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Tony Frankel
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Chicago Theater Review: OKLAHOMA! (Lyric Opera)
CORNOGRAPHY It’s been 70 years since Rodgers and Hammerstein ushered in the “golden era” of Broadway musicals with Oklahoma! but given the right production, the innovative musical can still soar. Old-fashioned staging, however, can thicken the aging brown dust on the bright green corn; that’s when the innovative musical can show its age. Well, an Oklahoma! twister blew through Lyric Opera last night,…
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Stage and Cinema Interview: MICHAEL PERETZIAN (Director of DYING CITY at Rogue Machine in L.A.)
DYING TO DIRECT It turns out that a career as a top literary agent at William Morris and CAA served as a solid stepping-stone for Michael Peretzian’s dream job: directing in theater. As an agent, Peretzian may have represented many distinguished screenwriters and directors, including John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr….
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Chicago Theater Review: COLLECTED STORIES (American Blues Theater)
PERFECTED STORIES Ever since Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories premiered at South Coast Rep in 1996, and especially after it hit the Broadway boards starring Linda Lavin in 2010, the one-set, two-character play — being inexpensive to produce — is seemingly occurring at any given time somewhere in the U.S.A. There is some predictability in the plot,…
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Los Angeles Cinema Feature: LAST REMAINING SEATS (Los Angeles Conservancy)
MOVIES THE WAY THEY WERE MEANT TO BE SEEN 26 years ago, a handful of volunteers from The Los Angeles Conservancy, a nonprofit that recognizes, preserves, and revitalizes the historic architectural of L.A. County, dreamt up Last Remaining Seats, a summertime program which presents classic films and live entertainment in historic movie palaces. The brilliantly…
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Chicago Theater Review and Commentary: THE EMPEROR’S NEW THREADS (Lifeline Theatre)
LEAVE IT TO CHILDREN’S THEATER TO MAKE THE BIGGEST STATEMENT OF ALL The biggest opening in Chicago last week was the behemoth pre-Broadway spectacle Big Fish, but right across town at Lifeline Theatre is another musical with more heart, a more resonant message, better songs, funnier dialogue, and performers who are infinitely more watchable than their non-distinctive…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE LAKE EFFECT (Silk Road Rising at Chicago Temple)
SQUALL IN THE FAMILY In meteorology, the phenomena known as Lake Effect occurs when a cold system glides over the warmer water of a large lake and dumps huge amounts of precipitation, usually snow, in the surrounding area. This weather pattern can occur anywhere, but it is especially hard-hitting in the areas around the Great…
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Chicago Theater Review: PLOUGHED UNDER: AN AMERICAN SONGBOOK (House Theatre at Chopin)
PLOUGHED UNDER BY GOOD INTENTIONS AND BAD SONGWRITING What a great idea: Create modern folk songs to represent Americans whose voices have been given short shrift (or ploughed under) by history. There are boundless unsung heroes who can attain mythical stature through inspirational ditties. Given the little we know factually about the subjects, there is room for…
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Chicago Theater Review: CORE OF THE PUDEL (Trap Door Theatre)
FAUST IN SPACE Just because I recommend Trap Door’s latest production doesn’t mean that I understand it. Core of the PUDEL (pronounced “poodle”) is an Avant Garde/Experimental/Movement Theater production conceived and directed by Thom Pasculli, who draws from Goethe’s Faust to present a one-hour rendering that is practically impossible to follow for those unfamiliar with…
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Chicago Theater Review: YELLOW MOON (Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe)
ALMOST A FULL MOON The theater has been sorely affected by electronic communication. Since the advent of the internet, at least, the cumbersome amount of news bits and twittering has infected storytelling like a cancer. Modern playwrights must be so caught up in instant missives and self-promotion on Facebook (or some such nonsense) that even…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS (La Mirada Theatre)
OH BROTHERS! Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: Talk about a musical with a strange history! It begins with the Ancient Roman legend “The Rape of the Sabine Women” — attributed to Plutarch — followed by Stephen Vincent Benét, who transferred the tale to Tennessee in his short story, “The Sobbin’ Women.” Then comes the 1954…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: A CHORUS LINE (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
THE MUSICAL WITH LEGS Musical Theatre West’s (MTW) exuberant production of A Chorus Line proves that the musical is as fresh as the day it appeared almost forty years ago, when the standard Broadway musical was already fading away, making room for the jukebox musicals and mostly hollow spectacles we are still forced to endure….
