Posts Tagged ‘East West Players’

MAMMA MIA!

An all-POC cast (primarily Asian, significantly Filipino), inspired direction, electrifying choreography, and the most gorgeous of production designs breathe fresh new life into East West Players’ thrillingly trailblazing Mamma Mia!, the all-around best of the many MM!s I’ve seen.
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MAN OF GOD

The discovery of a spy cam pointing up from inside the hotel bathroom toilet of four Korean-American teens on a mission trip to Thailand sets in motion a wild and unexpected chain of events in Anna Moench’s Man Of God, an East West Players World Premiere as funny, dramatic, and edge-of-your-seat gripping as it is a timely reminder that there are no age restrictions where the #metoo movement is concerned.
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VIETGONE

Romantic comedy lovers are in for a treat as a couple of Vietnamese evacuees in an Arkansas refugee camp circa 1975 fall reluctantly in love in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone, one of East West Players’ all-around best productions in years.
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AS WE BABBLE ON

Millennials get their turn in the East West Players spotlight in Nathan Ramos’s World Premiere comedy As We Babble On, a crowd-pleasing Asian-American take on Friends with more than just laughter on its mind.
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ALLEGIANCE

Allegiance has arrived at Little Tokyo’s Aritani Theatre, and if the feel-good Broadway musical about the forced internment of 70,000 American citizens and another 40,000 longtime U.S. residents tries too hard to be a crowd-pleaser in ways that the similarly fact-based Parade and The Scottsboro Boys did not, its East West Players debut is if nothing else a splendidly performed (and refreshingly homegrown) Los Angeles Premiere that scores bonus points for the light it sheds on a dark stain in American history.
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YOHEN

Danny Glover gives East West Players/Robey Theatre Company’s revival of Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yohen plenty of movie-star box-office draw, but Gotanda’s delicate, perceptive “portrait of a marriage” and Yohen’s luminous leading lady June Angela deserve better than Glover’s lackadaisical performance as a retired African-American soldier estranged from his Japanese wife of thirty-plus years.
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HOLD THESE TRUTHS

The time could not be riper for Jeanne Sakata’s Hold These Truths to make its powerful, compelling, inspiring Pasadena Playhouse debut, the extraordinary tale of one American’s fight for his inalienable rights at a time when his own government wished to deny them.
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NEXT TO NORMAL

Deedee Magno Hall gives a beautifully nuanced performance as bipolar wife-and-mother Diana Goodman opposite her real-life spouse Cliffton Hall’s powerful Dan Goodman in Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s Next To Normal, and though the East West Players season closer doesn’t deliver on all fronts, it provides the Halls with a pair of dream roles and audiences with a moving musical look at the effects of mental illness on an all-American family.
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