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Michael M. Landman-Karny
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Theater Review: EAT ME (South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa)
A HUNGER THAT DOESN’T QUITE NAME ITSELF A sharp new play still discovering its center Lewis Carroll understood that eating is never just eating. When Alice stands before the small cake and weighs the risk, she is doing what everyone in Talene Monahon’s Eat Me does across this hundred-minute production: measuring the cost of wanting…
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Opera Review: FALSTAFF (LA Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
THE LAST FOOL A master’s final shrug lands with surprising weight Verdi was seventy-nine when Falstaff premiered at La Scala in 1893. He had not written a comic opera since Un giorno di regno in 1840, a failure so complete it drove him to swear off the form for fifty-three years. And here, in what…
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Theater Review: HELL MOUTH (The Road Theatre Company, North Hollywood)
A HELL OF A MOUTHFUL A play where grief, faith, and ambition collide —and silence carries the weight Jacobson knows that the domestic and the exalted do not occupy different rooms. Hell Mouth, now receiving a luminous production at The Road Theatre Company, opens on a son cleaning his dying father and pivots, in a…
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Concert Review: LISE DAVIDSEN & FREDDIE DE TOMMASO (BroadStage, Santa Monica)
TWO VOICES, ONE VOLTAGE An evening of operatic power finds its charge in connection, not just scale BroadStage does not often present evenings of this ambition. A sold-out house, a freelance orchestra under Iván López Reynoso, and two singers at or near the summit of their respective careers: Lise Davidsen, the Norwegian soprano who has…
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Preview: THE MUSIC THAT MAKES ME DANCE: THE SONGS OF JULE STYNE (El Portal Theatre, North Hollywood)
EVERYTHING’S COMING UP JULE Broadway’s golden-age hits return in a world premiere revue that treats them as living drama Jule Styne’s name tends to arrive attached to titles that feel immovable. Gypsy. Funny Girl. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The songs have outlived their original performers, yet they still seem written for bodies onstage, for voices under…
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Dance Review: SYLVIA (American Ballet Theatre at Segerstrom Center)
DELIBES TAKES THE LEAD In ABT’s return of Ashton’s Sylvia, the best performance at Segerstrom wasn’t onstage Frederic Ashton’s Sylvia arrives at Segerstrom Center for the Arts after nine years away from American Ballet Theatre’s repertory, with the Pacific Symphony in the pit. Start there. Ormsby Wilkins conducted, and he set the terms of the…
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Theater & Concert Preview: MY FAIR LADY IN CONCERT (Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa)
THE RAIN IN SPAIN, UNRESTRAINED At full symphonic scale, My Fair Lady finally sounds the way it was written to be heard George Bernard Shaw got what he deserved. He spent decades refusing to let anyone set Pygmalion to music, having been burned once already by an operetta adaptation of Arms and the Man that…
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Theater Review: DEATH OF A SALESMAN (A Noise Within, Pasadena)
THE DREAM ON CREDIT A clear-eyed, unsentimental staging that lets Miller’s argument land with full force Arthur Miller finished Act I of Death of a Salesman in a single day and the rest in six weeks, which tells you something about the pressure behind it. He had been watching his uncle Manny Newman for years,…
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Music Review: LANG LANG PLAYS BEETHOVEN (Pacific Symphony)
FATE AND THE NEW WORLD Beethoven’s Egmont Overture was still settling into the air above Segerstrom Concert Hall when it became clear that Monday evening March 23 was going to demand more than the usual pleasant surrender to familiar music competently played. Carl St.Clair opened the Pacific Symphony’s program with the Egmont, followed by Dvorak’s…
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Theater Review: FAIRVIEW (Rogue Machine Theatre)
WHEN COMFORT TURNS INTO A TRAP Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer-winning play dismantles what we think we’re watching Marie-Françoise Theodore, iesha m. daniels Writing honestly about Fairview without ruining it is close to a contradiction in terms. The play runs on surprise, on jolts timed so precisely that a critic who telegraphs them is doing active…
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Theater Review: THE SHARK IS BROKEN (Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach)
