Michael M. Landman-Karny

DONIZETTI’S BURIED TREASURE AND RUBBLE POP finds music worth hearing in a comedy better left buried Pacific Opera Project did not pull Il fortunato inganno (The Fortunate Deception) from a library shelf. Artistic director Josh Shaw traced the score to Italy and a 1998 revival at the Festival della Valle d’Itria, three years after its…

A MOST ACCOMMODATING DISASTER Frisch’s comedy leaves no one comfortably outside the joke Gottlieb Biedermann tells his wife and his maid that even if he had three spare beds standing empty, taking in a stranger would still be out of the question. He says this in one breath. In the next, he offers the stranger…

THE BLUES COME WITH A PRICE Power, ownership, and exploitation run through a sharply realized production of August Wilson’s classic A stew uses whatever is in the house. Carrots. Potatoes. A piece of meat, if there is one. Maybe the marrow worked out of the bone. Then dinner ends. What remains sits in the pot,…

GREASE STILL HAS ITS GROOVE Altadena Music Theatre returns after devastating loss with Rydell High, right on schedule The year is 1959. Rock and roll is reshaping American culture, the Sexual Revolution is just around the corner, and Grease captures a generation on the cusp of change. In its original incarnation, the musical was a…

NO STRINGS ATTACHED? THINK AGAIN Erik Patterson’s provocative world premiere boasts superb performances but mistakes repetition for depth In F**king Strangers, receiving its world premiere from Echo Theater Company, playwright Erik Patterson begins with an arresting image: a terrified young man stranded beside a freeway, begging his mother to stay on the phone until help…

WHAT THE MUSIC BOX REMEMBERS A lavish production overcomes a book that never fully solves its own mystery A music box opens. A grandmother sings a lullaby to a five-year-old girl who will spend the evening trying to remember it. That is the show in miniature. Everything that follows turns on whether the memory is…

PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE (TO MIND THE STORE) Michael Mullen shines in Jonathan Tolins’ affectionate backstage fantasy Jonathan Tolins built his 2013 solo play Buyer & Cellar around one of the stranger facts in contemporary celebrity lore. Barbra Streisand really does keep a basement mall under her Malibu barn: a doll shop, an antique store,…

LONG-DISTANCE DAMAGE Samuel D. Hunter finds devastating intimacy across thousands of miles Sam Shepard built True West on a kitchen and two brothers who could not stay out of each other’s way. They fought in the same room, over the same toaster, under the same desert moon. The room held the heat. Samuel D. Hunter…