TO THE BONE

posted on October 9th, 2022 at 10:32 AM by Steven Stanley


Pay no mind to its frustratingly cryptic and even off-putting title. Catherine Butterfield’s alternately sidesplitting/heartstrings-tugging To The Bone is not only one of the year’s best new plays, like David Lindsay-Abaire’s similarly set Good People, the Open Fist Theatre Company World Premiere will keep you guessing—and keep surprising you—from its hilarious start to its unexpected, laughter-through-tears finish.
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posted in Comedy-Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, World Premiere, WOW!

CARRIE: THE MUSICAL

posted on October 8th, 2022 at 9:29 AM by Steven Stanley


Director extraordinaire Kari Hayter strips Carrie: The Musical down to basics to better reveal the heart and soul of the Broadway adaptation of the Brian De Palma horror classic, and the results, performed by an all-student cast at USC’s McClintock Theatre, are nothing short of spectacular, even minus the spectacle that’s been a hallmark of previous productions.
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, Student-Cast Production, Theater Review, WOW!

A GREAT WILDERNESS

posted on October 5th, 2022 at 8:51 AM by Steven Stanley


Idaho playwright Samuel D. Hunter tackles gay conversion therapy in his expectations-defying, cliché-free 2014 drama A Great Wilderness, the riveting latest from Rogue Machine Theatre.
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posted in Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, WOW!

THE ELABORATE ENTRANCE OF CHAD DEITY

posted on October 3rd, 2022 at 12:01 AM by Steven Stanley


In all my years of theatergoing, I’ve never seen a play or production quite like Chance Theater’s Orange County Premiere of Kristoffer Diaz’s The Elaborate Entrance Of Chad Deity, at once a hilariously spot-on look at the wild, weird, and wacky world of professional wrestling and a subtly scathing critique of the American Melting-Pot Dream.
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posted in Comedy, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

REVENGE PORN OR THE STORY OF A BODY

posted on October 1st, 2022 at 3:02 PM by Steven Stanley


A disgruntled ex gets back at his onetime bed partner in the most publicly demeaning of ways by posting online the nude selfies she’d sent him years earlier in Carla Ching’s Revenge Porn or The Story of a Body, the thrillingly hot-button latest from Ammunition Theatre Company.
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posted in Drama, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls, World Premiere, WOW!

BABE

posted on September 26th, 2022 at 11:21 AM by Steven Stanley

Cliffhangers are perfectly fine if you’re writing a series pilot or season finale. Not so much if you’ve written what purports to be a full-length play, which is why, engaged as I was throughout Echo Theater Company’s Babe, I left feeling frustrated, angry, and confused as to why playwright Jessica Goldberg didn’t finish what she’d started so provocatively sixty-five minutes earlier in a more satisfyingly conclusive way.
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posted in Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, World Premiere

ANDREW LIPPA’S WILD PARTY

posted on September 25th, 2022 at 11:22 AM by Steven Stanley


Santa Monica’s Morgan-Wixson Theatre once again gives professional houses a run for their much bigger bucks with a fabulously staged and performed Andrew Lippa’s Wild Party.
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posted in Musical

EVERYBODY

posted on September 24th, 2022 at 3:38 PM by Steven Stanley

If 90 minutes of occasionally amusing but more often longwinded philosophizing about the meaning of (among other things) Life, Love, Friendship, Beauty, Material Possessions, and Death sounds like your thing, then Antaeus Theatre Company’s Everybody, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 21st-century adaptation of a 600-year-old morality play, might just be your cup of tea. It wasn’t mine.
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posted in Burbank/Glendale, Comedy, Theater Review

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