THREE MEN IN A BOAT, WAITING FOR A FISH At Laguna Playhouse, the making of a blockbuster becomes a chamber piece about ego, craft, and survival Gildart Jackson, Will Block, and Adam Poole The mechanical shark that tormented Steven Spielberg during the filming of Jaws in the summer of 1974 was nicknamed Bruce, after the…
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Concert Review: FROM MOZART TO MAHLER (Pacific Symphony)
INTIMACY AND ENORMITY: MOZART AND MAHLER IN COSTA MESA Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, is a peculiar piece to a classical program. It omits oboes entirely, replacing them with clarinets for a softer, more inward blend, and there are no trumpets or drums at all, no means of making a…
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Opera Review: AKHNATEN (LA Opera)
STILL THE PHARAOH-EST OF THEM ALL, AKHNATEN STUNS AT LA OPERA An intellectually rigorous, visually arresting production that embraces the opera’s challenges rather than disguising them John Holiday as Akhnaten There is a structural difficulty at the heart of Akhnaten that admiration alone cannot resolve—although admiration at last night’s opening at The Chandler is never…
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Opera Preview: RIVERSIDE LYRIC OPERA (Grand Re-Opening Gala Concert on March 7)
OPERA RETURNS TO RIVERSIDE, AND IT’S BRINGING A 54-PIECE ORCHESTRA The Riverside Lyric Opera’s gala concert on March 7 marks a rare moment for the Inland Empire: a full-scale operatic event with world-class talent, right in its own backyard. Riverside has one of the largest collections of Mission-style architecture in Southern California, a university campus…
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Theater Review: SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA (Geffen Playhouse)
THREE SYLVIAS, ZERO THRILLS Beth Hyland’s world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse arrives with the kind of literary bait that makes theater people clasp their reusable water bottles in delight. Sylvia Plath’s ghost returns to her old Boston apartment. A present-day novelist moves in. The novelist unravels as her marriage curdles and her deadline circles…
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Theater Review: AMADEUS (Pasadena Playhouse)
PATRON SAINT OF THE SECOND-RATE A rigorously intelligent and theatrically thrilling revival that restores Shaffer’s parable to full force Schopenhauer once drew a distinction between talent, which hits a target no one else can hit, and genius, which hits a target no one else can see. The remark could serve as an epigraph for Peter…
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Theater Review: MY SON THE PLAYWRIGHT (Rogue Machine)
TWO MONOLOGUES IN SEARCH OF A DIALOGUE Justin Tanner has spent decades making chaos look easy. Those early Cast Theatre productions like Pot Mom and Zombie Attack trafficked in a particular brand of Los Angeles mayhem — high energy and unruly and knowing. With My Son the Playwright, now receiving its world premiere at Rogue…
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Obituary: CATHERINE O’HARA (1954-2026)
THE ACTRESS WHO MADE THE RIDICULOUS PROFOUND Catherine O’Hara, who has died aged 71, could make you laugh and break your heart in the same scene. Most performers pick a lane; she moved between them without visible effort. Born in Toronto on March 4, 1954, O’Hara was the sixth of seven children in an Irish…
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Theater Review: THE NOTEBOOK: THE MUSICAL (North American Tour)
Three Couples, Zero Accumulation With a score that forgets to remember, The Notebook drowns in its own mawkish bathwater There’s a musical version of The Notebook that might actually work. A decades-spanning romance built on longing, separation, and fading memory? That’s theater. What’s currently stinking up the Hollywood Pantages? That’s a $30 million hostage situation…
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Concert Preview: THREADS OF GOLD—DOLLY PARTON GOES SYMPHONIC (National Tour)
THREADS OF GOLD—DOLLY PARTON GOES SYMPHONIC Her songs get the orchestral treatment in a cross-country concert experience Dolly Parton has never been one for half measures. When she says the threads of her life run through her songs, she means it. That idea is taken literally with Dolly Parton’s Threads: My Songs in Symphony, a…
Theater Review: “MASTER HAROLD” …AND THE BOYS (Geffen Playhouse)
by pwsadmin | April 21, 2026
in Los Angeles, TheaterTheater Review: EAT ME (South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa)
by Michael Landman-Karney | April 21, 2026
in Los Angeles, Regional, TheaterOff-Broadway Review: A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM (Theater 2020)
by Rob Lester | April 21, 2026
in New York, TheaterOpera Review: FALSTAFF (LA Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
by Michael Landman-Karney | April 20, 2026
in Los Angeles, Music, TheaterTheater Review: ENGLISH (Wallis Annenberg Center, Beverly Hills)
by Ernest Kearney | April 19, 2026
in Los Angeles, Theater
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