Tony Frankel

NEED TO KNOW MORE Since moving into my six-unit apartment eight months ago, I have encountered the loveliest neighbors a man could hope for. But just two weeks ago, a  tall, gangly, middle-aged man, who was watering the lawn at the four-unit building next door, saw my husband and I hurriedly entering the locked gate in…

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN OPERA IS HERE I shudder when the time comes to see a “New American Opera.” The majority of new works are frustratingly inaccessible. Instead of reinventing opera, most composers stick with the same non-melodic minimalist recitative while librettists get more wrapped up in poeticism (such as repeating phrases for unfathomable reasons)…

SHORT ON WICKED; SHORTER ON LIT While Knott’s Scary Farm has been doing it for decades with its haunted mazes, interactive theater is gaining ground nationwide as a way to address dwindling and/or disinterested theatergoers. Live performances are battling with the internet’s popularity: The performing arts need audiences, and audiences are intrigued by the notion…

GOD HE’S GOOD A belated but welcome revue, Sondheim on Sondheim offers both songs and personal musings from one of Broadway’s best composer/lyricists. This inside look is rich with the stories behind the songs, new arrangements for old favorites, and a few obscure tunes. Part showcase  and part documentary, this Los Angeles premiere, as with other…

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE ALIVE AND WELL AND WAITING FOR GODOT Rajiv Joseph’s surprisingly complex and touching two-hander concerns a couple of guards assigned to stand watch at the walls in front of the newly built Taj Mahal, which will be revealed to the public for the first time since construction began 16 years earlier….

COME YE TO THE FAIR…LADY, THAT IS I’m rather certain one cannot visit enough  productions of My Fair Lady. The 1956 musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, tells the tale of Professor Henry Higgins, a puffed-up upper-class grammarian, and Eliza Doolittle, his lower-class, flower girl protégé whom Higgins turns into a lady by changing her…

HOT DOG SUCKING AHEAD You know, it’s funny, I was asking a friend just the other day if he knows of any show in town which has a guy sucking on a hot dog. And it would be great if it wasn’t a drama but something cutting edge. Oh, plus some wildly original vaudevillian humor….

SUNNY AND SCARE You think theater in Los Angeles can be frightening? Well, here’s entertainment that’s intentionally soulless. “It’s so funny, you’ll laugh your head off” takes on a whole new meaning with The Groundlings Halloween Show (a.k.a. You Paid to Die Tonight II),  a frightening amalgam of sketch comedy and all the scary shit you…

GANGSTER MUSICAL You’ve seen the movie, you’ve seen the car, now see the musical. Meet the most famous robbing, murdering, loving couple in U.S. history. From their first meeting at a West Texas diner through their tumultuous courtship and romance, from their brief, history-making crime spree to their fateful final drive through Louisiana, this thrilling…

A RARE TREAT SERVED PIPING HOT The Stephen Schwartz/Joseph Stein musical The Baker’s Wife never made it to Broadway. The musical folded in Washington. D.C. in 1976 before reaching New York City but has since gained something of a cult status in both the United States and England (listen to the “original cast” CD starring…