COSTA MESA THEATER REVIEWS

In Theatre Out's latest production (which plays through February 20 at the Empire Theater in Santa Ana), TICK...TICK...BOOM!, Larson's pre-Rent, briefly workshopped musical is an interesting theater piece that's really more of an archival discovery from the vault of a brilliant musician rather than ...

Add 'Cabaret Queen' to this woman's long list of accomplishments. When three-time Tony nominee Kelli O'Hara steps in front of an audience and sings, you feel like you're in the presence of a true star. During her much too short cabaret concert at the Orange County Performing Arts Center's Samueli Th...

In GEORGE GERSHWIN ALONE, now playing at The Laguna Playhouse until February 21, Hershey Felder-in a remarkable, captivating performance-brings a first-person account of Gershwin's staggering brilliance and calls attention to a life so tragically cut short. Transplanted directly from its engagements...

COSTA MESA, CA-In Adam Gwon's delightfully fresh musical ORDINARY DAYS, now playing its West Coast premiere run at Costa Mesa's Tony-Award winning South Coast Repertory, we find four young New Yorkers trying to live their ordinary days in an extraordinary city. This quirky show attempts to show tha...

BroadwayWorld/Costa Mesa's Michael Lawrence Quintos looks back at the highs of this past year. Orange County (or 'The O.C.' as it's more popularly nicknamed) saw a plethora of amazing theater this past year, thanks to a hits-driven national tour line-up at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, a...

COSTA MESA, CA-It's no secret that the 1980 Olivia Newton-John/Gene Kelly film Xanadu was such a horrendously-received crap-o-rama that it has since transcended above it's own flaws to become a surprise cult classic that people actually adore, in its own very unique way. With that in mind, the Broad...

LONG BEACH, CA-Just a little over two months after RENT's current Broadway National Tour made a tour stop in nearby Costa Mesa, Musical Theater West debuts the first L.A.-area professional regional production of RENT at the Richard and Karen Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts. Their production...

ORANGE COUNTY, CA-Now in its third year, Theatre Out's riotously merry LAST CHRISTMAS I GAVE YOU MY HEART, BUT THE VERY NEXT DAY, YOU SAID YOU WERE GAY continues to slay its audiences with the naughtiest of shows likely to exist for the holidays. Like previous incarnations, it skewers those long-hel...

LAGUNA BEACH, CA-With the holidays upon us, the arrival of aptly-themed shows also permeate the theatrical landscape. And like tinsel, egg-nog and Santa, perennial traditions are still what most people crave, especially in these unknowing, unstable times. Hummable, familiar holiday tunes are always ...

It's tough to be a teenager these days. And apparently, things weren't so easy back in late 19th Century Germany either. In what is possibly one of the most soul-stirring, beautifully-scored, creatively innovative musicals to have come out of Broadway in the past few years, SPRING AWAKENING (playing...

LONG BEACH, CA-There was once a simpler time in America, specifically at the turn of the 20th century, when hope and tradition were the norm and the promise of progress was tangible in the age of new mechanized machinery. That antiquated era of traditional family dynamics is the setting for MEET ME ...

When you've got a prestige project like Gone With The Wind in your hands, your goal as a director or a producer or a writer or, hell, even a craft services caterer, is to make it be the Best. Movie. Ever. In 1939, in what seemed like a banner year for celluloid masterpieces, David O. Selznick was a ...

Has it really been 13 years since RENT first arrived on Broadway? As soon as original cast members Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp make their entrance on stage to start the current 'Broadway Tour' production (playing through October 25 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center), the audience erupts i...

REVIEW: If you have not had any prior or much exposure to the absurdist comedy of Monty Python before, don't fear (or, worse, soil your pants and run away). Not knowing anything from their decades-long catalog of shtick will not prevent you from enjoying MONTY PYTHON'S SPAMALOT, one of the funniest ...

With Rob Fisher behind the podium conducting the Pacific Symphony, LuPone takes the audience for a ride through her musical theater past. As the show's title Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda suggests, the evening's selections are from musicals she either auditioned for, shows she thinks she could/should have...

COSTA MESA, CA-There is a good reason the Broadway community has given this accomplished chanteuse two-yes TWO-Tony® Awards: she is just that good. In her four-night return engagement to the Orange County Performing Arts Center (Oct. 8-11), Christine Ebersole performs a beautifully-packaged cabaret...

REVIEW: When you sit down to watch the year-old national tour of LEGALLY BLONDE THE MUSICAL (now playing at the Orange County Performing Arts Center through September 28), you will find a wildly entertaining piece of theater, that not only brings a 'right now' vibe to the Broadway musical, it also p...

The fear that coming out in public spells box office poison for a marquee-desiring actor is at the center of Douglas Carter Beane's THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED, presented by Theatre Out, Orange County's gay and lesbian theatre. The play, which received a Tony® Award nomination for Best Play in 2007, is ...

When a property as old and as sacred as FIDDLER ON THE ROOF is revived for new audiences, one would expect either a fresh, new take on a familiar show, or a disastrous series of experiments that disparages its source material. Neither is the case in the current touring production of the classic stag...

When Frank Sinatra passed away in May of 1998, America, it seemed, lost one of its most iconic and treasured song stylists. Sinatra in his day was one of only a handful of artists that transcended mere celebrity star status, thanks to a career that spanned film, television, recordings, and the stage...

Long Beach's Musical Theatre West presents LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center, Ends July 26...

The national tour of CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG inspires child-like wonder for the young and young-at-heart with its familiar Sherman Brothers score and its gravity-defying title character...