Tony Frankel

MTG DEFIBRILLATES DOA MUSICAL Sheaths can be written about how deadly the musical Death Takes a Holiday is, and where the creators went wrong. What’s more important is that director Calvin Remsberg, musical director Jim May, and a wholly flawless cast have pulled a Frankenstein: They electrified dead tissue and created a vivid being. It…

DAISEY: I LOVE HIM, I LOVE HIM NOT I’m jealous of Mike Daisey. In American Utopias at Royce Hall, the infamous monologist fulminated and commentated about three interpolated subjects near and dear to my heart: Disney, Activism, and Community Gatherings. The corpulent and energetic Daisey, who sat at a table mopping himself, was by-and-large riveting…

SNAPSHOTS OF PARIS What do composers Léon Boëllmann, Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc, and Bohuslav MartinŠ¯ have in common? According to François Chouchan and Julius Reder Carlson, the answer is Paris. The programmer/artistic director and resident musicologist of Le Salon de Musiques, the best Chamber Music outfit in Los Angeles, contextualized three sonatas written for cello…

KILLER PUSSY Suicide! Euthanasia! Incest! Health Care! Racism! Old age! Corporate America! Spirits! The afterlife! Prison! Duplicity! Playwright Josefina López (Real Women Have Curves) is tackling so many issues in her new play A Cat Named Mercy that it suffocates what could have been a most compelling story. As if living with her death-wishing, diabetic,…

MAKE IT ANOTHER OLD-FASHIONED PLEASE It’s something of a shocker, really. I had a great time watching Let’s Misbehave, a jukebox musical slim on both premise and reality. It’s actually more of a cabaret in which three super-talented and likeable performers knock off 34 Cole Porter ditties with style and elegance, and that’s the part…

A SCRUMPTIOUS SCANDINAVIAN FEAST Russian conductor Andrey Boreyko arrives at Disney Hall this weekend for a contemplative and vivid Nordic program with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The returning conductor will be united with the phenomenal Hilary Hahn, who consistently offers a captivating combination of classiness, élan, ferocity, concentration and shading. She will be playing Danish…

WHEN A WORD OR TWO WILL NOT DO A Word or Two is an apt title for Christopher Plummer’s solo show about Christopher Plummer and Christopher Plummer’s love of language. He wants to celebrate language in all of its “infinite variety, majesty, and beauty.” His love of language gave him an escape early in life,…

NOTHING MINOR ABOUT IT First-timers to Bach’s B Minor Mass, which Los Angeles Master Chorale is offering for two performances this weekend, may possibly be overwhelmed. First of all, a glance at the 27 movement titles alone can be intimidating: “Kyrie eleison,” “Et in terra pax,” and “Qui tollis peccata mundi,” especially for the non-religious…

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR When Umi Garrett played Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star with her hands behind her back on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2009, what first appeared as cutesy fun-and-games suddenly turned into a recital to be remembered: The 8-year-old budding piano prodigy stunned the world executing a section from Franz Liszt’s technically formidable…

THAT AIN’T THE WAY TO HAVE FUN, SON One of the most exciting events to come out of Los Angeles theater in the last few years was Zombie Joe’s Urban Death,  a naturalistic horror show in the style of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. I stated in my review that his creepy one-hour compilation of original, jocular,…

EVERYTHING IS NEW AGAIN It was quite a blow when it was announced that both Christoph Eschenbach and Christian Tetzlaff’”due to illness’”canceled their engagement with the LA Phil at Disney Hall last weekend. While I wish them both a speedy recovery, their withdrawal resulted in one of the most exciting evenings with the LA Phil…

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID The two most important aspects of the right kind of cabaret act are the singer and the songs. But when you go to see Laura Benanti’s new cabaret In Constant Search of the Right Kind of Attention at Catalina Bar & Grill (if you can get tickets to her last performance…