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Tony Frankel

  • Dance Review: GRIMM TALES (Ballet Austin)

    By Tony Frankel | April 22, 2019
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    BEST WHEN IT’S GRIM GRIMM Born in Austin and now living in New York City, artist Natalie Frank created 75 works based on the stories of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Using gouache and chalk pastel, the images are almost a blend of Marc Chagall and Irving Albright. There’s a delicious, nightmarish, psychologically unsettling quality to…

  • CD Review: HOTEL AMOUR (Meow Meow and Thomas Lauderdale)

    By Tony Frankel | April 20, 2019
    in

    IF ANYONE CAN CAUSE A PUSSY RIOT… Welcome to the definition of “chanteuse.” The slinky, sexy, performance artist Meow Meow — whose new CD with Pink Martini’s leader and pianist Thomas Lauderdale is instantly classy, lovable, moving, funny, accessible, transportive, and timeless — gives what feels like your own private deliriously fun nightclub act. Hotel…

  • Music Preview: VíKINGUR ÒLAFSSON (Solo Piano at Disney Hall)

    By Tony Frankel | April 19, 2019
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    AS GOOD AS GOULD While my heart sank to hear that Murray Perahia had to pull out of his recital at Disney Hall this Sunday, April 21, 2019, nothing prepared me for the fantastic news that pianist Ví­kingur í“lafsson will replace him with a program of mostly Bach with some Glass (Perahia will return as…

  • Theater Review: FALSETTOS (National Tour)

    By Tony Frankel | April 18, 2019
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    NOT ONE FALSE NOTE The musical masterpiece  Falsettos follows Marvin, an appealing, brainy, anxious, obsessive, wealthy Jewish gay man who struggles to create a tight-knit family out of his eclectic array of core relationships: an ex-wife, new boyfriend, adolescent son, psychiatrist, and “neighbors who are lesbians from next door.” Amidst a series of monumental life changes…

  • Theater Review: EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (Ensemble Theatre Company in Santa Barbara)

    By Tony Frankel | April 16, 2019
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    SOME, NOT ALL, IS ILLUMINATED Sadly, not everything is illuminated in British playwright Simon Block’s fascinating but problematic adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-selling novel about a young American writer who hires a Ukrainian translator to take him to the town where a woman named Augustine saved his grandfather’s life in WWII. Or so Jonathan…

  • Los Angeles Theater Review: TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS (Pasadena Playhouse)

    By Tony Frankel | April 15, 2019
    in

    CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE THEATER Well, there certainly is nothing wrong with good advice. And there’s plenty of that in the structurally unconventional Tiny Beautiful Things, Nia Vardalos’s stage adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s epistolary best-selling book which, in the incarnation at Pasadena Playhouse starring Vardalos herself, feels like a warm little hug when it could…

  • Music Review: MIRGA LEADS TCHAIKOVSKY & DEBUSSY (LA Phil)

    By Tony Frankel | April 10, 2019
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    MIRGA DESERVES THE HEADLINE, BUT PATRICIA STEALS THE SHOW Here’s how it starts: Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja — born in Moldova, trained in Vienna — saunters onstage at Disney Hall as if she’s headed to the beach; she wears a comfy lived-in black outfit that says “flea market” more than “concert hall”; then, she slips off…

  • Music Preview: MONTEREY JAZZ FESTIVAL ON TOUR (Disney Hall)

    By Tony Frankel | April 2, 2019
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    GET YOUR JAZZ ON Hooray and hallelujah! Long before her third Grammy win, I have always been a fan of jazz vocalist and song interpreter extraordinaire Cécile McLorin Salvant. But seeing her live three times now has not only cemented my opinion that this is the most exciting thing in all music ’” not just…

  • Theater Review: NOTES FROM THE FIELD (ZACH Theatre | Kleberg Stage in Austin, TX)

    By Tony Frankel | March 27, 2019
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    GRACE NOTES Now on the Kleberg Stage in Austin, TX, Anna Deavere Smith’s powerful, engrossing and resonant solo play — Notes from the Field — has been updated for four actors by ZACH’s Producing Artistic Director David Steakley. As always, Ms. Smith has crafted a series of first-person portrayals culled from hundreds of her own…

  • Los Angeles Theater Review: ROALD DAHL’S MATILDA THE MUSICAL (5-Star Theatricals in Thousand Oaks)

    By Tony Frankel | March 25, 2019
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    A VAULTING MATILDA Imagine Annie with psychokinetic powers, Nancy Drew as a mind-reader, or Cinderella acting as her own fairy godmother. Self-empowerment fuels this upbeat, knock-down, pell-mell 2011 musical. A multi-Tony and Olivier award winner, Matilda the Musical is now being given a piping-hot presentation by 5-Star Theatricals   at Kavli Theatre. The much motivated heroine…

  • CD Review: BEYOND (Libera)

    By Tony Frankel | March 24, 2019
    in

    BEYOND BEAUTIFUL The all-boy English vocal group Libera has morphed ever since they began in 1995. The approximately 40 members — 35 on this latest album — are between the ages of seven and sixteen, which means between the changes in voices and age, the singers come and go (most have unchanged boy soprano, a.k.a….

