Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’

THE POWER OF DUFF

All hell breaks loose—or is it heaven?—when TV anchor Charlie Duff offers an impromptu (and decidedly prayerful) tribute to his just-deceased father at the end of the nightly news, thereby setting off a firestorm of pro-and-con reactions in Stephen Belber’s The Power Of Duff, a play that is one part dark comedy, one part satire, but ultimately the deeply moving story of one man’s inadvertent quest for redemption.
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DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS

Glendale Centre Theatre offers musical theater lovers a mid-week treat with the 2005 Tony Best Musical nominee Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, giving its audiences one of Broadway’s (and GCT’s) most laugh-out-loud hilarious shows ever.
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RECORDED IN HOLLYWOOD: THE MUSICAL

When you think about history-making 20th-century African-American music impresarios, Berry Gordy and Quincy Jones and perhaps two or three other names probably top the list. A less likely name to spring to mind is that of John Grayton Dolphin, an omission that Recorded In Hollywood: The (World Premiere) Musical sets out to rectify … and does so so crowd-pleasingly under Denise Dowse’s pizzazzy direction that it could easily end up giving the Broadway smash Memphis a run for its money.
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GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes may have played nearly 750 performances on Broadway, turned Carol Channing into a star, featured hit songs like “Bye, Bye, Baby” and “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” and got turned into a Hollywood Movie Classic starring Marilyn Monroe, but when’s the last time you saw it onstage?

The answer may well be “Never,” because that’s what happens to 60something Broadway hits that aren’t Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, or Guys And Dolls … or rather that’s what would happen without Musical Theatre Guild’s much-loved concert staged readings, the latest of which brings that “little girl from Little Rock,” aka blonde bombshell Lorelei Lee, and her brunette chum Dorothy Shaw, back to entertaining 21st-century musical life.
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LES MISÉRABLES

A twenty-year wait for the rights to the international phenomenon that is Boublil And Schönberg’s Les Misérables pays off at long last for Musical Theatre West in an absolutely spectacular big-stage, big-cast, big-budget production that gives Broadway a run for its money.
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SWEENEY TODD

A cast of eighteen, ten of them members of Actors’ Equity, bring Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street to thrilling life on the intimate stage of North Hollywood’s Monroe Forum Theatre, a powerful reminder that should Equity’s 99-seat plan bite the dust per AEA’s wishes, productions of this size, scope, and caliber may soon be a much-mourned memory of our Los Angeles theater past.
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FIGARO

The very first West Coast staging of a 2012 World Premiere may not be what folks expect from A Noise Within given the company’s usual slate of Shakespeare, Shaw, Racine, Moliere, and other long-deceased playwrights, but that is precisely what California’s Home For The Classics now offers its audiences in Charles Moray’s Figaro, the frothiest, funniest, most farcical romp I’ve yet seen at ANW.
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MINE EYES HATH SEEN

Theatre Banshee commemorates the sesquicentennial of end of the bloodiest war in our nation’s history in their tenth-anniversary revival of Mine Eyes Hath Seen, Sean Branney and Leslie Baldwin’s theatrical montage of Civil War tales told “in their own words,” and powerfully so, under Branney’s imaginative direction.
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