Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’
RECORDED IN HOLLYWOOD: THE MUSICAL
Monday, April 13th, 2015
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
Monday, April 13th, 2015
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
Sunday, April 12th, 2015
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
Saturday, April 11th, 2015
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
Friday, April 10th, 2015
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
Saturday, April 4th, 2015
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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GREASE
Friday, April 3rd, 2015
You know from the great-big boy-band/girl-group/cast-of-thirty title-song production number that opens USC’s revival of the Broadway/Hollywood smash Grease that you’re in for something out of the ordinary, and here’s the even better news. USC’s big-stage production turns out to be by far the most exciting of the eight Grease revivals I’ve seen.
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AMERICAN WEE-PIE
Tuesday, March 31st, 2015
Cupcakes offer a down-on-his-luck textbook editor a new lease on life in Lisa Dillman’s magical, whimsical American Wee-Pie, now getting its Los Angeles Premiere in one of my favorite Theatre 40 productions ever.
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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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