend visit would be the perfect opportunity for the two of them to engage in a bit of extramarital hanky-panky? She’d make a quick phone call to cancel plans with mother, and before you knew it, there’d be two sets of adulterous lovers under the same roof with the Cordon Bleu cook you’d hired to cater the weekend making it Five’s A Crowd.

If you think this sounds like the perfect set-up for a door-slamming, mistaken identity-filled French farce, you’d be absolutely right, since this is precisely how Marc “Boeing-Boeing” Camoletti sets up Don’t Dress For Dinner, the hilarious (and pitch-perfect) latest from Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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posted in Comedy, Long Beach/San Pedro, Theater Review, WOW!

RII

posted on October 10th, 2013 at 5:20 PM by Steven Stanley


William Shakespeare. The Theatre @ Boston Court. Two names you wouldn’t normally expect to see in the same sentence let alone in the first paragraph of a review. But wonder of wonders, Boston Court is currently wowing an audience of Shakespeare buffs and T@BC regulars with its very own version of Richard II, one they’ve redubbed RII if only to let the world know that, just as Boston Court isn’t your grandparents’ theater, this isn’t your grandparents’ Richard II—not by a long shot.
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posted in Drama, Pasadena, Theater Review, WOW!

THE LAST GOODBYE

posted on October 8th, 2013 at 7:55 PM by Steven Stanley


Romeo and Juliet may have fallen in love countless times before, but perhaps never quite so stunningly as they do to the songs of Jeff Buckley in The Last Goodbye, the 2010 Williamstown Theatre Festival hit now being given a splashy Broadway-ready production at San Diego’s Old Globe.
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posted in Musical, San Diego County, Theater Review, WOW!

THE FEW

posted on October 7th, 2013 at 9:42 PM by Steven Stanley


Samuel D. Hunter. Remember that name, because if the three Sam Hunter plays I’ve had the great good fortune to see over the past twelve months are any indication, this Idaho-born, New York-based playwright is one whose name you’ll be hearing for years to come. A Bright New Boise and The Whale have proven him “one to watch.” The Few (his latest, now getting the sensational World Premiere it deserves), further cements the young playwright’s place in contemporary American theater.
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posted in Drama, San Diego County, Theater Review, WOW!

LA CAGE AUX FOLLES

posted on October 7th, 2013 at 11:09 AM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
The “birds” are boys and the boys are girls as Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center presents Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage Aux Folles (aka The Birdcage), and if an uninspired scenic design gives the production a more “community theater” look than it deserves, the result is nonetheless a crowd-pleasing, gender-bending treat.
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posted in Musical, Recommended, Theater Review, Ventura County

TIME STANDS STILL

posted on October 5th, 2013 at 2:49 PM by Steven Stanley


A wounded photo-journalist’s return home from the war zone proves even more challenging than a life lived on the edge in Donald Margulies’ intelligent, perceptive, often funny, always compelling Time Stands Still, now getting a superb Orange County Premiere at Anaheim’s Chance Theater with crackerjack director Marya Mazor assuredly at the helm.
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posted in Drama, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

THE NORMAL HEART

posted on October 5th, 2013 at 12:57 AM by Steven Stanley


Larry Kramer’s landmark drama The Normal Heart gets its first L.A. staging in nearly two decades, and tough as it may be to revisit the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic, this absolutely brilliant production is one that no Los Angeles theater lover should miss, and the younger the audience the better.
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posted in Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, WOW!

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