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.
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posted in Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!
ENCOUNTER
posted on September 13th, 2012 at 3:34 PM by Steven StanleyNOT 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.
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posted in Dance, Los Angeles, Not Recommended
EPIC PROPORTIONS
posted on September 11th, 2012 at 4:30 PM by Steven StanleyRECOMMENDED
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?)
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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posted in Cabaret/Concert/Variety, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!
A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE
posted on September 2nd, 2012 at 6:02 PM by Steven Stanley
Performance Riverside introduced its patrons to the musical theater genre known as the Concert Staged Reading in last night’s script-in-hand, one-performance-only “reading” of Ahrens and Flaherty’s A Man Of No Importance. And the result?
A nearly flawless production entirely deserving of its standing ovation.
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posted in Concert Staged Reading, Inland Empire, WOW!
THE FANTASTICKS
posted on September 2nd, 2012 at 11:12 AM by Steven StanleyRECOMMENDED
When the best-known of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s musicals ended its off-Broadway run ten years ago, the New Yorker marked its closing with (what else?) a cartoon. In it, an elderly couple sit reading the news, one of them glancing up to remark deadpan to the other, “We missed ‘The Fantasticks,’” a sly dig on folks who put off seeing a show so long that they end up missing it entirely, and in the case of The Fantasticks, that meant a record-breaking 42-year, 17,162-performance postponement.
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posted in Hollywood/West Hollywood, Musical, Recommended
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