Posts Tagged ‘Los Angeles Theater Review’
THE LIAR
Monday, October 14th, 2013
Silliness has rarely been cleverer or cleverness sillier than in David Ives’ translation/adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s 1644 comedy The Liar, The Antaeus Company’s end-of-season offering and quite possibly the classical theater masters’ frothiest romp ever.
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DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS
Saturday, October 12th, 2013
The multi-talented student triple-threats of USC’s Musical Theatre Repertory are back onstage again in their latest student-directed, designed, and performed musical hit, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and though its lead characters are indeed the dirtiest of scoundrels, there’s nothing at all rotten about MTR’s latest Broadway-to-blackbox gem. Quite the contrary, there’s not a more sensationally performed 99-seat musical now playing in all L.A.
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DON’T DRESS FOR DINNER
Saturday, October 12th, 2013
Let’s say you’re a married man. Let’s say you’re a married man with a mistress. Let’s say you’d like nothing more than to spend a romantic weekend with said mistress in the renovated farmhouse you call home. You’d send the wife off for a visit with Mommy and invite your best friend over to throw the missus off the scent, right?
Right … but what if your wife and that best of friends happened to be secret lovers and she thought your chum’s weekend visit would be the perfect opportunity for the two of them to engage in a bit of extramarital hanky-panky? She’d make a quick phone call to cancel plans with mother, and before you knew it, there’d be two sets of adulterous lovers under the same roof with the Cordon Bleu cook you’d hired to cater the weekend making it Five’s A Crowd.
If you think this sounds like the perfect set-up for a door-slamming, mistaken identity-filled French farce, you’d be absolutely right, since this is precisely how Marc “Boeing-Boeing” Camoletti sets up Don’t Dress For Dinner, the hilarious (and pitch-perfect) latest from Long Beach’s International City Theatre.
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RII
Thursday, October 10th, 2013
William Shakespeare. The Theatre @ Boston Court. Two names you wouldn’t normally expect to see in the same sentence let alone in the first paragraph of a review. But wonder of wonders, Boston Court is currently wowing an audience of Shakespeare buffs and T@BC regulars with its very own version of Richard II, one they’ve redubbed RII if only to let the world know that, just as Boston Court isn’t your grandparents’ theater, this isn’t your grandparents’ Richard II—not by a long shot.
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THE NORMAL HEART
Saturday, October 5th, 2013
Larry Kramer’s landmark drama The Normal Heart gets its first L.A. staging in nearly two decades, and tough as it may be to revisit the earliest days of the AIDS epidemic, this absolutely brilliant production is one that no Los Angeles theater lover should miss, and the younger the audience the better.
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THE LION IN WINTER
Sunday, September 29th, 2013
It’s a classic nighttime soap, that is if Dallas or Dynasty had been set in 12th-Century England. It’s a Shakespeare history, that is if you could understand every word the actors are saying. It’s a 1960s film classic that won Katharine Hepburn the third of her four Best Actress Oscars.
It’s Peter Goldman’s Broadway flop play-turned-Hollywood hit movie, and if (as Wikipedia puts it rather ungrammatically) “The Lion in Winter is fictional and none of the dialogue and actions is historical,” it still makes for one of modern American theater’s most entertaining dramas and offers actors some of the meatiest roles of their careers—proof of which is now onstage at the Sierra Madre Playhouse.
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THE END OF IT
Friday, September 27th, 2013RECOMMENDED
A 50ish couple (or is it three?) confront the dissolution of a twenty-year relationship in Paul Coates’ The End Of It, a World Premiere production elevated above a too generic script by sensational direction, fine acting, and one humdinger of a gimmick.
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ANYTHING GOES
Wednesday, September 25th, 2013
No 1930s musical has achieved the enduring popularity of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. A grand total of five Broadway, off-Broadway, and West End revivals, a pair of movie adaptations, a TV special, and more national and international productions than even the most dedicated Porter aficionado could possibly count.
For those who wonder why Anything Goes just keeps on ticking, there’s no more compelling evidence than the National Tour of its 2011 Broadway revival now spending the week at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center For The Arts, a Broadway tour that guarantees SoCal audiences one show-stopping number after another in an Anything Goes that tops any other production of it you might happen to have seen.
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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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