Tuesday, December 29, 2020
It’s time once again for the annual “Vee-Cee” Awards, in which we honor some of the most memorable performances on Ventura County stages over the course of the past year. Because of th…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 02:34PMFriday, March 6, 2020
In The Revolutionists, Lauren Gunderson’s 2017 black comedy about four (in)famous women of the French Revolution, comedy meets tragedy in a fictionalized what-if? premise that brings to mi…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 08:13PMSunday, March 1, 2020
It’s hard to believe, but 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center, one of the prime community theaters in Ventura County. In 1995, the center’s first prod…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 04:03PMSaturday, February 29, 2020
An interview with David Krassner, director of Agoura High School’s current production of Rent. Krassner uses his experience as an actor on Broadway and in national tours to guide young act…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 06:59PMThursday, February 27, 2020
Can a play about cancer be uplifting? That’s the question posed by Margaret Edson in her Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Wit, currently showing at the Elite Theatre Company in Oxnard. The pla…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 12:04PMSaturday, February 22, 2020
Occasionally, Broadway audiences miss the target. Such is the case with It Shoulda Been You, a musical that somehow lasted less than five months before slinking off into tours and community …
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 12:51PMThursday, February 20, 2020
On Wednesday, February 26, Agoura High School’s drama department, under the direction of David Krassner, will be staging the high school production of Rent, Jonathan Larson’s groundbreak…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 06:06PMFriday, February 14, 2020
The appeal of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, which arrived in Thousand Oaks on February 13 for a four-day run, can be summed up by the comments of an elderly couple leaving the Fred Kav…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 01:03PMWednesday, February 12, 2020
Beautiful, the musical that chronicles the life of singer/songwriter Carole King, comes to the Conejo Valley for the first time in American Theatre Guild’s national tour. Many performers h…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 08:51PMThursday, January 30, 2020
The sudden death of Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant on Sunday cast a pall over not just Southern California basketball fans, but people around the world who admired Bryant for his devoti…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 12:31PMMonday, January 20, 2020
Steven Dietz’s play, Bloomsday, which made its debut at the Elite Theatre Company in Oxnard January 17, is a Twilight Zone-like story that mixes past and present, using James Joyce’s nov…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 03:28PMSaturday, January 18, 2020
In Finding Neverland, reality is blurred by imagination as J. M. Barrie, the creator of the characters and the original play version of Peter Pan, struggles with writer’s block as he tries…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 05:32PMWednesday, December 25, 2019
It’s time once again for the annual “Vee-Cee” Awards, in which we honor some of the most memorable performances on Ventura County stages over the course of the past year. As I explain …
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 12:57PMTuesday, December 24, 2019
For sheer timeless comedy, there are few plays better than The Man Who Came To Dinner, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s hilarious love letter to owlish American theater critic Alexander W…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 04:47PMTuesday, November 26, 2019
Toward the end of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, traveling salesman Harold Hill tells Marian Paroo, “For the first time in my life, my foot got caught in the door.” A few weeks ago,…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 03:23PMFriday, November 8, 2019
Bandstand is a musical that most people are not familiar with, but should be. Its plot deals with a group of musicians who come back to the U.S. after serving in World War II and finding it …
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 09:18PMWednesday, November 6, 2019
Good news for theater fans! Rubicon Theatre Company’s current production of Big River has been extended until November 17. Its success is due in part to Beverly and Kirby Ward’s evocati…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 02:34PMMonday, November 4, 2019
Bringing a show as expansive as Big River to the small stage of the Rubicon Theatre Company was a daunting prospect, but Kirby and Beverly Ward thrive on such problems and ended up producing…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 11:20PMThursday, October 31, 2019
There is one word that best describes the motivation of the two main characters in the 1985 musical Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The word is “freedom.” Both Huckleberry…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 07:32PMTuesday, October 29, 2019
In this first of three features on the Rubicon Theatre Company’s production of Big River, co-producers/directors Beverly and Kirby Ward discuss their vision for bringing the Tony Award-win…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 12:18PMThursday, October 24, 2019
Every so often an actor emerges who is what I call a “five-tool-player,” a term borrowed from baseball, describing someone who can run, hit, field, throw, and hit for power. In the theat…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 01:06PMWednesday, October 23, 2019
In 5-Star Theatricals’ current production of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, acrobatics worthy of an Olympics gymnastic meet are turned in nightly by Antonia Vivino, who plays starry-…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 01:42PMTuesday, October 8, 2019
Last week we spoke with Adam Pascal about his approach to playing Professor Harold Hill in Meredith Willson’s classic musical comedy The Music Man. 5-Star Theatrical’s production, whic…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 11:00AMTuesday, October 1, 2019
Ventura County theater fans were overjoyed when 5-Star Theatricals announced that veteran Broadway star Adam Pascal would be starring as raffish traveling salesman Harold Hill in the company…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 11:00AMTuesday, July 16, 2019
In British playwright Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange, Christopher is a patient in a London psychiatric hospital who has been admitted under a “Section 2” for what has been diagnosed as a …
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 12:38PMTuesday, July 2, 2019
Plays that show characters changing through the years are some of the most challenging actors can experience. In the 1976 Off-Broadway play Vanities, author/playwright Jack Heifner focuses …
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 11:36AMMonday, May 20, 2019
Today we received a letter from Andrew Landecker, senior film student at Calabasas High School who played the role of Amos Hart in the school’s March production of Chicago. Here’s what…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 07:56PMSunday, May 19, 2019
In a world that is consumed by political correctness, Avenue Q, which made its debut at the Conejo Players Theatre May 3 for a brief two-weekend run, shatters Broadway conventions with its r…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 09:10PMTuesday, May 14, 2019
Camelot, the original “Game of Thrones,” is familiar to theater and film fans through its highly successful stage productions but a new ballet, produced by Pacific Festival Ballet, makes…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 12:05PMFriday, April 5, 2019
Its theater is definitely of the no-frills variety, a black box constructed in the space of two public storage units in an industrial park in Ventura, but there is no denying the talent that…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 11:59AMThursday, March 14, 2019
Next week, former Cabrillo Music Theater artistic director Lewis Wilkenfeld returns to Thousand Oaks to direct Matilda, the story about a precocious English girl who uses books and literacy…
SOURCE: vconstage.com at 01:27PM 
