Areas We Cover
Categories
Michael M. Landman-Karny
-
Theater Review: LEGALLY BLONDE THE MUSICAL (La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts)
REASONABLE DOUBT? NOT ABOUT LEGALLY BLONDE‘S PINK POWER Let’s get one thing straight. Legally Blonde: The Musical is not highbrow theater. It is not Sweeney Todd with meat pies and too-close shaves. It is not The Light in the Piazza with yearning strings and emotionally repressed tourists. This show is pink, peppy, and rides a…
-
Opera Review: AINADAMAR (LA Opera)
LORCA’S GHOST IN FRACTURED LIGHT “Verde que te quiero verde…” The first time I heard Lorca’s Romance Sonámbulo, its incantatory line “Green, how I want you green” slipped under my skin. The poem’s haunted beauty and dreamlike dread were something to feel rather than simply understand. That sensation returned at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where…
-
Theater Review: FURLOUGH’S PARADISE (Geffen Playhouse)
When There’s A Second Knock On The Door: Love and Lockup in Furlough’s Paradise In Furlough’s Paradise, a. k. payne has crafted something that moves like a whisper but hits like a reckoning. Now in its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, this 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winning one-act plants two women in a…
-
Theater Review: YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO THE END OF THE WORLD! (South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa)
END-OF-WORLD TRAGICOMEDY CRACKS, BLEEDS AND THRIVES The end arrives not with a sob, but with a drag queen in a glittering black pantsuit, standing in a celestial spotlight, grinning like they’re about to host the universe’s weirdest game show. Keiko Green’s You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! doesn’t so much begin…
-
Theater Review: CORKTOWN ’39 (Rogue Machine at The Matrix)
IN CORKTOWN ’39, THE LIVING ARE JUST GHOSTS WITH BETTER TIMING Mark Mendelson‘s tightly composed set at The Matrix Theatre is a room cloaked in aging wealth at the Keating family’s Philadelphia home. Heavy curtains. Soft chairs. Whiskey always within reach. It feels like it once held power and still holds its consequences. That atmosphere…
-
Theater Review: REGENCY GIRLS (Pre-Broadway World Premiere at The Old Globe)
A RIOTOUS CARRIAGE RIDE THROUGH TIME Somewhere between empire waistlines and leather harnesses, Regency Girls carves out a raucous, messy, and strangely moving place for itself onstage at The Old Globe. This new musical, with a book by Jennifer Crittenden and Gabrielle Allan, takes the stiff-backed decorum of Austen-era England and smashes it headfirst into…
-
Concert Review: CELEBRATING JOHN WILLIAMS (LA Phil)
Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic’s Celebrating John Williams concerto on April 5, 2025, as not so much a concert as it was a cultural séance in which John Williams’ scores, so deeply embedded in the American psyche, were summoned and reanimated with startling freshness. The program, filled entirely with Williams’ most iconic works, could…
-
Dance Review: THE WINTER’S TALE (ABT at Segerstrom)
EXIT, PURSUED BY MOVEMENT THAT CUTS DEEP Jealousy doesn’t sneak in. It bursts. You can see it take hold of Leontes the second doubt flickers behind his eyes. His body folds in. Hands clutch at air. His spine locks. His stare slices across the room, scanning for proof that isn’t there. This isn’t some vague…
-
Film, Concert and Tour Review: RIGHT IN THE EYE (Alcoléa)
MOONSHOTS AND MUSICAL SAWS: MÉLIÈS GETS A MAKEOVER Georges Méliès wasn’t exactly Spielberg. He was cinema’s first mad scientist—half director, half magician, all-around agent of chaos. In the early 1900s, he wasn’t so much directing films as he was recording fever dreams: rocket ships crashing into eyeball moons, skeletons dancing Irish jigs, ghost houses with…
-
Theater Review: INTO THE WOODS (Musical Theatre West)
THE FAIRY TALES BREAK– AND THAT’S THE POINT The stories are still here. Cinderella. Jack. Little Red. Rapunzel. A Baker and his Wife, tangled in a curse and each other. Into the Woods has always worn its source material like a costume—but it keeps a blade tucked underneath. Musical Theatre West’s new production doesn’t sharpen…
-
Concert Review: ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA (Lahav Shani, conductor, at Segerstrom Concert Hall)
