Posts Tagged ‘East West Players’
YOHEN
Thursday, November 2nd, 2017Danny Glover gives East West Players/Robey Theatre Company’s revival of Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yohen plenty of movie-star box-office draw, but Gotanda’s delicate, perceptive “portrait of a marriage” and Yohen’s luminous leading lady June Angela deserve better than Glover’s lackadaisical performance as a retired African-American soldier estranged from his Japanese wife of thirty-plus years.
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HOLD THESE TRUTHS
Monday, June 5th, 2017
The time could not be riper for Jeanne Sakata’s Hold These Truths to make its powerful, compelling, inspiring Pasadena Playhouse debut, the extraordinary tale of one American’s fight for his inalienable rights at a time when his own government wished to deny them.
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NEXT TO NORMAL
Friday, May 19th, 2017Deedee Magno Hall gives a beautifully nuanced performance as bipolar wife-and-mother Diana Goodman opposite her real-life spouse Cliffton Hall’s powerful Dan Goodman in Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s Next To Normal, and though the East West Players season closer doesn’t deliver on all fronts, it provides the Halls with a pair of dream roles and audiences with a moving musical look at the effects of mental illness on an all-American family.
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FREE OUTGOING
Thursday, February 16th, 2017Powerful performances highlighted by Anna Khaja’s riveting star turn command attention in the Los Angeles Premiere of Anupama Chandrasekhar’s Free Outgoing. Still, the unremitting bleakness of its shocking-but-true story of conservative Indian values in today’s anything-goes Internet age could make it a hard sell for East West Players.
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KENTUCKY
Friday, November 18th, 2016Thomas Wolfe to the contrary, you can go home again. Just don’t expect to have fun once you’ve arrived, not if the family you’ve left behind in the Appalachians is as dysfunctional as Hiro’s in Leah Nanako Winkler’s Kentucky, an entertaining but hit-and-miss East West Players West Coast Premiere that could be a whole lot better without tonal shifts that take it back and forth from over-the-top sitcomish to authentically real.
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LA CAGE AUX FOLLES
Thursday, May 19th, 2016
Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage Aux Folles is back in L.A. thanks to East West Players, and as anyone who’s seen one of EWP’s annual Broadway musical revivals will tell you, this means yet another thrillingly reimagined Asian take on a contemporary musical theater classic.
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CRIERS FOR HIRE
Thursday, February 18th, 2016
A trio of SoCal Filipinas earning extra cash by weeping and wailing at funerals may provide the title (and the hook) for Giovanni Ortega’s Criers For Hire, but it’s the play’s mother-daughter reunion and its look at a teenage girl’s coming-of-age in a new land that give Ortega’s delightful, charming World Premiere comedy its emotional heart and punch.
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CHINGLISH
Thursday, September 17th, 2015
East West Players continues its two-year-long 50th-anniversary celebration with Chinglish, David Henry Hwang’s hilarious, perceptive, eye-opening look at Chinese-American relationships (including one of a particularly romantic/sexual nature), a Los Angeles Premiere that could well prove one of EWP’s most popular productions ever. It’s certainly one of the finest I’ve seen onstage at the David Henry Hwang Theater.
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Since 2007, Steven Stanley's StageSceneLA.com has spotlighted the best in Southern California theater via reviews, interviews, and its annual StageSceneLA Scenies.
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