Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’
ENDGAME
Monday, October 28th, 2013NOT RECOMMENDED
There are plays that grab you from their opening moments and keep you on the edge of your seat throughout. And then there’s Endgame, the latest from A Noise Within.
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RABBIT HOLE
Sunday, October 27th, 2013
Run, do not walk, to the La Mirada Theatre For The Performing Arts, where McCoy Rigby Entertainment is treating theater lovers to an absolutely brilliantly directed, acted, and designed production of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole.
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THE MYSTERY OF IRMA VEP
Saturday, October 26th, 2013
The next laugh is never more than a few seconds away as the Falcon Theatre presents Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery Of Irma Vep, one of the most hilarious comic spoofs ever—and a showcase for director Jenny Sullivan and its two brilliant leading men/women Matthew Floyd Miller and Jamie Torcellini.
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THE HOMOSEXUALS
Saturday, October 26th, 2013
The flamboyant theater queen who lives to rag on this year’s Tony winners. The average-looking all-around good gay who’s everybody’s best friend and nobody’s boyfriend. The foreign-born charmer living with HIV—though no longer with his (married-her-for-a-green-card) wife. The small-town boy whose move to the big city has meant making gay friends—and a new life he could never have had back home.
We’ve seen these gay men, or gay men like them, on stage before, most notably in the pre-Stonewall world of Mart Crowley’s The Boys In The Band and in the AIDS-crisis world of Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!
Now, young Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins brings these gay archetypes into the 21st Century in his 2011 Jefferson Award-nominated dramedy The Homosexuals, now being given a couldn’t-be-better West Coast Premiere by Celebration Theatre.
WHEN YOU WISH The Story Of Walt Disney
Thursday, October 24th, 2013RECOMMENDED
Director extraordiniare Larry Raben and choreographer par excellence Lee Martino team up with an all-around fabulous cast to make the very most of book, music, and lyric writer Dean McClure’s World Premiere bio-musical When You Wish (The Story Of Walt Disney), though for producers to dub it a “Pre-Broadway production” is wishful thinking indeed.
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SUNNY AFTERNOON
Sunday, October 20th, 2013
On November 22, 1963, at about half-past-noon Dallas time, President John F. Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed in front of the Texas School Book Depository … and thirty minutes later was pronounced dead. On November 24, the President’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself fatally shot by local nightclub operator Jack Ruby as a nation sitting glued to their TV screens looked on in horror.
But what about the forty-eight hours separating these two America-shattering events?
Playwright-director Christian Levatino and his gangbusters theatre company* let us be flies on the walls of the Dallas Police Headquarters where Oswald spent his last two days under police interrogation in Levatino’s gripping new play Sunny Afternoon, now getting its official World Premiere following its Best-Of-Fringe-winning workshop at last June’s Hollywood Fringe Festival.
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WAIT UNTIL DARK
Saturday, October 19th, 2013
Some plays simply cannot be updated to the 21st Century. Take for example Wait Until Dark, Frederick Knott’s classic 1966 thriller about a blind New York City newlywed targeted by a trio of thugs out to find the heroin-filled doll they believe to be hidden somewhere in the walk-down flat she shares with her photographer husband—a play entirely dependent on there being just one land-line phone in the apartment and a (now virtually non-existent) phone booth on a nearby corner.
That’s why, when I heard that playwright Jeffrey Hatcher was adapting Wait Until Dark for the Geffen Playhouse “in a new time/setting,” my first thought was “They must be kidding!” Then I found out that Hatcher was actually taking Knott’s thriller back in time to WWII New York City and that thought turned to “Wow! What a clever idea!” Not only a clever idea, it turns out, but one that proves as exiting in execution as in theory.
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LEGALLY BLONDE
Monday, October 14th, 2013
3-D Theatricals gets everything right in its end-of-season staging of Legally Blonde The Musical. With director David F.M. Vaughn assuredly in charge, this is the very best production I’ve seen of one of Broadway’s best-crafted hits of the past ten years.
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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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