PIPPIN

posted on September 17th, 2012 at 12:08 PM by Steven Stanley


Few musicals lend themselves to as many different interpretations as the Stephen Schwartz classic Pippin. Reprise did it sexy and Chicago-esque some years back; East West Players took an Asian hip-hop approach to the material; Deaf West at the Taper featured not one but two Pippins, one deaf and one hearing; and the recently reviewed Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center revival set Pippin in the world of “Steampunk Carnivale.”

Now, Scenie-winning San Diego Director Of The Year James Vasquez puts his own personal stamp on Pippin for San Diego’s LGBT Diversionary Theater, and trust me, you may have seen Pippin before, even many times before, but you’ve never seen a Pippin like this one.
(read more)

posted in Musical, San Diego County, WOW!

XANADU

posted on September 15th, 2012 at 1:15 PM by Steven Stanley


Playwright Douglas Carter Beane provided a textbook example of how to turn a movie lemon into Broadway lemonade when he wrote the book for the stage adaptation of the turkey known as Xanadu, and lo and behold, one of biggest critical and commercial failures of the 1980s was transformed from flaming flop to fabulous hit!
(read more)

posted in Hollywood/West Hollywood, Musical, WOW!

EURIPIDES’ HELEN

posted on September 14th, 2012 at 5:27 PM by Steven Stanley


Take the greatest legendary beauty of the Ancient World, three of Hollywood’s most glamorous screen legends, the splendor of the Getty Villa’s Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater, the prodigious originality of playwright Nick Salamone, the spellbinding music of David O, and the directorial mastery of Jon Lawrence Rivera, mix all of this together, and the result is Euripides’ Helen, Salamone’s clever, mesmerizing, and oh so entertaining adaptation of the 412 BC play of the same name.
(read more)

posted in Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

ENCOUNTER

posted on September 13th, 2012 at 3:34 PM by Steven Stanley

NOT RECOMMENDED

East West Players abandons its usual fare (i.e. Asian-American-themed plays and musicals and mainstream plays and musicals with Asian-American casts) for an evening of South Asian dance. Those expecting colorful, Bollywood-style musical numbers will be disappointed, however, and so too I fear will EWP’s subscriber and fan base. Far more suited for a limited run at a Performing Arts Center specializing in eclectic music and dance, Navarasa Dance Theatre’s Encounter, while artfully designed and beautifully performed, failed to ignite this reviewer’s interest, its eighty-minute running time feeling considerably longer despite the talent involved.
(read more)

posted in Dance, Los Angeles, Not Recommended

EPIC PROPORTIONS

posted on September 11th, 2012 at 4:30 PM by Steven Stanley

RECOMMENDED
If ever there were a play more suited to North Hollywood’s Avery Schreiber Theatre than Broadway’s Helen Hayes (where it flopped back in 1999), that play is Larry Coen & David Crane’s Epic Proportions, an entertaining small-scale spoof of those cheesy Biblical epics that were once part of Hollywood’s bread and butter. (Or should that be dates and hummus?)
(read more)

posted in Comedy, North Hollywood, Recommended

THE WORLD GOES ‘ROUND

posted on September 10th, 2012 at 12:11 PM by Steven Stanley


A bunch of Kander & Ebb songs assigned to Man 1, Man 2, Woman 1, Woman 2, and Woman 3. That’s pretty much what a theater company gets when Music Theatre International grants it the rights to The World Goes ‘Round, and that’s pretty much what audiences have been getting since the Kander & Ebb revue made its Off-Broadway debut back in 1991. Five singers performing songs from the Broadway classics Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss Of The Spider Woman and lesser know Kander & Ebb gems like The Rink, The Happy Time, and Woman Of The Year.

Audiences expecting more of the same from Actors Co-op’s intimate-stage The World Goes ‘Round  can instead plan on being bowled away by director-choreographer Robert Marra’s brilliant reconception of the Kander & Ebb revue as a sung-through musical. That’s right. The World Goes ‘Round  is now a bona fide musical, and which manages to tell the stories of seven authentic, distinct, fully developed characters without a word of spoken dialog.
(read more)

posted in Hollywood/West Hollywood, Musical, WOW!

THE FULL MONTY

posted on September 8th, 2012 at 4:39 PM by Steven Stanley


Richard Israel’s intimate staging of the 2001 Broadway hit The Full Monty is so perfect on just about every level that a visit to the Third Street Theatre ought to be required of anyone aiming to produce, direct, appear in, musical direct, or design a 99-seat-plan musical—or by anyone who’s ever foolishly asserted that L.A. doesn’t know how to “do theater.”
(read more)

posted in Hollywood/West Hollywood, Musical, WOW!

THE COMPANY MEN

posted on September 4th, 2012 at 8:46 PM by Steven Stanley


With their snazzy business suits and skinny neckties, they might seem at first glance to be a quartet of ad execs straight out of TV’s Mad Men. Place them onstage in front of mikes and backed by a four-piece rock band and they turn into the hot new singing group The Company Men, now wowing audiences in a limited series of Sunday appearances at the Key Club on world famous Sunset Strip.
(read more)

posted in Cabaret/Concert/Variety, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

Next PagePrevious Page