TEA, WITH MUSIC

posted on November 16th, 2012 at 12:09 AM by Steven Stanley


When Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea was first staged back in 1987, the playwright could scarcely have imagined that one night, twenty-five years later, her poetic tribute to her mother and the 100,000 other Japanese “war brides” who came to the U.S. after World War II would one night become Tea, With Music, an exquisite new chamber musical now getting its World Premiere production by East West Players.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, WOW!

INTIMATE APPAREL

posted on November 12th, 2012 at 3:18 PM by Steven Stanley


Elegant writing, a fascinating place and time, and an African-American heroine rarely given center-stage status transform Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel from soap opera to Outer Critics Circle Award-winning drama, as Los Angeles audiences can now (re)discover in its impeccable big-stage revival at the Pasadena Playhouse.
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posted in Drama, Pasadena, WOW!

PRESENT LAUGHTER

posted on November 11th, 2012 at 2:42 PM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
San Pedro’s Little Fish Theatre closes its 2012 season with a sparklingly performed revival of Noël Coward’s hilariously farcical Present Laughter. If only poor sightlines didn’t leave many audience members craning for a view of the actors.
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posted in Comedy, Long Beach/San Pedro, Recommended

AVENUE Q

posted on November 10th, 2012 at 5:56 PM by Steven Stanley


DOMA Theatre Company presents its strongest production to date with the first L.A.-area intimate staging of Avenue Q, Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx, and Jeff Whitty’s 2004 Tony-winning Best Musical, brought to fresh new life by director extraordinaire Richard Israel and an ever-so-talented young cast.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, WOW!

THE DOCTOR’S DILEMMA

posted on November 10th, 2012 at 1:29 AM by Steven Stanley


Two men facing imminent death from a terminal illness and a doctor with the means to save only one of them. Who will live? Who will die?

If this sounds like a made-for-TV movie or an episode of a weekly medical drama, think again. It’s The Doctor’s Dilemma, George Bernard Shaw’s smart, funny, still thought-provoking 1906 comedy and the latest classic to be revived—smashingly—by A Noise Within.
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posted in Comedy, Pasadena, WOW!

MEMPHIS

posted on November 7th, 2012 at 6:58 PM by Steven Stanley


December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. November 6, 2012: Barack Obama is reelected to the Presidency of the United States. What a difference 57 years make!

November 6, 2012 happens also to have been the Opening Night of the National Tour of Memphis, the Tony-winning Best Musical set in the same decade Rosa Parks made her historic stand for racial equality, a serendipitous coincidence given that Memphis is the fictional but fact-inspired tale of Huey Calhoun, a Memphis DJ who made history in his own way by daring to play “race music” on mainstream, i.e. white radio. That particularly groundbreaking step, and Calhoun’s then illegal romance with a young singer he meets on his first visit to a “colored” nightclub, are at the heart of one of the most powerful—and most tuneful and exuberant—musicals Broadway has seen in many a year.
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posted in Musical, National Tour, Orange County, WOW!

THE FISHERMAN’S WIFE

posted on November 6th, 2012 at 6:40 PM by Steven Stanley


An unhappily married fisherman and his wife get some unsolicited sex therapy from a nautically tattooed traveling salesman and a sexually insatiable pair of tentacled sea creatures in Steve Yockey’s laugh-out-loud surreal screwball comedy The Fisherman’s Wife, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s maiden offering in The Speakeasy, its brand new (and aptly named) performance space in Atwater Village.
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posted in Comedy, Los Angeles, WOW!

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

posted on November 5th, 2012 at 6:07 PM by Steven Stanley


A mysterious host invites eight guests, each of them a stranger to the others, for an island holiday off the coast of Devon, a pair of married servants in attendance and said host (or hostess?) nowhere to be seen. Does this sound like recipe for murder?

To a diehard Agatha Christie fan, it not only does, it sounds suspiciously like And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Indians), published first as a novel in 1939 and then adapted for the stage by the author herself in 1943.

Hollywood’s Actors Co-op now revives this Christie gem in a production that makes for as entertaining and suspenseful a mystery thriller as any Christie fan or neophyte could possibly ask for, thanks to incisive direction by Linda Kerns and topnotch performances by an all-around terrific cast.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

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