THE MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP

posted on October 26th, 2013 at 1:22 PM by Steven Stanley


The next laugh is never more than a few seconds away as the Falcon Theatre presents Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery Of Irma Vep, one of the most hilarious comic spoofs ever—and a showcase for director Jenny Sullivan and its two brilliant leading men/women Matthew Floyd Miller and Jamie Torcellini.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Comedy, Theater Review, WOW!

THE HOMOSEXUALS

posted on October 26th, 2013 at 11:25 AM by Steven Stanley


The flamboyant theater queen who lives to rag on this year’s Tony winners. The average-looking all-around good gay who’s everybody’s best friend and nobody’s boyfriend. The foreign-born charmer living with HIV—though no longer with his (married-her-for-a-green-card) wife. The small-town boy whose move to the big city has meant making gay friends—and a new life he could never have had back home.

We’ve seen these gay men, or gay men like them, on stage before, most notably in the pre-Stonewall world of Mart Crowley’s The Boys In The Band and in the AIDS-crisis world of Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!

Now, young Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins brings these gay archetypes into the 21st Century in his 2011 Jefferson Award-nominated dramedy The Homosexuals, now being given a couldn’t-be-better West Coast Premiere by Celebration Theatre.

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posted in Comedy-Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, WOW!

WHEN YOU WISH The Story Of Walt Disney

posted on October 24th, 2013 at 11:31 PM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
Director extraordiniare Larry Raben and choreographer par excellence Lee Martino team up with an all-around fabulous cast to make the very most of book, music, and lyric writer Dean McClure’s World Premiere bio-musical When You Wish (The Story Of Walt Disney), though for producers to dub it a “Pre-Broadway production” is wishful thinking indeed.
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posted in Musical, Recommended, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls

PRISCILLA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT

posted on October 23rd, 2013 at 4:33 PM by Steven Stanley


The rainbow-colored bus known around the world as Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert has just pulled into the Costa Mesa station (make that Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts), and as anyone who’s seen Stephen Elliott’s 1994 cult hit movie of the same name can tell you, that’s just about the most fabulous news any OC resident or neighbor to the north could possibly ask for this week.
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posted in Musical, National Tour, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

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!

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