NOgoodDEED

posted on January 27th, 2012 at 6:46 PM by Steven Stanley


“No good deed goes unpunished,” or so Richard Jewell discovered when the mass media, having previously heralded his heroism at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, turned viciously against him, dragging the security guard through the mud without a shred of proof—or even evidence, all because he “fit” an FBI criminal profile.
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posted in Drama, Hollywood/West Hollywood, Now Playing, WOW!

WHAT THE BUTLER SAW

posted on January 26th, 2012 at 4:03 PM by Steven Stanley

Here’s a quick quiz for theater aficionados:

Who can name a screwball comedy which deals with, features, or mentions all of the following: depravity, disguises, gender identity, the government, hanky-panky, hermaphroditism, homosexuality, incest, insanity, marriage, mistaken identities, nymphomania, pederasty, psychiatry, rape, religion, reunited orphan siblings, slapstick, and transvestitism?

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posted in Comedy, Now Playing, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM

posted on January 23rd, 2012 at 5:37 PM by Steven Stanley


Woody Allen is back on screen—and better than ever—in his critically acclaimed box-office smash Midnight In Paris, making the Morgan-Wixson Theatre’s decision to program one of Allen’s earliest hits as part of their 2011-12 season a stroke of prescient genius. That Morgan-Wixson’s staging of Play It Again Sam, Allen’s late-1960s comedy about a Humphrey Bogart-obsessed nebbish, turns out to be quite a gem of a production is icing on the cake.
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posted in Comedy, Now Playing, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

THE 39 STEPS

posted on January 22nd, 2012 at 7:30 PM by Steven Stanley


A quarter century before Cary Grant found himself pursued across the United States by enemy spies mistakenly believing him to be a CIA agent in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller North By Northwest, a young man named Richard Hannay wound up in similar straits in The 39 Steps, one of the master of the suspense’s earliest hits, and one whose now iconic sequences include a train-top chase leading to Hannay’s daredevil jump onto the Forth Bridge, a seemingly fatal shooting of our hero midway through, hero handcuffed to Hitchcock Blonde heroine as he searches for a villain recognizable only by the missing top joint on one of his fingers, and a very public climactic scene at the London Palladium, much like the one Hitchcock later filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
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posted in Comedy, Downey/La Mirada, Now Playing, WOW!

THE WATER’S EDGE

posted on January 21st, 2012 at 5:48 PM by Steven Stanley


A man’s return visit to the wife and children he left behind seventeen years ago yields unexpected consequences in The Water’s Edge, Theresa Rebeck’s gripping family drama (with a twist), now getting a sensational Los Angeles Premiere at North Hollywood’s The Road Theatre under the inspired direction of Sam Anderson.
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posted in Drama, North Hollywood, Now Playing, WOW!

THE DROWSY CHAPERONE

posted on January 20th, 2012 at 3:50 PM by Steven Stanley


The Tony-winning 2006 Broadway musical The Drowsy Chaperone proves the best possible showcase for more than twenty talented USC undergrads (and audiences lucky enough to catch it during its sold-out six-performance run through Sunday).
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posted in Los Angeles, Musical, WOW!

OUR TOWN

posted on January 20th, 2012 at 1:16 PM by Steven Stanley


Rare is the theatergoer who has not seen at least one, if not half a dozen productions of Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s classic bit of Americana that first astonished audiences in 1938 with its innovative storytelling, even as it told a story as old as time itself—a story of birth, and life, and love, and death.
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posted in Drama, Now Playing, West Side/Beverly HIlls, WOW!

LONESOME TRAVELER

posted on January 19th, 2012 at 3:03 PM by Steven Stanley


There’s a hootenanny down yonder in Laguna Beach these days as the Laguna Playhouse presents the Rubicon Theatre production of Lonesome Traveler, a nostalgic trip down folk music memory lane, from the early part of the 20th Century to the mid-‘1960s, when the screeches of Bob Dylan’s electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival signaled the end of an era.
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posted in Musical Revue, Now Playing, Orange County, WOW!

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