NICCI CLASPELL

posted on May 22nd, 2012 at 5:46 PM by Steven Stanley

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posted in Interview

BELLS ARE RINGING

posted on May 22nd, 2012 at 4:38 PM by Steven Stanley


Tony-nominated musicals of the 1950s fall largely into two categories. There are those that have made such a lasting impression that hardly a year goes by without regional theater revivals galore. Shows like South Pacific, Guys And Dolls, The King And I, West Side Story, Damn Yankees, My Fair Lady, and The Music Man make this list. The rest are mostly long-forgotten chestnuts that nonetheless merit a “concert staged reading” from time to time, if only for nostalgia’s sake. Take for instance Pipe Dream, Redhead, or New Girl In Town.

Then there’s Bells Are Ringing, which in spite of a Tony-nominated Broadway revival in 2001, has largely faded into obscurity despite at least three popular standards (“Long Before I Knew You,” “Just in Time,” and “The Party’s Over”) written by the incomparable Jule Styne, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and a book that continues to delight five and a half decades later. If ever there were a show in Category B which deserved to be in Category A, Bells Are Ringing is that show, as Sunday’s Musical Theatre West concert staged reading made abundantly clear.
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posted in Concert Staged Reading, Long Beach/San Pedro, WOW!

THE LEARNED LADIES

posted on May 22nd, 2012 at 4:29 PM by Steven Stanley


Actor’s Co-op stages Moliere’s The Learned Ladies (Les Femmes Savantes) with such panache, you’d think they’d been doing the French master on at least a yearly basis rather than a mere twice in seventeen years.
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posted in Comedy, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

DOG SEES GOD

posted on May 20th, 2012 at 11:28 AM by Steven Stanley


Santa Ana’s Theatre Out continues its 2012 season with one of the Orange County LGBT theater’s finest “straight play” productions to date, Bert V. Royal’s Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead. Directed by Scenie winner Tito Oritz at his inspired best and featuring a remarkably talented young cast, Dog Sees God is not only must-see theater for avid OC and L.A. playgoers, it ought to be required viewing for students from middle school up. Briefly put, Dog Sees God makes for a hilarious, thought-provoking, and ultimately transformative evening of theater.
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posted in Comedy, Orange County, WOW!

THE CLOSENESS OF THE HORIZON

posted on May 19th, 2012 at 2:50 PM by Steven Stanley


“I got my first real six-string, bought it at the five-and-dime, played it till my fingers bled, was the summer of ’69.”

What would contemporary fiction, drama, music, and art be had the summer of 1969 never happened? Bryan Adams would never have written “Summer Of 69,” nor would Robert Downey Jr. have starred in the movie 1969, nor would playwright Damon Chua have written his recent dramatic fantasy 1969: A Fantastical Odyssey Through The American Mindscape. Summer of ’69 brought us the Stonewall Riots, the release of The Who’s Tommy and Midnight Cowboy, Ted Kennedy’s car crash at Chappaquiddick, the three-day event that was Woodstock, the beginning of the trial of the Chicago 8, and most memorably, the night Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon.

For playwright Richard Martin Hirsch, Summer of ‘69 was the year he turned 19, the year his alma mater Palisades High School won the Los Angeles City High School Basketball Championship, and the year he and his two best friends from Pali High traveled across the country in a VW bus.
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posted in Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

ANNIE

posted on May 18th, 2012 at 6:04 PM by Steven Stanley


Rarely has a hard-knock life made for more delightful family entertainment than the one led by a little orphan named Annie in the multiple Tony Award-winning musical bearing her name. Now, beating the projected Fall 2012 Broadway revival by several months, Glendale Centre Theatre stages its very own in-the-round rendition of the much-loved Broadway megahit (2377 performances from ‘77 to ‘83!).
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Musical, WOW!

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

posted on May 18th, 2012 at 12:15 AM by Steven Stanley


East West Players continues its love affair with Stephen Sondheim with a fresh, new Asian-Pacific Islander take on A Little Night Music, one which follows in the footsteps of past EWP-SS collaborations begun back in 1979 with Pacific Overtures. Company, Follies, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, Into The Woods, Marry Me A Little, Merrily We Roll Along, Passion, and Sweeney Todd have all gotten East West Players makeovers since then, and now Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s 1973 adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night at last makes its East West debut.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, WOW!

THE CHILDREN

posted on May 16th, 2012 at 12:04 AM by Steven Stanley


When Susan Smith confessed to having drowned her two small children back in 1994, it was hard not to draw parallels between this murderous mom of today and that lethal lady of mythology known as Medea. Though their motives were different (Susan wanted to get rid of her kids, the better to fool around with a man who didn’t want a “ready-made” family; Medea killed hers to punish her husband for an adulterous affair), the results were tragically the same.

Perhaps inspired by this tale as old as Greek tragedy and as recent as today’s headlines, playwright Michael Elyanow has written an extraordinary (if a tad too intricate) new play, The Children, which Theatre @ Boston Court is now World Premiering under the inspired direction of Jessica Kubzanky.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Pasadena, WOW!

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