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Chicago Theater Review: H.M.S. PINAFORE (Light Opera Works in Evanston)
SHIPSHAPE PRODUCTION TAKES SAIL Still subversive as it both condemns and confirms class snobbery, this smash hit from 1878 fuses Romeo and Juliet and Punch into a role-reversing romp where love levels some ranks. Rudy Hogenmiller’s respectful revival, Light Opera Work’s fourth production of H.M.S. Pinafore since 1981, aims at nothing more than fidelity to…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: A MIDSUMMER SATURDAY NIGHT’S FEVER DREAM (Troubadour Theater Company at the Falcon Theatre)
MADCAP MIDSUMMER To say that Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is oft-produced would be an understatement. The 1595 text is very much in the public domain, free and available to anyone with an interest in putting it up. Here in Los Angeles, there are already three productions running this summer, with at least two more…
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Chicago Theater Review: A COLE PORTER SONGBOOK (Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre)
KISS ME, COLE Just the songs are blessing and bounty enough in A Cole Porter Songbook, Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre’s all-singing, much-dancing salute to Broadway’s suavest purveyor of perfection. Cleverly compiled in rich arrangements by music director Aaron Benham, hoofed up to period perfection by choreographer David Heimann, and, above all, seamlessly staged with inventive inevitability…
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San Francisco Cabaret Review: TRIBUTE TO MARVIN HAMLISCH (Bay Area Cabaret at the Venetian Room)
MARVIN HAMLISCH GETS A WARM-HEARTED, STAR-FILLED MUSICAL TRIBUTE You had the feeling you were watching the cream of musical theater history come fully, wholeheartedly alive on the evening of June 2 in the Venetian Room. That’s when its elegant intimacy enfolded an affectionate tribute to the late Marvin Hamlisch on what would have been the…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: HEART SONG (Fountain Theatre)
CHICK ‘N’ SCHTICK THEATER It’s no small feat when a play inspires me to do something with my life. While watching Stephen Sachs’ Heart Song at the Fountain, I felt compelled to join a Flamenco class inmediatamente. The problem was I wanted to bolt from the theater during this play to do so. But here’s…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: IONESCOPADE (Odyssey)
OVER THE (ABSURD) MOON The show begins in darkness with a musical overture blazing through the air. Slowly the glow of a yellow moon appears in the background, a man’s face superimposed on it. We have a brief moment to meditate on it before a straggly-haired man, the writer, bound in a straight jacket, makes…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: NEXT TO NORMAL (La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts)
ABNORMALLY REAL When you avoid musicals as strenuously as I do, after a while you wonder why. For some time I decided that it was the generally trite treatment of serious issues, a gripe which doesn’t hold up to analysis given the works of Kander & Ebb, among others. For years I was sure my…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (Odyssey Theatre)
BOTTOM IS TOPS Unlike Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, which are mostly named for their main character, his comedies have rather different kinds of titles. These differing titles alert us to the comedies’ vastly different subject matter, which is less about particular characters than about particular events. Who, for example, is the main character in Shakespeare’s…
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Off-Off Broadway Theater Review: DRAGON (Articulate Theater Company at the Robert Moss Theatre)
LOVE AS A MYTHICAL BEAST Compelling performances and Cat Parker’s surefooted direction overcome budgetary and other constraints associated with short-run, theater-festival productions, making Jenny Connell Davis’s Dragon, which is part of the Planet Connections Theater Festivity, a worthwhile and at times quite moving theatrical experience. Often intentionally ambiguous, and combining the allegorical with the literary,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE: THE MUSICAL (The Pasadena Playhouse)
SLEEPY IN SEATTLE In the city of Seattle, Sam is still coping with the loss of his wife who died one year ago leaving behind a pre-adolescent son, Jonah, for him to raise on his own. In Baltimore, Annie isn’t ready to give up on the storybook romance she is longing for, but agrees to…
