Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’

JOHNNY GUITAR THE MUSICAL

RECOMMENDED

Whittier Community Theatre celebrates 93 years of entertaining audiences (and providing local 9-to-5ers a stage on which to strut their stuff by night) with Johnny Guitar The Musical, the campy off-Broadway adaptation of the 1954 Joan Crawford potboiler-turned-cult classic.
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CLOSER THAN EVER

Four of the most gloriously-voiced actor-singers in town, clever musical staging by the Ovation-winning Janet Miller, over two-dozen of Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire’s most melodious and insightfully worded songs, and a superbly played 9.5-foot-long concert grand add up to a thoroughly captivating Closer Than Ever at Burbank’s Hollywood Piano. Lighting may be rudimentary, the set may consist simply of a red velvet curtain, four stools, and said piano, and the folding-chair seating as back-challengingly uncomfy as it gets, but oh the performances! Oh the songs!
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ROMEO & JULIET: LOVE IS A BATTLEFIELD

Shakespeare meets Pat Benatar (with “a little love from Tina Turner”) as Rockwell Table And Stage presents their latest, Romeo & Juliet: Love Is A Battlefield, and Holy Bard Of Avon, what an electrifying evening of cabaret-meets-musical-theater alchemy it is!
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END OF THE RAINBOW

The facts behind Judy Garland’s death on June 22, 1969 are a matter of public record. Several months after a five-week stint at London’s trendy Talk of the Town, the legendary screen/recording star was found dead at the age of 47 by fifth husband Mickey Deans in the bathroom of their rented Chelsea house, the cause of death “an incautious self-overdosage” of barbiturates.

Peter Quilter’s critically acclaimed End Of The Rainbow, now playing at Long Beach’s International City Theatre, lets us be flies on the walls of Judy and Mickey’s London hotel (and of the London nightclub as well) during that much talked about Talk Of The Town run, and a humdinger of a play and production this is under John Henry Davis’ incisive direction.
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THE BROADWAY CAGE MATCH

L.A.’s brightest musical theater stars square off once a month, not in the boxing ring, but in the next best thing to it, at Rockwell Table & Stage in trendy Los Feliz for Justin Jones’ and Bruce Merkle’s Broadway Cage Match.
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THE THREEPENNY OPERA

A Noise Within kicks off its Spring 2015 season with a sensationally performed and designed revival of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. Theatergoers who’ve not acquired a taste for Brecht’s brand of early 20th-century avant-garde or Weill’s dirge-like melodies may find its three-hour running time a bit of a long haul, however those with a fondness for Threepenny (and they are, I am told, legion) will find themselves in Brecht/Weill heaven.
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THE OTHER PLACE

Trust nothing you see or hear until about halfway through the riveting, complex puzzle that is Sharr White’s The Other Place, now getting its first Los Angeles production, and a superb one at that, at North Hollywood’s 99-seat-plan Road Theatre.
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THE ROAD TO APPOMATTOX

A war approaching its bloody end and a marriage quite possibly nearing its own death throes come together Catherine Bush’s enlightening, entertaining new dramedy The Road To Appomattox, now getting its West Coast Premiere at Burbank’s Colony Theatre.
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