StageSceneLA

CHAPTER TWO

posted on January 25th, 2013 at 12:52 AM by Steven Stanley

Love’s more wonderful the second time around for widowed novelist George Schneider in Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, or at least it would be if memories of his beloved late wife Barbara didn’t get in the way of starting afresh with actress Jennie Malone.

Simon’s 1977 gem arrives at Laguna Playhouse as fresh and funny as ever, the absence of the Internet, cell phones, and social media making it a delightful period piece as do mentions of As The World Turns, Merv Griffin, and Fresca.
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posted in Comedy, Orange County, WOW!

WAR HORSE

posted on January 23rd, 2013 at 7:15 PM by Steven Stanley

Simply put, War Horse is a theatrical experience unlike any other you have ever witnessed. A spectacular, breathtaking work of art that does things usually reserved only for the movies, it had this reviewer gasping in awe and blubbering like a baby. Trust me, you’ve never seen anything like it before.
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posted in Drama, National Tour, Orange County, WOW!

110 IN THE SHADE

posted on January 21st, 2013 at 7:43 PM by Steven Stanley

Musical Theatre West’s One-Night-Only concert staged reading of 110 In The Shade, the 1963 Broadway musical adaptation of N. Richard Nash’s perennial favorite The Rainmaker, proved an entertaining, particularly well-timed treat for this reviewer, having only one week prior seen the very play which set the musical ball in motion.
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posted in Concert Staged Reading, Long Beach/San Pedro, WOW!

CLYBOURNE PARK

posted on January 21st, 2013 at 6:06 PM by Steven Stanley

The 19th Century axiom that “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”* could have been thought up to describe race relations in the United States, or at least race relations as Bruce Norris writes about them in his Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play Clybourne Park, now getting its first San Diego production—and a splendid one at that—at San Diego REPertory Theatre.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, San Diego County, WOW!

BOEING-BOEING

posted on January 21st, 2013 at 1:53 PM by Steven Stanley

Theatergoers wanting to start off the New Year with a good laugh—or a thousand of them—are hereby advised to head on over to the La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts where McCoy Rigby Entertainment is opening its 2013 season with Marc Camoletti’s saucy, sexy French farce Boeing-Boeing.
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posted in Comedy, Downey/La Mirada, WOW!

YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN

posted on January 19th, 2013 at 3:38 PM by Steven Stanley

Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, Sally, and Snoopy celebrate the life of a boy named Charlie Brown in the crowd-pleasing musical You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown, now being given a positively irresistible guest production at North Hollywood’s intimate Theatre Banshee.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Musical, WOW!

FREUD’S LAST SESSION

posted on January 18th, 2013 at 6:44 PM by Steven Stanley

Maxwell Anderson did it in his 1936 play Mary Of Scotland. Steve Allen did it in his late 1970s TV series Meeting Of Minds. And now playwright Mark St. Germain does it in Freud’s Last Session.

What these writers have in common is that all three imagined what might have happened had famous historical figures actually met, like Anderson did with Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen Of Scots, or in the case of Germain’s off-Broadway smash, now playing at Santa Monica’s Broad Stage, the Father Of Psychoanalysis (and confirmed atheist) Sigmund Freud and the Chronicles Of Narnia creator (and Christian apologist) C. S. Lewis.
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