Tony Frankel

THE DROWSY CHAPERONE OPENS AT THE NORRIS Before American Musical Theater was reinvented by Oklahoma! in 1943, musical comedies were constructed piecemeal’”a comic star here, a songwriting team there, whoever was available, really. The plot was most often something to endure until the next great tune. Along with the boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl syndrome, librettos included a…

UNBEREAVABLE Bekah Brunstetter’s Be a Good Little Widow is awash with structural issues (ambiguous timeline, disconnected scenes), trite themes and relationships, and a refusal to penetrate into the characters. Why, then, have prominent companies Collaboraction in Chicago, Ars Nova in New York, Old Globe in San Diego, and now NoHo Arts Center decided to produce…

WHICH GAME IS ON? With the 2014 Hollywood Fringe Festival set to begin in June, I decided to check out Fathers at a Game. I was curious to see why this 50-minute three-hander was being billed as “The Best of Fringe – 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival.” After seeing it, I was bemused that this play…

EVERYTHING NEEDS A RETOUCH 30-year-old Jess is a mess. A New York-based dotcom genius, Jess is fraught with low self-esteem, making her an overweight, smelly, anti-social, stressed-out, aggressive, iconoclastic nerd who picks at her zits. She tells fellow nerd and co-worker Lewis during lunch at Chipotle that her mother, estranged for years, is dying back…

WHAT’S DE MATERIE? Of all the offerings during LA Phil’s Minimalist Jukebox Festival, the hard-core lovers might prefer Europe’s leading Minimalist, Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. His rarely performed, abstract, non-traditional, quasi-operatic work De Materie (“Matter”) will receive a huge production, the work’s first performance on the West Coast, on April 18 at Disney Hall. Written…

INVENTIVE MEMORY PLAY COULD USE JUST A BIT MORE MAGIC Inspired by the work of Johanna Cooper’”a broadcaster who was commonly drawn to Jewish tales’”Nicola Behrman, David Kersnar, Abbie Phillips, Heidi Stillman, and Andy White based The Last Act of Lilka Kadison on a story recounted for the NPR series “One People, Many Stories.” It…

IS THERE A SHOW DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE? There is a method of political activism called a “zap.” Basically, zaps are militant but non-violent face-to-face confrontations with persons in positions of authority, but when used in tandem with a media alert, they can be powerful weapons when furthering a cause. Since gay activists in the…

MINIMALIST JUKEBOX OFFERS MAXIMUM JOY Minimalism. The very notion of this form of music can send some musical lovers running for the hills, while others see it the most exciting and wholly refreshing form of music in the world today. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is presenting an opportunity for you to decide for yourself. Through…

I’LL TAKE ASTAIRE’S WAY TO PARADISE The great ballet choreographer George Balanchine compared Fred Astaire to Bach, and Baryshnikov claimed Astaire gave him in inferiority complex. On April 5 and 6, the second program of the DANCE+DESIGN series will examine the beloved Fred Astaire and his extraordinary talent as a dancer and choreographer. This installment…

NEWS FLASH! CIVIL WARS HITS LOS ANGELES! As part of LA Phil’s Minimalist Jukebox Festival, Jacaranda and the Los Angeles Philharmonic will be presenting two sections of Robert Wilson’s vast, ambitious, and unfinished opera, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down. On April 5 in Santa Monica, the Minneapolis Section’”a…

HAVING A “‘S WONDERFUL” TIME It should come as no surprise that the song catalog of George and Ira Gershwin’”according to Los Angeles Times’”generates about $8 million a year.  The treasure-trove of tunes created by the Gershwin brothers between the early 1920s and 1937, when George died, include “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” “Shall We…

I CAN’T CAVE ENOUGH In 1917, Kentucky cave explorer Floyd Collins discovered Crystal Cave. Located in the same area as Mammoth Cave’”the longest cave system known in the world’”the site operated as a tourist attraction by his family. In 1925, while searching for a new entrance to the hundreds of miles of interconnected caves, Collins…

REVEL IN RAVEL AND BASK IN BEETHOVEN I’m so excited about LA Phil’s upcoming program this weekend (March 28 – 30) that I don’t know where to start. Well, actually I do. Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. In 1909, impresario Serge Diaghilev commissioned Ravel to write a score for a new ballet which would be based…

PASADENA SYMPHONY’S SPRING CONCERT BLOOMS THIS WEEK Come for the most famous four notes in classical music history, stay for the Pasadena Symphony and POPS (the Symphony has incorporated the Pasadena POPS into its Association under this new name). This estimable organization has been doing splendid work this year, especially with Beethoven’s Ninth last February,…