Posts Tagged ‘Odyssey Theatre’
PARADISE
Monday, January 28th, 2019
A Columbia University professor reduced to teaching science in an overcrowded, underfunded Bronx high school and a Muslim-American student with dreams far loftier than her Yemeni immigrant family are likely ever to allow. From these two disparate, desperate souls, Laura Maria Censabella has written Paradise, as intelligent, thought-provoking, compelling, heartbreaking, and satisfying a two-hander as I’ve seen in a good long while.
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ASHES TO ASHES
Monday, December 11th, 2017A divorced couple must spend 16 days, 21 hours, and 32 minutes in each other’s company or forfeit the $955,000,000 they’ve been bequeathed in Ashes To Ashes, Debby Bolsky’s entertaining, mostly successful screwball romcom, a World Premiere guest production at the Odyssey.
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FARRAGUT NORTH
Monday, May 8th, 2017
Farragut North, Beau Willimon’s riveting look at the behind-the-scenes maneuverings and back-stabbings of a Presidential primary campaign, a Geffen Playhouse hit just months after the first Obama win, now gets a solid Odyssey Theatre guest production with a far different man in the White House.
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DRAMA QUEENS FROM HELL
Sunday, August 21st, 2016NOT RECOMMENDED
Significant trimming and tweaking is needed to make Peter Lefcourt’s Hollywood-spoofing Drama Queens From Hell the comedy hit it aspires to be despite some occasional insider hilarity and several deliciously scene-stealing performances.
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AWAKE & SING!
Sunday, January 10th, 2016
Clifford Odets’ Depression-era drama Awake & Sing! has reopened at the Odyssey Theatre for a January extension, exciting news indeed for fans of the kind of big-cast, big-issue Great American Classics that don’t get written anymore.
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WHEN STARS ALIGN
Monday, September 7th, 2015
A mixed-race slave comes of age on a Mississippi River cotton plantation during the Civil War years in Carole Eglash-Kosoff and John Henry Davis’s epic interracial love story When Stars Align, a mini-series worth of plot compacted into two hours (plus intermission) of gorgeously-staged historical melodrama that proves involving and ultimately quite moving despite some occasionally clunky dialog along the way.
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CAFÉ SOCIETY
Monday, August 24th, 2015
Zaniness reigns supreme in Peter Lefcourt’s screwball Café Society, now getting a terrifically performed, imaginatively directed, cleverly designed World Premiere at West L.A.’s Odyssey Theatre, the ever so “Westside” laughfest marred only by a jarring 11th-hour tonal shift that bears rethinking.
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OFF THE KING’S ROAD
Saturday, July 4th, 2015NOT RECOMMENDED
Several bright supporting performances and a topnotch production design are not enough to rescue Off The King’s Road from its lackluster script, languorous pacing, and a numbingly dull lead performance, though truth be told it would take an actor with the charisma and star power of the late James Garner to stir up any interest in playwright Neil Koenigsberg’s sad sack protagonist.
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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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