Tony Frankel

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, SKID You want to hear some of the freshest, funniest dialogue in town? Head over to Cornerstone’s world premiere of Love on San Pedro. James McManus’s script was developed via personal interviews he had with Skid Row denizens, so the stories in the play take place in this one square mile…

TOVEY SLAMS DOWN THE FIFTH A funny thing happened on the way to witty raconteur and conductor Bramwell Tovey’s presentation of his Songs of the Paradise Saloon featuring trumpet soloist Alison Balsom at Disney Hall last Sunday: I came for this newer concerto but ended up being blown away by his ecstatic interpretation of Shostakovich’s…

EUROPEAN ELEGANCE IN LOS ANGELES Once while in Salzburg, I happened upon a chamber concert in a private home (well, they called it a home, I called it a tiny palace). Our host explained that piano trios’”compositions for two stringed instruments and a piano’”were designed for intimate spaces such as the luxuriant parlor we sat…

AN EXPERIENCE NOT TO BE MISSED On  a website which attempts to list every Anton Bruckner orchestral recording offered to the public (abruckner.com), the discography collector and annotator John F. Berky states that the Austrian composer “expanded the concept of the symphonic form in ways that have never been witnessed before or since. When listening to…

BLOATED SCORE OR A BIG FAT MUSICAL TRIUMPH? LA Opera’s production of Verdi’s Falstaff, his last opera which premiered in 1893, fascinatingly elucidates why his one successful comic romp has both detractors and ardent admirers. Those who crave memorable arias will be disappointed, but those who appreciate evocative orchestral music which expresses character and blazes…

ROGUE MACHINE’S PRODUCTION KEEPS SCRIPT FROM FALLING In Deanna Jent’s Falling, a mom is reaching burnout: Her 18-year-old autistic son is consuming her time, her marriage is shaky, her mother-in-law is visiting, and she has a resentful daughter. With so much tension in the house, all it takes is an unseen barking dog to heighten…

THIS SHOULD BE A YEARLY INSTITUTION It seems a shame to fawn over Los Angeles Master Chorale’s splendid rendering of Carl Orff’s pagan-fest, Carmina Burana, because I can’t tell you to mark your calendar now for the next time. Even though LAMC has visited it before under all four of their music directors, who knows…

A DANCE PIECE THAT’S A KEEPER The frequency of site-specific events continues to grow exponentially in the City of Angels, but Heidi Duckler has been doing it for many years, creating unique dance performances in spaces as disparate as Laundromats, museums, churches, civic buildings and even a vintage 1961 Oasis trailer. Now she takes us…

HIT THE WALLIS A brand new theater has opened its doors in Beverly Hills, but nothing could have prepared me for its magnificence in contemporary construction and design. The 500-seat Bram Goldsmith Theater opens to the public this week with the Martha Graham Dance Company, but the state-of-the-art theater is just one part of The…

ITZHAK PERLMAN PLAYS DUAL ROLE OF CONDUCTOR AND SOLOIST AT DISNEY HALL Surely it’s no mere coincidence: On a recent road trip, I played over and over the 1979 recording of Itzhak Perlman playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. I own several recordings of the piece, but this is my favorite. The Israeli-born violinist not only brings…

THE PHANTOM OF DISNEY HALL It’s positively spooky looking for something to do on Halloween. Are you tired of coming home from that noisy Halloween party with smeared make-up? Are you weary of competing with the crowds on Santa Monica Boulevard? Are the high-heel pumps you only wear once a year causing Godzilla-sized blisters? Are…

A STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF ACTING Last August, Time’s cover story, “A World Without Bees,” brought to light a frightening occurrence: In recent years, there have been mass deaths of honeybees around the globe, known as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” Scientists are surmising the reasons – agricultural pesticides, parasitic mites, bacterial and HIV-like diseases – but they’ve…

A CLOSED-MOUTH KISS There are so many sexual allusions and situations in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate that it is remarkable the musical came out in 1948. I surmise the reason that Porter got away with such startling and blatant innuendos was his ability to wrap them up in sophisticated, witty lyrics. The musical is…

SEEING WHAT’S INVISIBLE In describing Invisible Cities, allow me to paraphrase Gore Vidal’s critique of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel of the same name on which this production is based: Of all tasks in reviewing director Yuval Sharon’s marvelously inventive theater event in Union Station, recounting Christopher Cerrone’s opera is the most difficult and perfectly irrelevant….