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Michael M. Landman-Karny
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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…
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Opera Review: LA BOHÈME (Los Angeles Opera)
HERBERT ROSS’S BOHÈME RETURNS Beauty polished, questions still lingering Puccini’s tale may be endlessly familiar, yet the recent Los Angeles staging shows how even the most well-trodden path can still feel unsettled and full of open questions. For those new to the work, the opera traces two parallel romances among struggling artists in 1830s Paris….
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Theater Obituary: TOM STOPPARD (1937–2025)
THE PLAYWRIGHT WHO CHOSE RADIO OVER JAWS Steven Spielberg had asked Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay for Jaws, and Tom said he couldn’t as he was writing a play for the BBC. Spielberg said, “I’m offering you a fortune to collaborate with me on a Hollywood blockbuster, and you turn me down to write…
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Opera Review: FRA DIAVOLO (Pacific Opera Project)
A Night with a Gentleman Thief: Pacific Opera Project’s Delightful Fra Diavolo Daniel Auber’s Fra Diavolo amassed over 900 performances at the Opéra Comique during the 19th century before being dropped from the repertoire in 1907. Pacific Opera Project’s current production at The Highland Park Ebell Club makes a case for why this neglect is…
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Theater Review: JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE (A Noise Within in Pasadena)
AMAZING THEATER HERE AND NOW Kai A. Ealy stands in a doorway wearing a coat that looks like it weighs forty pounds. Maybe it does. His Herald Loomis has just walked off seven years of forced labor on Joe Turner’s chain gang, and the weight is literal: bones, memory, rage, the specific gravity of stolen…
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Concert Review: YUNCHAN LIM, PIANIST (Debut at Walt Disney Concert Hall)
Pedal to the Monument: Yunchan Lim Reimagines the Goldberg Variations Last night, October 16, the audience fell quiet before Yunchan Lim, making his Disney Hall debut, walked onstage, but it wasn’t the usual pre-concert hush. Something closer to anticipation, maybe nervousness. Lim has acquired a reputation that precedes him now. After the Cliburn Competition, where…
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Concert Review: MAHLER SYMPHONY NO.2 “RESURRECTION” (Gustavo Dudamel, LA Phil)
DUDAMEL RESURRECTS MAHLER, AND HIMSELF, IN A PERFORMANCE THAT TRANSCENDS GOODBYE Gustavo Dudamel’s farewell season in Los Angeles has already taken on the air of ritual, and no ritual is more fitting for a conductor’s parting gesture than Mahler’s Second Symphony. The Resurrection has become the universal valedictory of the orchestral world, a monument through…
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Theater Review: ANTHROPOLOGY (Rogue Machine Theatre)
WHEN GRIEF MEETS THE ALGORITHM The terrible beauty of grief is that it makes us do irrational things with the most rational tools. In Lauren Gunderson‘s anthropology, now in its North American premiere at Rogue Machine Theatre, a Silicon Valley software engineer named Merril uses artificial intelligence to resurrect her missing sister Angie, only to…
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Theater Review: JAJA’S AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING (Mark Taper Forum)
BRAIDS AND BELONGING Some plays don’t announce themselves with spectacle. They invite you in through a metal grate, into a cramped Harlem salon where the air smells of braiding gel and the television plays Nollywood movies on loop. Before you know it, you’re laughing, aching, realizing how invested you’ve become in the fate of women…
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Dance Review: FRANKENSTEIN (San Francisco Ballet at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa)
When creation becomes choreography in Frankenstein, the laboratory turns into a stage of desire Mary Shelley’s creation continues to haunt not only literature but the stage, where movement and music conspire to make visible the tremors of his unnatural birth. The late choreographer Liam Scarlett’s Frankenstein, brought vividly to life by San Francisco Ballet, joins…
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Theater Review: ADOLESCENT SALVATION (Rogue Machine Theatre at The Matrix)
The Radiant Disorder of Tim Venable’s Teenage Inferno [Contributing writer: Nick McCall] Rogue Machine is presenting Tim Venable’s intense and disquieting new play Adolescent Salvation, which arrives not as a tidy debutante but as a brilliant troublemaker. It lurches, it burns, it contradicts itself. It is alive in ways most new plays are not. Venable…
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Theater Review: HUZZAH! (The Old Globe)
HUZZAH AND HO-HUM The curtain speech at Huzzah! — which opened Thursday at The Old Globe — comes with bassoon and tambourine: silence thy phones, feed not ye actors. This bit of business tells you everything. The evening ahead will be enthusiastic, self-aware, and content to play within modest boundaries. The cast Nell Benjamin and…
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Concert Review: DANIIL TRIFONOV, PIANO (Season Opener at Soka Performing Arts Center)
STORMS, WHISPERS, AND THE SPACE BETWEEN Daniil Trifonov has become a figure around whom the current piano world seems to orbit. He is not only astonishingly skilled, he is unpredictable in the best way, always willing to risk fragility or silence rather than hide behind sheer volume. His playing has the uncanny quality of making…
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Theater Review: COME FROM AWAY (La Mirada Theatre)
A Town, a Tragedy, and the Triumph of Kindness The musical Come From Away — with book, music and lyrics by married couple Irene Sankoff and David Hein — tells the remarkable true story of the small town of Gander (population 9,000) in Newfoundland, Canada, about 1,500 miles from New York City. Nearly 25 years ago, in 2001,…
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Theater Review: A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE & MURDER (Laguna Playhouse)
MURDER NEVER SOUNDED SO SWEET The gentleman killer returns to Southern California with a smile that could polish the silver. In a joint run between Laguna Playhouse and North Coast Repertory, this A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder arrives in Laguna looking eager to please and blessedly well cast, though the gilding runs somewhat…
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Concert Review: RACHMANINOFF & SIBELIUS (Pacific Symphony | Ludovic Morlot, conductor | Alessio Bax, pianist)
PACIFIC SYMPHONY OPENS ITS 48TH SEASON WITH RUSSIAN SOUL AND FINNISH SPIRIT Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, is one of the most beloved works in the piano repertoire. Composed between 1900 and 1901, it marked a turning point in Rachmaninoff’s career, emerging from a period of deep personal and creative…
Theater Review: SANCTUARY CITY (Chance Theater / Anaheim)
by Michael Landman-Karney | May 11, 2026
in Los Angeles, Regional, TheaterTheater Review: SWEPT AWAY (SpeakEasy Stage at Boston Center for the Arts)
by Lynne Weiss | May 10, 2026
in Boston, TheaterTheater Review: ‘NIGHT, MOTHER (Redtwist Theatre / Chicago)
by Croydon Fernandes | May 9, 2026
in Chicago, TheaterOff-Broadway Review: BIKE SHOP: THE MUSICAL (Theater for the New City)
by Rob Lester | May 7, 2026
in New York, TheaterTheater Review: SOMETHING ROTTEN! (Lyric Stage Company of Boston)
by Emily Brenner | May 7, 2026
in Boston, TheaterTheater Review: MJ THE MUSICAL (National Tour / San Diego)
by Dan Zeff | May 7, 2026
in Dance, Theater, Theater-San Diego, ToursTheater Review: FAULT (Chicago Shakespeare)
by Croydon Fernandes | May 7, 2026
in Chicago, TheaterTheater Review: I HATE HAMLET (Saint Sebastian Players / Chicago)
by Mitchell Oldham | May 6, 2026
in Chicago, Theater
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