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San Francisco Theater Review: INTO THE WOODS (Ray of Light Theatre at The Eureka)
RAY OF LIGHT FINDS THE HUMANITY WITHIN FRACTURED FAIRY TALES Into the Woods has been produced many times since its 1987 Broadway premiere, but it is unlikely to have benefited from as ebullient a cast as the one seen at the Eureka Theatre last Friday. Ray of Light Theatre’s high-energy ensemble conveyed enthusiasm and an…
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Bay Area Theater Feature: WILD WITH HAPPY (TheatreWorks / Mountain View Performing Arts Center)
PIXIE DUST TO PIXIE DUST After a funeral many years ago, a group of my buddies all declared their desire to be cremated when the time comes. Shockingly, however, all four of us avowed to have our ashes scattered in the same place: The Magic Kingdom. There was no talk of illegality, just an acknowledgement…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS (Center Theatre Group at the Ahmanson Theatre)
AMERICAN TRAGEDY BECOMES MUSICAL COMEDY 1931 was a crossroads in American history. With no economic recovery in sight, the Depression had people edgy, and when Americans are edgy, they are discordant. An acrimonious populace is a perfect breeding ground for intolerance. As such, issues that were quelled during the over-consuming, over-spending 1920’s were coming to…
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Off-Off-Broadway Review: PETER / WENDY (the cell)
CHILD’S PLAY Adapted by Jeremy Bloom from J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy and A Little White Bird, Peter/Wendy, which Mr. Bloom also directs, is a charming, semi-interactive theatrical experiment in which a group of delightful young performers in pajamas play out a retelling of the story of Peter Pan (John Charles McLaughlin) and Wendy…
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DVD Review: CLEOPATRA (directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz)
WHAT AN ASP During one of the tamer scenes of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor’s Queen of the Nile leads Julius Caesar to the tomb of Alexander the Great. Staring down at the (pretend) grave of Western Civilization’s greatest conqueror, it’s possible that Taylor was thinking, “Amateur!” Whereas Alexander tried and failed to take with force the…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE GLASS MENAGERIE (Mary-Arrchie at Theater Wit)
EXQUISITE SHARDS OF GLASS Never has the title of Tennessee Williams’ early masterpiece, The Glass Menagerie, been so thoroughly embraced by the set designer. Grant Sabin takes the name of this 1944 memory play very seriously. Unlike past productions where the late 1930s Saint Louis cramped Wingfield apartment is fully realized, fire escape and all,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: A FRIED OCTOPUS (Bootleg Theater)
BRAIN FRIED Retaining a cephalopod’s far-ranging spinelessness and wide-ranging tentacles, Alicia Adams and Justin Zsebe’s vanity work, A Fried Octopus, makes a squishy thud at The Bootleg. Instead of a clear narrative, what we have is an absinthe-soaked progression of discussions and monologues that veer from subjects like Toulouse Lautrec, divine femininity, and women in…
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Theater Review: CIRQUE SHANGHAI: DRAGON’S THUNDER (Navy Pier)
A THUNDEROUS EVENT The “thunder” in Dragon’s Thunder comes from huge kettle drums, prominently featured in a pounding competition between a Dragon and a Tiger (both win). It’s one of 14 lyrical or awesome acts in 2013’s welcome edition of Navy Pier’s annual Skyline Stage spectacle: Cirque Shanghai, the Eastern answer to a rather different…
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Los Angeles/National Tour Theater Review: PRISCILLA QUEEN OF THE DESERT (Pantages Theatre)
WHAT A DRAG There are so many ways to glitter and be gay in modern American Musical Theater. The recent revival of La Cage Aux Folles depicts the unexpected bourgeois normality in a near-marriage of boa-wrapped impersonators at a gender-breaking Riviera nightclub. Kinky Boots, currently on Broadway, celebrates vogue-crazed drag queens with foot fetishes who…
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Chicago Theater Review: RICHARD III (Wayward Productions at the Den Theatre)
HAND IN HAND TO HELL’S ANGELS Deceit and destruction reign in Wayward Productions’ hell-bent for leather staging of Richard III, which has been reimagined as biker gang mayhem in a bar named London. This reinterpretation of Shakespeare has extended its run from the Underground Wonder Bar; given the deft direction of Carlo Lorenzo Garcia and committed…
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