PLAZA SUITE

posted on January 27th, 2013 at 3:59 PM by Steven Stanley


Neil Simon was the reigning King Of Broadway when his Plaza Suite opened at the Plymouth Theatre on Valentine’s Day, 1968. Only two years before, Simon’s Sweet Charity, The Star-Spangled Girl, The Odd Couple, and Barefoot in the Park were all four playing simultaneously on the Great White Way, and Plaza Suite, the next Simon comedy to open in New York ran over a thousand performances and on into the next decade.

It’s this still rib-tickling, still relevant collection of three short plays, each of them unfolding in Suite 719 of New York’s posh and pricey Plaza Hotel, that the Morgan-Wixson Theatre now revives to near perfection in a production blessed by inspired direction and a pair of sensational lead performances.
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posted in Comedy, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS

posted on January 26th, 2013 at 4:10 PM by Steven Stanley


Imagine you wanted to dramatize one of science fiction writer Jules Verne’s greatest novels, one which imagined a journey around the world circa 1872 in a then unimaginable eighty days with stops in Suez, Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Yokohama, San Francisco, New York, and then back to London, an adventure that would include dozens of characters along the way, onboard train and ship and atop elephant, and involve a daring rescue, a visit to a Chinese opium den, an Apache attack, and one unexpected delay after another.
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posted in Comedy, Long Beach/San Pedro, WOW!

SWEENEY TODD

posted on January 25th, 2013 at 5:21 PM by Steven Stanley


Like the Little Engine That Could, USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory’s self-proclaimed “innovative musical theater, for students, by students,” undertakes its most daunting challenge to date, Stephen Sondheim’s epic Sweeney Todd, and comes out with yet another winner.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, WOW!

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!

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