  • CD Review: ISANG YUN: SUNRISE FALLING (Bruckner Orchestra Linz, Russell Davies)

    By Tony Frankel | March 23, 2019
    in

    SUNRISE ISN’T THE ONLY THING THAT’S FALLING; IT SOUNDS LIKE THE END OF THE WORLD This is my first time hearing the music of Isang Yun, the South Korean composer who was once kidnapped from Germany and put on trial for his support of Korean reunification. Korean born, Berlin resident Isang Yun, who died last…

  • CD Review: STRAVINSKY (Le Sacre du printemps) & DEBUSSY (La Mer) (New York Phil, Jaap van Zweden)

    By Tony Frankel | March 23, 2019
    in

    RITE ON! Remember the first time you heard a classical work that became a seminal moment for you? Mine came watching Disney’s Fantasia. When I heard the pounding and mysticism and that swirl of orchestrated colors in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps), I was hooked. It didn’t hurt that I was watching…

  • Theater Review: INCOGNITO (Son of Semele)

    By Tony Frankel | March 20, 2019
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    BRAIN CRAMPS One of the brainiest plays since, well, British playwright Nick Payne’s other brainy play, Constellations, Incognito (2014) contains Payne’s usual assortment of short scenes and quantum physics-like, obfuscating construction. But I don’t buy it this time. And not because I don’t get it. (Although I don’t get it.) This is Payne showing off…

  • Theater Review: THE WOLVES (Echo Theater Company)

    By Tony Frankel | March 20, 2019
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    TEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA I’m not really sure if director Alana Dietze could have done anything more with The Wolves, a dramatically inert slice-of-life one act that follows an all-female indoor soccer team over a succession of pre-game warm-ups. Playwright Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-finalist (?!?!?!?!) is awash in the perfect patois of…

  • Theater Review: ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST (The Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles)

    By Tony Frankel | March 19, 2019
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    ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A PLAY Anarchy is not chaos. The former means “without law” and the latter means “without form.” This is an important distinction to consider in a play that intends to make an argument for anarchy. After a government scandal, a schizoid anarchist poses as certain government officials at a police station in…

  • Concert Preview: OSCAR, WITH LOVE (Disney Hall)

    By Tony Frankel | March 18, 2019
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    OSCAR, WITH LOVE AND BEAUTY AND RESPECT AND: It’s a simple idea that could easily have caused higgledy-piggledy results. In fact, many tribute albums involving various artists contain tracks that are jarringly inconsistent and smack of commercialism. Not so with Oscar, with Love. Kelly Peterson, the widow of Oscar Peterson (1925-2007), personally produced this extraordinary…

  • CD Review: RENT (Original Soundtrack of the Live Television Event)

    By Tony Frankel | March 18, 2019
    in

    TOO BAD THEY DIDN’T RAISE THE RENT Rent has a romantic history: Jonathan Larson, its author and composer, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm on Jan. 25, 1996, 10 days before his 36th birthday and the day before the musical’s first preview performance Off-Off-Broadway. Larson’s score is a mix of rock, rap, and gospel, the…

  • Theater Review: CATS (National Tour, 2019)

    By Tony Frankel | March 18, 2019
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    KITTY LITTER If I had my way, the slogan for Cats would be changed from “Now and Forever” to “Not Now, Not Ever.” Even when I saw the show back in the early 80s and again in the early 90s, I simply couldn’t make it through another act and bolted at intermission. After seeing the…

  • CD Review: THE MUSIC OF HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD (Imogen Heap)

    By Tony Frankel | March 17, 2019
    in

    HARRY POTTER AND THE RECYCLED RECORDING ENGINEER Jack Thorne’s immensely popular two-part play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has taken up residence in London, New York, and Melbourne, and will soon be in San Francisco (Nov. 2019) and Hamburg (2020). Recording artist and engineer extraordinaire Imogen Heap was hired to create a soundtrack for…

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