Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM
Sunday, May 3rd, 2015
The theater company whose recent reinvention of Kander & Ebb’s Cabaret for the intimate stage earned it both critical and audience raves now returns with a “downsized” staging of the Stephen Sondheim classic A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, and the result is one of the funniest—and most ingenious—Forums ever.
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ABIGAIL/1702
Saturday, May 2nd, 2015
When last we saw her in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, teen temptress Abigail Williams was about to flee Salem, Massachusetts and its infamous witch trials, leaving in her wake twenty hanged (or otherwise executed) victims of her venomous, vile, trumped-up accusations.
Playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa now imagines Abby’s life ten years later, and fascinatingly so, in Abigail/1702, a play and production no Crucible lover will want to miss, and the latest from Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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I AND YOU
Friday, May 1st, 2015
When was the last time you saw a contemporary teen dramedy that not only featured a pair of complex, non-stereotypical characters but added something to the genre and in its final moments left you breathless?
Lauren Gunderson’s I And You is that play, at once funny, captivating, and profoundly moving, a powerful piece of theater now getting its Los Angeles Premiere in a production highlighted by Jennifer Finch’s and Matthew Hancock’s star-making performances under Robin Larsen’s inspired direction.
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BOY GETS GIRL
Tuesday, April 28th, 2015NOT RECOMMENDED
Terrific performances by a thoroughly engaging Ivy Khan and a riveting if miscast Jim Martyka highlight Theatre Unleashed’s ill-advised fifteenth-anniversary revival of Rebecca Gilman’s Boy Gets Girl, one which leaves this reviewer wondering how Gilman’s pseudo-thriller ended up named Time Magazine’s #1 Play Of The Year.
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MY BARKING DOG
Sunday, April 26th, 2015RECOMMENDED
Performances are outstanding and the production design sensational, the director is Michael Michetti (need I say more?), and the ideas put forth are provocative, but an overreliance on monologs proves off-putting in the West Coast Premiere of Eric Cable’s two-hander My Barking Dog, the latest from The Theatre @ Boston Court.
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THE ANARCHIST
Saturday, April 25th, 2015
Felicity Huffman and Rebecca Pidgeon square off in the cat-and-mouse game that is David Mamet’s provocative yet abstruse The Anarchist, the duo’s superb performances and bona fide star power, the intimacy of Theatre Row’s Theatre Asylum, and ticket prices about a quarter of what they were when Mamet’s latest premiered on Broadway combining to make this 99-seat-plan production a likely candidate for hottest ticket in town.
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WORDS BY IRA GERSHWIN
Friday, April 24th, 2015RECOMMENDED
The play may indeed be the thing, at least most of the time, but it’s the songs and the singers (and not the show’s rather uninspired format) that make the Los Angeles Premiere of Joseph Vass’s self-described “musical play” Words By Ira Gershwin worth a drive to Burbank’s Colony Theatre.
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JANE AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, A MUSICAL
Monday, April 20th, 2015
If a World Premiere musicalization of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in which the 19th-century novelist figures not only as part of its title but as one of the its leading players seems fraught with peril, then Austen fans can rest assured. To quote from La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts’ next-up Mary Poppins, Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice, A Musical is practically perfect in every way.
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