SPRING AWAKENING

posted on May 4th, 2012 at 4:44 PM by Steven Stanley


Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening has awakened once again, this time as a showcase for a group of very talented, mostly college-age performers and a director whose vision has already impressed this reviewer on more than one occasion.
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posted in Musical, South Bay, WOW!

TICKLED PINK

posted on May 2nd, 2012 at 5:28 PM by Steven Stanley


Taking her comic novel Tickled Pink as inspiration, Las Vegas headliner Rita Rudner and husband Martin Bergman have penned a two-act comedy not coincidentally titled Tickled Pink—and the results now onstage at the Laguna Playhouse are likely to tickle the fancy of anyone in the mood for a couple hours of laughs … along with a well-earned tear or two thrown in for good measure.
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posted in Comedy, Orange County, WOW!

THE HEIRESS

posted on April 30th, 2012 at 1:14 PM by Steven Stanley


The Heiress may have reached the ripe old age of sixty-five, but you’d hardly know it from the latest revival of Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s 1947 Broadway hit, adapted from Henry James’ classic novel Washington Square and currently engrossing and delighting audiences in equal measure at the Pasadena Playhouse.
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posted in Drama, Pasadena, WOW!

REBORNING

posted on April 29th, 2012 at 12:27 PM by Steven Stanley


The past continues to haunt the present of the two women whose lives intersect in Zayd Dohrn’s powerful personal drama Reborning, now getting its Southern California Premiere—and only its second production—at Orange County’s illustrious Chance Theater, with Resident Artists Casey Long, Jennifer Ruckman, Karen Webster doing some of their best work ever under Artistic Director Oanh Nguyen’s inspired direction.
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posted in Drama, Orange County, WOW!

THE FIX

posted on April 28th, 2012 at 3:47 PM by Steven Stanley


When Senator Reed Chandler dies in flagrante delicto, his Spiderwoman of a widow and his embittered, crippled brother connive to make the Senator’s handsome but dim son the next President of the United States.

No, this isn’t an upcoming Meryl Streep flick or nighttime network series created to coincide with this election year, though it well could be. It is instead the setup that John Dempsey and Dana P. Rowe use to open their highly topical and equally entertaining musical The Fix, now getting its official West Coast Premiere at Long Beach’s International City Theatre (though Angelino theater buffs will recall its Musical Theatre Guild’s one-night-only concert staged reading our last big national election year).
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posted in Long Beach/San Pedro, Musical, WOW!

THE GIRL MOST LIKELY TO

posted on April 27th, 2012 at 5:35 PM by Steven Stanley


By day, he is a schoolteacher in the Philippines. By night, he becomes the gowned and bejeweled drag entertainer known to all Luzon as Mama Cid.

Across the world, an American high schooler dons girls’ clothes too, but for a very different reason. “This is how I have to be,” he tells his mother. “Otherwise I die.”

Playwright Michael Premsrirat takes these two characters—separated by an ocean and several decades—and ties their stories together quite extraordinarily in The Girl Most Likely To, now getting its World Premiere production under the truly inspired direction of Jon Lawrence Rivera.
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posted in Drama, Los Angeles, WOW!

MILLION DOLLAR QUARTET

posted on April 25th, 2012 at 4:03 PM by Steven Stanley


It takes you thrillingly by surprise, that first glance at Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins onstage together, and from then on the excitement never lags in Million Dollar Quartet, Tony-nominated as Best Musical of 2010 and now touring the country, its latest stop at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts.
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posted in Musical, National Tour, Orange County, WOW!

CLOUDLANDS

posted on April 24th, 2012 at 5:23 PM by Steven Stanley


Adam Gwon and Octavio Solis might well have subtitled Cloudlands, their World Premiere chamber musical now playing at South Coast Repertory,  An American Musical Greek Tragedy, not all that bad an idea considering how much darker its story turns out to be than the airy romance its one-word title suggests. Regardless, if the idea of divinely preordained doom seems apter subject matter for Euripides or Sophocles (had the two tragedians teamed to write a musical with elements of both Medea and Oedipus), so it might be without Gwon’s gorgeous, haunting melodies to propel the tale of a suicidal San Franciscan teen whose depression is compounded by the discovery that Mom has been cheating on Dad.
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posted in Musical, Orange County, WOW!

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