Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’

RAPTURE, BLISTER, BURN

San Pedro’s Little Fish Theatre scores a major programming coup in offering Angelinos their first 99-seat look at Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright’s tangy examination of how much—and how little—women’s lives have changed from the pre-Betty Friedan 1950s to the post-post-Feminist today.
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LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

Save for one teensy tiny potted plan that doesn’t even make it through Act One, there’s nothing even vaguely botanical-looking in The B Productions’ 99-seat revival of Menken & Ashman’s Little Shop Of Horrors. What there is is an abundance of talent both onstage and off, making the NoHo Arts Center guest production a winner even if its central conceit (“Technology Can Kill”) will probably work best for those who’ve already seen Little Shop umpteen times.
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EVERYTHING’S COMING UP ROSIE

A couple of luminous Broadway stars shone brightly this past Sunday in Everything’s Coming Up Rosie, Sterling’s Upstairs At The Federal’s one-night-only salute to Rosemary Clooney, a celebration of both the lady of song and the ten years that Michael Sterling has treated L.A. to the crème-de-la-crème of musical theater talent in an intimate supper club setting.
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A RAISIN IN THE SUN

Star turns you’d expect to see at the Pasadena Playhouse or the Geffen distinguish Ruskin Group Theatre’s 57th-anniversary revival of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning A Raisin In The Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s piercing look at racial discrimination, gender roles, family values, and burgeoning African-American identity—a modern American classic that remains as relevant today as it was in the pre-Civil Rights Era 1950s.
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BABY DOLL

A just-right darkly comedic tone and pitch-perfect performances turn minor Tennessee Williams into major summer entertainment as the Fountain Theater gives West Coast audiences their first taste of Pierre Laville and Emily Mann’s streamlined, Williams-estate-approved adaptation of the 1956 movie potboiler Baby Doll.
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SPACE

Disproving the oft-suggested notion that a playwright should never direct his own work, Stefan Marks not only scores a double bulls-eye at the Stella Adler; in never leaving the stage as Space’s riveting protagonist, the Ovation Award-winning director-writer-actor proves himself a bona fide triple-threat in this brain-teasing dazzler of a play.
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OBAMA-OLOGY

The months leading up to Barack Obama’s election as this country’s first African-American President serve as the backdrop for Aurin Squire’s semi-autobiographical Obama-ology, the 2015 Juilliard grad’s engaging look at a pivotal moment in our nation’s history as seen through one 20something black man’s eyes.
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I LOVE YOU BECAUSE

A sparkling book, a dozen or so delightfully quirky characters, and above all one of the catchiest (and often most gorgeous) scores in recent years add up to Joshua Salzman and Ryan Cunningham’s unabashedly romantic I Love You Because, at long last getting the Los Angeles staging I’ve been wishing and hoping for since first falling in love with the musical’s original cast recording nearly ten years ago—and what a terrific production ILYB has been given at Hollywood’s Hudson Theatre.
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