A RING IN BROOKLYN

posted on August 11th, 2012 at 5:58 PM by Steven Stanley


The Academy For New Musical Theatre follows last year’s 40 Is The New 15 with another flashback-to-the-past World Premiere musical, A Ring In Brooklyn (subtitled “a frickin’ musical”), and if their latest project gets off to an iffy start, about halfway through Act One it kicks into gear and turns out a winner.
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posted in Musical, North Hollywood, WOW!

THE IRISH CURSE

posted on August 10th, 2012 at 11:46 PM by Steven Stanley


At the risk of sounding like a broken record, anyone with the slightest doubt about the quality of Los Angeles theater could do no better than to check out Scott Conte, Austin Hébert, Shaun O’Hagan, Joe Pacheco, and Patrick Quinlan in the Andrew Barnicle-directed The Irish Curse, now heading into the final weeks of its justly lauded two-month run at the Odyssey.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

HEARTS LIKE FISTS

posted on August 6th, 2012 at 8:25 PM by Steven Stanley


Someone in a major American metropolis has been murdering post-coital couples, injecting them with a poisonous serum as they lie entwined in each other’s arms, leaving police baffled and the city’s lovers scared out of their minds.

Fortunately, as any comic book fan knows, serial murders like these are the reason super heroes exist, or in the case of Adam Szymkowicz’s World Premiere comedy-fantasy Hearts Like Fists, super heroines.
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posted in Comedy, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

ASSASSINS

posted on August 5th, 2012 at 5:05 PM by Steven Stanley


A terrifically performed and imaginatively directed revival of Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins makes it three annual musical hits in a row for the young artists of Coeurage Theatre Company, following their inventive downscaling of The Rocky Horror Show and Ovation winner Gregory Nabours’ original song cycle The Trouble With Words.
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posted in Hollywood/West Hollywood, Musical, WOW!

THE RETURN TO MORALITY

posted on August 4th, 2012 at 2:29 PM by Steven Stanley


With the United States presidential election just three months away, the timing couldn’t be more perfect for The Production Company to present the Los Angeles premiere of Jamie Pachino’s political satire The Return To Morality, imaginatively directed by Mark L. Taylor and terrifically performed by Alias’s Kevin Weisman and five of L.A.’s finest supporting players.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

THE BAT

posted on August 3rd, 2012 at 3:05 PM by Steven Stanley

NOT RECOMMENDED

The swanky upstate New York home designed by Jeff G. Rack seems the ideal setting for murder, the kind written about by Queen Of Crime Agatha Christie or her American predecessor Mary Roberts Rinehart. Ric Zimmerman has lit the elegant upper class digs for maximum suspense, with candles taking the place of electricity when the lights go out (more than once as we know they will). Bill Froggatt’s sound design provides an eerie, suspenseful musical underscoring to this tale of mystery and impending doom.

If only direction and performances came anywhere close to the collaborative efforts of these three top L.A. design talents in The Bat, the latest production from Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Not Recommended, West Side/Beverly HIlls

LEGALLY BLONDE

posted on August 1st, 2012 at 4:05 PM by Steven Stanley

Legally Blonde has arrived in picturesque Solvang in an exciting, from-the-ground-up staging that allows PCPA Theaterfest director-choreographer extraordinaire Michael Jenkinson to strut his Scenie-winning stuff without the creativity-limiting constraints of staging a musical on rented Broadway or National Tour sets.
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posted in Musical, Santa Barbara County, WOW!

THE WOMEN OF LOCKERBIE

posted on July 31st, 2012 at 6:24 PM by Steven Stanley


The facts are cut and dry. On December 21, 1988, PanAm Flight 103 from London to JFK exploded above the village of Lockerbie, Scotland, scattering bodies and debris over 845 square miles, a terrorist bomb hidden inside its front cargo space not only killing all 259 on board but ending the lives of 11 Scots going about about their daily lives in Lockerbie, never suspecting that the sky would soon be quite literally falling upon them. A number of years later, the women of Lockerbie set up a laundry project to wash the 11,000 articles of clothing found amongst the plane’s wreckage, after which the women packed and shipped them to the victims’ families around the world.

Playwright Deborah Brevoort takes these facts and puts a human face on them—to unforgettable effect—in her 2001 drama The Women Of Lockerbie, particularly powerful this summer of 2012 as staged outdoors in the rustic Topanga hills of Theatricum Botanicum—about the closest approximation of the hills of Lockerbie that any American audience is ever likely to get.
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posted in Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

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