COMING HOME TO THE ISRAEL PHIL The Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) lives in my blood. Not metaphorically. This sentiment springs from actual circumstance—a birth story twined around orchestral strings like umbilical cord. On December 6, 1966—that annus mirabilis—my mother was in her 8th month with me in Tel Aviv’s main concert hall while the Israel…
-
Concert Review: HÄIM LEADS HANDEL & BACH (The Handel Project, LA Phil)
VOICES OF ANTIQUITY, REAWAKENED Historically informed performance is no longer a specialty. Period practice vocabulary has entered the mainstream, influencing how modern orchestras perform baroque repertoire. Yet Emmanuelle Haïm‘s recent Los Angeles Philharmonic program—Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Bach’s Magnificat—had more to offer than expertly researched performance practice. It was baroque music with life in its…
-
Theater Review: ONE FOR MY BABY (Broadway-Bound World-Premiere Musical at El Portal in North Hollywood)
SWINGS BIG, SHINES BRIGHT All Roads Theatre Company just set the bar sky-high with One for My Baby, a slick, jazz-soaked tribute to the music of Harold Arlen. This is old-school showbiz at its best—big voices, big orchestrations, and enough high-voltage talent to power a city block. With a Broadway-caliber cast and an 11-piece band…
-
Concert Review: VIENNA PHILHARMONIC (Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor; Yefim Bronfman, pianist; Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa)
The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt. — Karl Kraus Of the world’s major orchestras, few are more traditional than the Vienna Philharmonic, which performed its first concert in 1842. It has had no music director for many years, another of its distinguishing features. The outcome is…
-
Opera Review: COSI FAN TUTTE (Los Angeles Opera)
THE JAZZ AGE MEETS OPERA IN LA OPERA’S SEXY COSI Mozart’s Così fan tutte started with royal scandal. In 1789, Emperor Joseph II commissioned the opera after a partner-swapping scandal shook Vienna’s high society. He knew just who could turn this juicy drama into reality. Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote an entirely new libretto—not, as many…
-
Theater Review: SUCH SMALL HANDS (Chance Theater)
A WHISPER THAT ECHOES There are plays that knock you over with intensity. And there are those that seep in, settle under your skin, and stay there long after the lights come up. Adam Szymkowicz‘s Such Small Hands falls firmly in the latter category. This quiet but devastating meditation on memory, mortality, and devotion opened…
-
Highly Recommended Theater: REGENCY GIRLS (Pre-Broadway World Premiere at The Old Globe)
YOU GO, GIRLS! San Diego’s theater scene is about to get a jolt of excitement as The Old Globe prepares the pre-Broadway world premiere of Regency Girls, a bold and hilarious new musical comedy opening on April 2, 2025. Featuring an all-star creative team and a powerhouse cast, this electrifying production promises to be one…
-
Highly Recommended Concerts: VIENNA PHILHARMONIC (Carnegie Hall, Segerstrom and Zellerbach Hall)
WANT TO HEAR ONE OF THE GREATEST ORCHESTRAS THAT HAS EVER EXISTED? VIENNA PHILHARMONIC MAKES ONLY THREE U.S. APPEARANCES: COSTA MESA, BERKELEY & NEW YORK For California classical music lovers, a delight is in store. Vienna Philharmonic, one of the most renowned orchestras in the world, comes to Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley March 5-7, followed…
-
Theater Review: DESPERATE MEASURES (International City Theatre in Long Beach)
A SHAKESPEAREAN WESTERN MUSICAL? DON’T WORRY, IT MEASURES UP The wild west sizzles with song and chaos in Desperate Measures, the rootin’-tootin’ Wild West musical shinin’ bright at International City Theatre in Long Beach. Peter Kellogg (book and lyrics) and David Friedman (music) convert a Shakespearean problem play into a hootenanny of moral quandaries, mistaken…
-
Concert Review: LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA (Yunchan Lim, piano; Antonio Pappano, conductor; Philharmonic Society of Orange County)
A NIGHT OF THUNDER AND ELEGANCE Presented by Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the London Symphony Orchestra, among the most disciplined and savagely expressive classical orchestras in the world, arrived in Costa Mesa at Segerstrom Concert Hall on Feb. 19, 2024, with Antonio Pappano conducting and a young firebrand at the keyboard. Yunchan Lim, the…
Off-Broadway Review: PORTRAITS OF GAYS IN DESPAIR (HB Playwrights Theatre)
by Michael Tyrell | July 13, 2026
in New York, TheaterTheater 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
Search Articles
Please help keep
Stage and Cinema going!
