TAMBO & BONES

posted on May 8th, 2022 at 11:04 AM by Steven Stanley

Dave Harris’s Tambo & Bones, a Center Theatre Group World Premiere, takes black anger against white America to such extremes that sitting through ninety minutes of it had me wishing I were anyone other than inside the Kirk Douglas Theatre. And it didn’t help that at least forty-five of its ninety minutes are devoted to ear-splitting, N-word/expletive-filled rap.
(read more)

Tags: , , ,
posted in Play With Songs, Theater Review, West Side/Beverly HIlls, World Premiere

AFTERGLOW

posted on May 7th, 2022 at 11:49 PM by Steven Stanley


Can an open marriage survive if one husband embarks on a sexual relationship with one of the couple’s occasional bed guests? This is the provocative question posed by playwright S. Asher Gelman in Afterglow, a surefire seat-filler thanks to its extended softcore sex scenes early on but a West Coast Premiere whose real dramatic fire begins once the clothes have come back on.
(read more)

Tags: , ,
posted in Drama, Los Angeles, Theater Review, WOW!

THE EFFECT

posted on May 7th, 2022 at 2:00 PM by Steven Stanley


Paul Rush delivers one of the most electrifying performances I’ve seen this past year opposite a captivating, compelling Jackie Jandrell in Sixty-Six Productions’ Los Angeles Premiere of Lucy Prebble’s The Effect.
(read more)

Tags: , , ,
posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Theater Review, WOW!

HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

posted on May 2nd, 2022 at 9:14 PM by Steven Stanley


After a 26-month hiatus, Musical Theater Guild returned to Glendale’s Alex Theatre on Sunday to once again do what they do best, mount a Broadway musical with just 25 hours of rehearsal, and like its pre-pandemic predecessors, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying succeeded in entertaining a packed house starved for MTG magic.
(read more)

Tags: , , ,
posted in Burbank/Glendale, Concert Staged Reading, Theater Review, WOW!

MASAO AND THE BRONZE NIGHTINGALE

posted on May 2nd, 2022 at 9:37 AM by Steven Stanley

Playwrights Dan Kwong and Ruben Funkahuatl Guevara have quite a tale to tell about post-WWII Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights in Masao And The Bronze Nightingale and an ethnically, culturally, linguistically diverse cast of characters to tell it with, but the World Premiere play-with-songs’ hefty three-hour running time begs the question, how much of a good thing is too much?
(read more)

Tags: , , ,
posted in Los Angeles, Play With Songs, Theater Review

HADESTOWN

posted on April 29th, 2022 at 12:17 PM by Steven Stanley


Like Rent, Spring Awakening, and Hamilton before it, Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, the 2019 Tony winner for Best Musical, revitalizes the genre in the most electrifyingly original of ways.
(read more)

Tags: , , ,
posted in Los Angeles, Musical, National Tour, Theater Review, WOW!

TOOTSIE

posted on April 27th, 2022 at 3:59 PM by Steven Stanley


Michael Dorsey and his female alter ego Dorothy Michaels share the Dolby Theatre stage in Tootie, the Tony-winning 2019 Broadway adaptation of the 1982 movie smash, a musical comedy as classic in concept and construction as it is contemporary in its attitudes, casting, and execution.
(read more)

Tags: , , , ,
posted in Hollywood/West Hollywood, Musical, National Tour, Theater Review, WOW!

THE TOXIC AVENGER

posted on April 26th, 2022 at 10:12 AM by Steven Stanley


A power-hungry, moneygrubbing New Jersey mayor, a beautiful, blind librarian, and a bespectacled nerd turned hulking green superhero give bad taste a good name in The Toxic Avenger, the outrageously funny (and very politically incorrect) off-Broadway musical now earning an abundance of “I can’t believe they actually said/sang that!” laughs at Santa Ana’s Grand Central Theatre.
(read more)

Tags: , , , ,
posted in Musical, Orange County, Theater Review, WOW!

Next PagePrevious Page