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Michael M. Landman-Karny
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Highly Recommended Concert: MOONLIGHT MELODIES: AN EVENING WITH THE CROONERS (Pasadena POPS)
CROONING SOON UNDER THE MOON Picture this: you’re sprawled on grass under a canopy of stars, wine in hand, while Michael Feinstein conducts a full orchestra just yards away. Behind him, actual peacocks strut across the stage like they own the place. This isn’t a fever dream, it’s Moonlight Melodies: An Evening with the Crooners,…
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Film Review: THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME (Directed by Wes Anderson)
ANDERSON’S REPUBLIC OF OBJECTS Something has shifted in Wes Anderson’s dollhouse universe. The Phoenician Scheme arrives with all the expected geometric precision, but underneath the familiar symmetries lurks an unfamiliar bite. Arms dealer Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro) has survived six assassination attempts by the time we meet him in 1950. He’s a jaded…
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Theater Obituary: MARK BROKAW (A Tribute to the Director’s “Cry-Baby” on Broadway)
In Praise of a Misjudged Misfit: Mark Brokaw and the Undeserved Fate of Cry-Baby In the wake of director Mark Brokaw‘s untimely passing at 65 yesterday, I find myself returning not to one of his celebrated triumphs, such as How I Learned to Drive, but to a show that critics swatted away with a smirk…
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Theater Review: THE JANEIAD (Old Globe in San Diego)
THE ODYSSEY, IN ASHES AND UPHOLSTERY The chair will not move. That is how we begin. In Anna Ziegler‘s The Janeiad, now in a quietly astonishing production at the Old Globe, which produced Ziegler’s The Last Match in 2016, a woman sits in a green armchair and does not get up. Not because of laziness….
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Book Review: THEATRE KID: A BROADWAY MEMOIR (Jeffrey Seller | Simon & Schuster)
STANDING OVATIONS, INNER DEMONS By the time Jeffrey Seller is having sex in a gym sauna—one of the more unfiltered anecdotes in Theater Kid—it’s clear this isn’t your typical Broadway memoir. The marquee names are there, and the triumphs are big—but what sets the book apart is its detour into raw, unglamorous emotional terrain. This…
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Obituary: ALFRED BRENDEL (1931-2025)
THE LAST OF THE PHILOSOPHERS AT THE PIANO The fingers were careful, almost tentative. Not cautious, a word Brendel would have objected to, but curious. Each phrase felt like a question. The silences in between rang louder than the notes. At the keyboard, Alfred Brendel–who dies on June 20 at 94–did not try to astonish,…
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Dance Review: SWAN LAKE (Miami City Ballet)
NO MIST, NO MERCY, JUST SWAN LAKE Forget what you think Swan Lake is. Forget the gauzy tragedy, the white tutus, the endless fluttering. At Segerstrom Hall tonight, Miami City Ballet, under Alexei Ratmansky‘s choreography, has cracked open the windows. Something sharper moves through the air now. The story’s cruelty remains intact. It is a…
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Highly Recommended Concert: BROADWAY LEGENDS FROM GERSHWIN TO SONDHEIM (Michael Feinstein and the Pasadena POPS at LA County Arboretum)
BROADWAY STARS UNDER THE STARS If you’ve ever wanted to hear Michael Feinstein conduct an orchestra while a pulchritude of peacocks prance in the background, you’re in for one of LA’s most delightfully surreal summer experiences. The Pasadena POPS is back Jun 21, 2025, at the LA County Arboretum with their annual Broadway night, and honestly?…
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Music Announcement and Commentary: ALEXANDER SHELLEY (Incoming Music Director of Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa)
Alexander Shelley and the Turn No One Saw Coming at the Pacific Symphony When Carl St.Clair steps down, after thirty-four years of quietly shaping the Pacific Symphony, will most people notice? That’s not a dig. It’s just the reality of classical music in Southern California — always slightly off to the side, just out of…
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Obituary: BRIAN WILSON (June 20, 1942 – June 11, 2025)
Brian Wilson: A studio perfectionist who heard symphonies in surf music Brian Wilson, whose crystalline harmonies and studio innovations redefined popular music, died on June 11, 2025, aged eighty-two. Known to millions as the creative engine behind the Beach Boys, his early work captured the youthful optimism of California in the early 1960s. But Wilson’s…
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Theater Review: THE WEDDING SINGER (Colony Theatre in Burbank)
