BEEHIVE

posted on September 21st, 2010 at 9:44 PM by Steven Stanley


Beehive: a) a structure housing a colony of bees; b) a hairstyle for women, popular around 1960, in which the hair is arranged in a high rounded shape on top of the head; c) a fabulous musical revue featuring the greatest hits of the top girl singers and girl groups of the swingin’, turbulent 1960s.
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posted in Musical Revue, South Bay, WOW!

70, GIRLS, 70

posted on September 20th, 2010 at 10:46 PM by Steven Stanley

NOT RECOMMENDED

John Kander and Fred Ebb had already had considerable success with Flora The Red Menace, Cabaret, The Happy Time, and Zorba when 70, Girls, 70 made its Broadway debut in 1971. Still, not even the renown of their four previous musicals could save their latest show from a quick 35 performance demise. In fact, 70, Girls, 70 vanished so quickly into obscurity that probably only the most avid Broadway buffs are even aware of its existence—Broadway buffs and the Musical Theatre Guild, which has as one of its missions to rescue flops like 70, Girls, 70 from obscurity.

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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Concert Staged Reading, Not Recommended

MISALLIANCE

posted on September 19th, 2010 at 10:21 PM by Steven Stanley


South Coast Repertory opens its 2010-2011 season with a deliciously staged and performed revival of George Bernard Shaw’s 100-year-old comedy Misalliance, a production so all-around splendid that it makes one of Shaw’s earliest plays seem half its age—or even younger.
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posted in Comedy, Orange County, WOW!

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS

posted on September 19th, 2010 at 2:30 PM by Steven Stanley


Anyone under a certain age who hears the title Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris may well wonder, “Who the hell is  this Jacques Brel?”—a question likely to provoke a cry of “Sacrilege!” from more seasoned theater aficionados.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical Revue, WOW!

MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

posted on September 18th, 2010 at 10:16 PM by Steven Stanley


For a show that lasted only sixteen performances in its original 1981 Broadway run, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along has had a remarkable “afterlife.” Over the past three decades, there’s probably not an American musical theater company that hasn’t staged it at least once. This reviewer alone has seen five productions of Merrily in the last four and a half years, Actors Co-op’s current revival being the latest and quite possibly the overall best of the bunch—and that’s saying a lot.
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posted in Hollywood/West Hollywood, Musical, WOW!

THE WEB

posted on September 17th, 2010 at 11:21 PM by Steven Stanley


While surfing the Internet, Chris Quiñones makes a shocking discovery—someone with the very same name as his, a Chris Quiñones who graduated with very same high school class, has the same date, place, and even hospital of birth, the same Columbian father and Jewish mother… The very same Chris Quiñones, yet subtly different in small details like the fact that for one Chris a particular time of import is a.m. but for the other p.m. Chris stays online all night searching, until finally the trail left by Chris II ends about a year ago, in Djibouti, after which his doppelganger has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, WOW!

RUINED

posted on September 16th, 2010 at 10:41 PM by Steven Stanley


Playwright Lynn Nottage puts a human face on the ongoing Civil War in the Democratic Republic of Congo in her Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Ruined, now in its West Coast Premiere engagement at the Geffen Playhouse.
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posted in Drama, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

MYSTERIOUS SKIN

posted on September 15th, 2010 at 10:32 PM by Steven Stanley


Mysterious Skin, Scott Heim’s powerful 1995 novel about two teenagers with a shared secret almost too horrendous to talk about, is the kind of book that would seem unadaptable to screen or stage, if only for its scenes of child sexual abuse. Still, miracle of miracles, Mysterious Skin The Movie and Mysterious Skin The Play did end up written, produced, and presented to audience bravos, the former by film maker Gregg Araki and the latter by playwright Prince Gomolvilas. It’s Gomolvilas’ ingenious stage adaptation that now gets an absolutely stunning Los Angeles Premiere at Little Tokyo’s East West Players in a production easily the Asian-American theater’s finest non-musical since Durango, three years ago.
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posted in Drama, Los Angeles, WOW!

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