Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’
SONS OF THE PROPHET
Monday, February 16th, 2015
“We’re like the Kennedys without the sex appeal” quips 29-year-old Joseph Douaihy about his woe-beset blue-collar Eastern Pennsylvania family in Stephen Karam’s extraordinary new play Sons Of The Prophet, now getting its Los Angeles Premiere at Hollywood’s The Blank, as fine an example as one could wish for of just how crucial the Los Angeles 99-Seat Plan is to our city’s one-of-a-kind intimate theater scene.
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SOUTH PACIFIC
Sunday, February 15th, 2015
If there’s one thing Musical Theatre West’s old-meets-new revival of South Pacific makes abundantly clear, it’s this: Few 20th-century musicals can match the 1949 Rodgers & Hammerstein classic in absolute brilliance.
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I LOVE YOU, YOU’RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE
Saturday, February 14th, 2015
Men are from Mars and women are from Venus and both sexes (and the battles between them) are as entertaining as male-female battles get in The Los Angeles New Court Theatre’s terrifically performed revival of Joe Di Pietro and Jimmy Roberts’ two-decade-old—but eternally relevant—smash off-Broadway musical revue I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.
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THE NIGHT ALIVE
Saturday, February 14th, 2015
Superb performances, a brilliant production design, plenty of chuckles (with a few gasps thrown in for good measure), and characters as weirdly idiosyncratic as any I’ve seen onstage spark the Geffen Playhouse’s West Coast Premiere of Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive. As to whether the play itself is worthy of the unqualified superlatives that out-of-town critics have showered upon McPherson’s oh-so quirky comedy, well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide.
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HELLMAN V. MCCARTHY
Thursday, February 12th, 2015
Hell hath no fury like a best-selling author dissed, or so Lillian “The Little Foxes” Hellman made abundantly clear when she sued fellow writer Mary McCarthy for disparaging words uttered during a 1980 TV interview with PBS talk show host Dick Cavett.
Playwright Brian Richard Mori returns to the scene of the alleged slander with none other than 78-year-old Dick Cavett playing a 40something Dick in Mori’s terrifically entertaining comedy-drama Hellman v. McCarthy, now getting its West Coast Premiere at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.
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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Monday, February 9th, 2015
Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice has rarely if ever been more deliciously, delightfully entertaining than Actors Co-op’s irresistible new staging of Helen Jerome’s 1936 adaptation of Miss Austen’s two-centuries-old classic.
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GREASE
Thursday, February 5th, 2015
A number of imaginative directorial touches and a fresh young cast of up-and-coming triple-threats make Inland Valley Repertory Theatre’s midweek revival of Grease at Candlelight Dinner Theatre worth a drive out to Claremont even if you’ve seen the musical or its smash movie adaptation umpteen times before.
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THE WHIPPING MAN
Wednesday, February 4th, 2015
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House, at long last ending what is still the deadliest war in United States history. Five days later, President Abraham Lincoln was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet. Coincidentally, during this fateful week in our country’s history, Jews in both North and South observed Pesach, the festival of Passover, celebrating the freeing of the Israelites from centuries of slavery in Egypt.
Inspired by this bit of historical happenstance, and armed with the knowledge that there were indeed Jewish slaveholders (and Jewish slaves) in the pre-Civil War Deep South, playwright Matthew Lopez sat down to write The Whipping Man, a gripping, eye-opening look at three Jews—two black, one white—in the days just following Appomattox, a play now brought to compelling life in a spectacular new production just transferred from South Coast Rep to the Pasadena Playhouse.
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