SILENCE! THE MUSICAL

posted on October 2nd, 2012 at 11:40 PM by Steven Stanley


When a flock of musical theater triple-threats adorned with sheep’s ears and hooves blend light-operatic voices to sing out “This is the story of Clarice,” only to be joined by a pantsuit-clad jogger looking like none other than a young Jodie Foster in FBI trainee mode, there’s only one place you could possibly be, whether in New York or L.A., and that’s at SILENCE! The Musical, the “unauthorized parody of Silence Of The Lambs” whose continuing Off-Broadway run has proved so successful that a sister production has now opened in Los Angeles to audience laughter and cheers.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, WOW!

THE RED ROOM

posted on October 1st, 2012 at 10:35 AM by Steven Stanley

NOT RECOMMENDED

Memories of the past haunt the present of a once successful Hollywood mogul, his tormented wife, and their three adult sons in Christopher Knopf’s frustratingly abstruse The Red Room, now getting its World Premiere at North Hollywood’s NoHo Arts Center.
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posted in Drama, North Hollywood, Not Recommended

AMERICAN FIESTA

posted on September 30th, 2012 at 1:17 PM by Steven Stanley


When a self-penned solo performance, the kind that Fringe Festival participants seem ever so fond of, proves so popular that actors other than the original writer get hired to perform it, that’s pretty much a guarantee of something special, or at least this is the case with the Colony Theatre’s latest, Steven Tomlinson’s autobiographical American Fiesta.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Solo Performance, WOW!

CRAZY FOR YOU

posted on September 29th, 2012 at 12:12 PM by Steven Stanley


Downey Civic Light Opera opens its 2012-13 season with one of its strongest productions in recent years, Crazy For You, the Tony-winning Best Musical of 1992. Winning lead performances by Mishi Schueller and Andrea Dodson, a bunch of terrific supporting turns, and some of the best dancing I’ve seen on the Downey Theatre stage make this a worthy follow-up to last spring’s excellent The Pajama Game.
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posted in Downey/La Mirada, Musical, WOW!

BY THE WAY, MEET VERA STARK

posted on September 29th, 2012 at 1:08 AM by Steven Stanley


The Motion Picture Production Code changed more than the sexual content of films made between 1934 and 1968. Not only did the Hays Code, as it was better known, ban “every profane and vulgar expression, any licentious or suggestive nudity, the illegal traffic in drugs, any inference of sex perversion,” and other cinematic sins which pre-1933 movies might have felt free to feature, it also restricted the ways blacks and whites could interrelate.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage looks back at the last pre-Code year and the effects the Code had on the life of Hollywood’s first (albeit fictional) African-American film star in her fascinating, funny, thought-provoking—though not entirely satisfying—By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, now getting its West Coast Premiere at the Geffen Playhouse.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

TITANIC THE MUSICAL

posted on September 26th, 2012 at 1:15 PM by Steven Stanley


Few 20th Century events continue to exert the fascination of the 1912 sinking of the Titanic. The mind still boggles at the epic tragedy of a supposedly unsinkable ocean liner on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City striking an iceberg in dead of night. What terror must have been inspired by the sudden realization that death was but an inexorable hour or two away?

2,224 passengers and crew in all—and only enough lifeboats onboard to carry half of them. 1,514 dead. Only 710 survivors, despite there having been space for 500 more.

And the “what ifs.” What if there had been sufficient lifeboats? What if the ship hadn’t been traveling at full speed so as to reach its destination in record time? What if a few critical modifications had been integrated into its design? What if a nearby ship had gotten Titanic’s SOS? What if? What if? What if?
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Concert Staged Reading, WOW!

SWEENEY TODD

posted on September 25th, 2012 at 6:32 PM by Steven Stanley


The sexual heat is on in Sweeney Todd, and if that sounds like an impossibility to those who’ve only seen Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett played by actors well into their forties, fifties, or even older, then just wait till you feel the heat ignited by Robert J. Townsend and Bets Malone in Moonlight Stage Productions’ ground-breaking revival of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 musical smash, brilliantly directed by Steven Glaudini.
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posted in Musical, San Diego County, WOW!

ALLEGIANCE

posted on September 25th, 2012 at 6:31 PM by Steven Stanley


Imagine you were told by the country in which you were born and raised that you had only a few days to sell your home and all your possessions, minus of what you could carry with you. Imagine that you were then transported hundreds of miles away and forced to live in cramped barracks where you would swelter during the summer and freeze during the winter, month after month, year after year. Imagine what kind of country that would be and how you would feel about the land you had believed with all your heart was your own.

To those Americans who take comfort in the certainty that “It couldn’t happen here,” an extraordinary World Premiere musical called Allegiance reveals that it not only could, it did happen here, and a mere seventy years ago when almost 70,000 American citizens and another 40,000 who called America home were imprisoned in internment camps for most of World War II simply because of their race.

A truly dark chapter in our country’s history, but one from which composer-lyricist Jay Kuo and book writers Marc Acito, Kuo, and Lorenzo Thione have created a musical that educates, moves, and entertains, particularly as performed by a stellar cast under the inspired direction of Stafford Arima at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.
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posted in Musical, San Diego County, WOW!

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