TWENTIETH CENTURY

posted on February 6th, 2012 at 12:30 PM by Steven Stanley


Screwball comedy is in expert hands as the Sierra Madre Playhouse revives Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Twentieth Century, tweaked by Ken Ludwig to give the 1930s piece a 21st Century sensibility while maintaining all the classic elements of screwball.
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posted in Comedy, San Gabriel Valley, WOW!

ROOMS: a rock romance

posted on February 5th, 2012 at 10:03 PM by Steven Stanley


The burgeoning punk music scene of the late 1970s provides the setting for the Outer Critics Circle Award-nominated ROOMS: a rock romance, whose exhilarating West Coast Premiere proves once again that Chance Theater is unmatched as Orange County’s finest intimate theater.
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posted in Musical, Orange County, WOW!

YOURS, ISABEL

posted on February 4th, 2012 at 8:29 PM by Steven Stanley


Playwright Christy Hall reinvents the epistolary play (one based on an exchange of letters) with her zesty, captivating World War II romance Yours, Isabel, now getting its official American Premiere at Hollywood’s Actors Co-op, and an all-around splendid one at that.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

GOD OF CARNAGE

posted on February 3rd, 2012 at 6:31 PM by Steven Stanley


Long Beach’s International City Theater trumps the competition with its 2012 season opener of Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning Best Play of 2009 God Of Carnage, a production which, while not technically its West Coast Premiere (Center Theatre Group got that honor by merely importing the Broadway team), nonetheless merits true event status for being built entirely from the ground up—brand new actors, a brand new director, and a brand new team of designers, all of them doing bang-up work on the ICT stage.
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posted in Comedy, Long Beach/San Pedro, WOW!

ART

posted on February 2nd, 2012 at 4:03 PM by Steven Stanley


There’s nothing like star quality to turn yet another revival of an oft-produced play into an event—not celebrity stunt casting, but rather that combination of talent, individuality, and charisma that true stars bring to whatever project they undertake.

Such is the case with the Pasadena Playhouse’s fabulous all-star revival of Yasmina Reza’s Art, the French playwright’s Tony-winning Best Play of 1998.
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posted in Comedy, Pasadena, WOW!

COME FLY AWAY

posted on February 1st, 2012 at 2:21 PM by Steven Stanley


The dance moves of premier choreographer Twyla Tharp and the vocals of Ol’ Blue Eyes himself combine to captivating perfection in Tharp’s Come Fly Away, brought to vivid life by a troupe of extraordinary young dancers and an onstage big band to rival the best of Nelson Riddle, Billy May, or Neil Hefti.
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posted in Musical Revue, National Tour, Orange County, WOW!

THE RECOMMENDATION

posted on January 31st, 2012 at 6:56 PM by Steven Stanley


What starts out as an Odd Couple-like comedy about a pair of mismatched Brown University roommates soon develops into something considerably more edgy (and edge-of-your-seat) in Jonathan Caren’s The Recommendation, a terrific World Premiere drama at San Diego’s Old Globe that will keep you guessing from its exhilarating start to its suspenseful finish.
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posted in Drama, San Diego County, WOW!

DIVIDING THE ESTATE

posted on January 30th, 2012 at 9:42 PM by Steven Stanley


The late, great Horton Foote returned to the small-town Texas he knew so well—in comedic mode this time round—in his Dividing The Estate, Tony-nominated as Best Play of 2009 and now playing at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre with two-thirds of its New York cast intact, including Foote’s daughter Hallie in the role that scored her a Tony nomination.
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posted in Comedy, San Diego County, WOW!

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