DAVID DEAN BOTTRELL IS WORKING

posted on March 7th, 2013 at 4:47 PM by Steven Stanley


You’ve undoubtedly heard it said that “Everyone has at least one good book in them.” Substitute “solo performance” for book and you’re in Hollywood, and if you should happen to doubt my words, you’ve only to check out how many One-Man or One-Woman Shows there are every summer at the Fringe Festival.

Still, despite this solo performance glut, there aren’t that many you’d actually pay good money to see, all the more reason to celebrate the return of story-telling master David Dean Bottrell, who not only has a Scenie-winning Solo Performance in him, he’s got a wingdinger of a follow-up to it, entitled simply David Dean Bottrell Is Working.
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posted in Los Angeles, Solo Performance, WOW!

MY BIG GAY ITALIAN WEDDING

posted on March 5th, 2013 at 6:02 PM by Steven Stanley


The place is Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where Tony Manero discoed the night away in Saturday Night Fever and where women still live by the credo, “The higher the hair, the closer to God.” The time is the present, meaning that the gay boys of South Brooklyn no longer have to pretend to be straight, and can even tie the legal knot when they meet Mr. Right. What better time could there be for a 20something Italian-American ragazzo like our hero Anthony Pinnunziato to pop the question to his Polish-American sweetie Andrew Polinski? Now all he has to do is convince his traditional Mamma and Papa to give the happy same-sex couple their blessing.

Playwright Anthony Wilkinson thus sets the comedic wheels in motion in his off-Broadway hit My Big Gay Italian Wedding, now getting a hilarious West Coast Premiere in an exuberantly acted albeit barebones production under the peppy direction of Paul Storiale.
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posted in Comedy, North Hollywood, WOW!

THE TROUBLE WITH WORDS

posted on March 4th, 2013 at 9:36 PM by Steven Stanley


What do you do when you’ve won your second Ovation Award (for music directing The Color Purple) a mere twelve months after winning Ovation Number One for the music and lyrics of your original song cycle The Trouble With Words … and you’ve only just turned thirty?

The answer, if you’re Gregory Nabours, is to revisit The Trouble With Words in a smartly tweaked 2013 production for Coeurage Theatre Company, one which features the talents of its original director and band and most of its original cast, along with four new songs and a brand new choreographer and design team, all of this adding up to a TTWW 2.0 even more splendiferous than it was the first time round.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical Revue, WOW!

LADYHOUSE BLUES

posted on March 3rd, 2013 at 10:36 PM by Steven Stanley


Four years had passed since the Equal Rights Amendment was sent to the states to be ratified and three since Roe vs. Wade became the law of the land when Kevin O’Morrison’s Ladyhouse Blues first sent mid-1970s audiences back to 1919, a year after the end of World War I and the watershed year the Senate ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote just as the 1920s began to roar.

Andak Stage Company now revives Ladyhouse Blues under the impeccable direction of Anne McNaughton, offering L.A. audiences an all-around splendid production, one that transports us back nearly a century to the end of a decade in which the times, were (as Bob Dylan was to put it forty-five years later) most definitely “a-‘changin’.”

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posted in Drama, North Hollywood, WOW!

STAY ON THE LINE: A Rock Musical

posted on March 2nd, 2013 at 7:59 PM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
A crisis hotline center serves as the setting for Stay On The Line: A Rock Musical, a revised remounting of a 2001 Cal State Fullerton project and one that works best as a showcase for its phenomenally talented cast of mostly 20something triple threats under the direction of Crystal K. Craft and Scott Mlodzinski.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, Recommended

RIGHT TOGETHER, LEFT TOGETHER

posted on March 1st, 2013 at 4:37 PM by Steven Stanley


Longtime friends reunite in New York City for the wedding of Taylor and Zac in Will Collyer & Pamela Eberhardt’s highly promising new musical Right Together, Left Together … if only an impending hurricane and the tiny matter of Zac’s possible same-sex leanings don’t get in the way.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Musical, WOW!

CAVALIA ODYSSÉO

posted on February 28th, 2013 at 6:28 PM by Steven Stanley


When was the last time you saw a production which featured 18 equestrians, 23 acrobats and aerialists, and 67 horses (22 stallions and 45 geldings) performing live under a 10-story-high big-top tent smack dab in the center of beautiful downtown Burbank?

Well, if you’re the editor of StageSceneLA, the answer to the above question is “Not until last night,” when the spectacularly one-of-a-kind Cavalia Odysséo opened to a standing-room-only audience dazzled again and again by its myriad of wonders.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Special Event, WOW!

ALL MY SONS

posted on February 26th, 2013 at 6:07 PM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
It takes guts for a community theater to challenge audiences accustomed to light comedic fare with a drama as stark as Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Heck, it takes guts for any theater company to stage what may well be the greatest play of the 20th Century and do it justice.
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posted in Drama, Recommended, San Gabriel Valley

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