Synthwave Romance: The Wedding Singer Grooves on Camp, Chemistry, and Crimped Hair If you still belt out “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” in your car or secretly miss the days when big hair was in fashion, The Wedding Singer—which opened last night at The Colony Theatre—has your number. This show doesn’t flirt with nostalgia—it goes…
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Concert Review: VERDI’S REQUIEM (Pacific Symphony)
St. Clair’s Swan Song: Pacific Symphony’s Volcanic Verdi’s Requiem Last night, the walls of the Segerstrom Concert Hall didn’t merely vibrate. They braced. Verdi’s Requiem opened not with reverence but with rupture. What followed wasn’t a farewell so much as a reckoning. Carl St. Clair’s final appearance as Pacific Symphony’s Music Director arrived wrapped in…
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Opera Review: RIGOLETTO (LA Opera)
STERILE STAGING, FEROCIOUS VOICES: LA OPERA’S RIGOLETTO BLEEDS DESPITE ITSELF Let’s be clear from the jump: this isn’t your Nonna’s Rigoletto. No 16th-century Italian costumes, no jester’s hump wobbling around the ducal funhouse. Just an elegantly brutalist playground for testosterone, tuxedos, and trauma. Director Tomer Zvulun, who seems to believe subtlety is for string quartets…
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Theater Review: ECHO (Cirque du Soleil)
ECHO: A CUBE WITH BIG DREAMS IN A SHOW STILL FINDING ITS SHAPE It opens with a cube. Glowing, two stories tall, and unmistakably the star of the show, this bold architectural gesture doesn’t just set the tone; it declares intent. ECHO arrives with a whiff of manifesto, promising reinvention, disruption, a new kind of…
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Theater Review: THE CHINESE LADY (Chance Theater / Anaheim)
FRACTURED REFLECTION The Chinese Lady and the Cost of Being Seen She doesn’t enter. She appears—still as a painting, but alive, watching. In Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady, now haunting the Chance Theater with a whisper that lingers long after curtain, Afong Moy isn’t introduced. She’s arranged. Composed. A presence to be consumed. A figure…
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Obituary: GEORGE WENDT (October 17, 1948 – May 20, 2025)
George Wendt: Actor of Warmth, Precision, and Chicago Stage Grit George Wendt, who died peacefully in his sleep on May 20, 2025, at age 76, will always be Norm to the millions who tuned in week after week to Cheers. But if you stop there—if you freeze him forever on that Boston barstool, beer in…
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Opera Review: SCHOENBERG IN HOLLYWOOD (West Coast Premiere at UCLA Nimoy Theater in Los Angeles)
Deconstruction in Technicolor: Schoenberg, Subjectivity, and the Cinematic Imagination in Schoenberg in Hollywood Schoenberg in Hollywood opens not with exposition but with rupture. What emerges from that opening is less a historical figure than a shattered mind, flickering across time and medium. Tod Machover’s score and Simon Robson’s libretto reject chronology in favor of kaleidoscopic…
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Theater Review: A MAN OF NO IMPORTANCE (A Noise Within)
Wilde at Heart: The Quiet Theatrics of A Man of No Importance Some musicals don’t announce themselves. They drift in quietly, settle beside you, and before you know it, you’re sitting there, wrecked, wondering when the tears began. That’s the spell cast by A Man of No Importance, now playing at A Noise Within. Based…
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Theater Review: THE STAIRCASE (South Coast Rep)
MEMORY LOOPS AND ECHOES IN GARDNER’S THE STAIRCASE Rain doesn’t fall in The Staircase. It lingers, heavy and waiting. Like a secret no one asked to hear. Like a mother halfway between a lullaby and a memory she can’t put down. In the hands of Noa Gardner, this first-time playwright turns weather into something far…
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Theater Review: TASTY LITTLE RABBIT (Moving Arts)
THE TRUTH IS RARELY PURE, AND NEVER SAFE, IN TASTY LITTLE RABBIT There is a tender brutality in the way Robert Mammana shatters a glass plate negative under his heel in Moving Arts’ aching new production of Tom Jacobson’s Tasty Little Rabbit. It happens early. The crack is too small to be mythic, too large to ignore….
Theater Review: THE GREAT GATSBY (National Tour)
by Lynne Weiss | July 12, 2026
in Boston, TheaterOff-Broadway Review: PORTRAITS OF GAYS IN DESPAIR (HB Playwrights Theatre)
by Kevin Hautigan | July 11, 2026
in New York, TheaterOff-Broadway Review: GIULIA: THE POISON QUEEN OF PALERMO (PAC NYC)
by Gregory Fletcher | July 10, 2026
in New York, TheaterTheater Review: CRAZY FOR YOU (Goodspeed Opera House / East Haddam, CT)
by Rob Lester | July 10, 2026
in Regional, TheaterTheater Review: SUFFS (First National Tour)
by Emma S. Rund | July 9, 2026
in Chicago, Theater, Tours
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