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Los Angeles Theater Review: OUR CLASS (Son of Semele at Atwater Village Theatre)
SO MANY ATROCITIES IN ONE EVENING When stories appear which elucidate the carnage during WWII, many look to heaven and ask, “Why?” But the script and execution of Our Class, about a true-life European massacre, are so rife with problems that you now have other reasons to clench a fist to the sky with the…
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Regional Theater Review: SMOKEFALL (South Coast Repertory in Coast Mesa)
SMOKEFALL GETS IN YOUR EYES The most amazing thing about Noah Haidle’s world premiere of Smokefall at South Coast Rep is Marsha Ginsberg’s scenic design of a simple yet beautifully crafted two-story family home in Grand Rapids, Michigan; a light wood finish and the dainty pastels of mid-century furniture offer a comfort and void at…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: THEN. NOW. ONWARD! (L.A. Contemporary Dance Company)
L.A. Contemporary Dance Company (LACDC) presented their spring program last weekend and what began in the first half as inaccessible artiness became a thrilling showcase for co-founder and Artistic Director Kate Hutter, both as choreographer and dancer. The second half of Then. Now. Onward!, which played in the Diavolo Dance Space, began with Hutter’s Unravel,…
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Los Angeles Event Coverage: BROADWAY MY WAY (The 29th Annual S.T.A.G.E. at Saban Theatre)
LADIES IN THEIR GOLDEN YEARS REAWAKEN BROADWAY’S GOLDEN AGE The Southland Theatre Artists Goodwill Event (best known by its acronym S.T.A.G.E.) presented its 29th cavalcade of stars this year at the snazzy Art Deco-styled 1930 Saban Theatre (originally the Fox Wilshire). This annual fundraiser (created by Michael Kearns and James Carroll Pickett in 1984) raised more…
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San Diego Theater Review: A DOLL’S HOUSE (Old Globe, Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre)
NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED Henrik Ibsen stated that he had no conscious thought of making propaganda with A Doll’s House (1879). Yet many productions have a feminist bent: Nora is the misunderstood wife of a husband who sees her as a doll, a thing he uses to round out his modular family. As such,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: MELANCHOLIA (Los Angeles Theatre Center)
BETWEEN IRAQ AND A HARD PLACE A soldier named Mario returns from Iraq just in time for the 2005 New Year’s celebration with his East Los Angeles family, friends and novia – but he also returns traumatized by war. Fueled by guilt and sorrow, he has nightmares and begins drinking more and more, spinning out…
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Los Angeles Music Feature: MAX RAABE & PALAST ORCHESTER (Walt Disney Concert Hall)
MAX RAABE & PALAST ORCHESTER MAKE VENUE DEBUT AT WALT DISNEY CONCERT HALL The public’s fondness for songs has an extensive and nearly unbroken history, and one of the acmes of this history took place in America from the 1910s into the 1950s. During this time, songsmiths created ditties that were so well constructed in…
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Los Angeles Music Review: THE TALLIS SCHOLARS (presented by The Da Camera Society at the Bradbury Building)
TALLIS SOME MORE With their presentation of the Broadway Festival last week, the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College not only validated the extraordinary rebirth of downtown Los Angeles but offered as the festival centerpiece a chamber concert by the Tallis Scholars inside the revitalized 1893 Bradbury Building. Seated on multiple levels around…
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San Diego Opera Review: MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL (San Diego Opera)
FITTING FOR A SAINT Although he wrote at least 15 complete operas, Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) is not a familiar name, even to many in the opera world. The first-generation modernist Italian composer yielded other forms of classical music (concertos, chamber works, sonatas) but also composed hundreds of film scores – many uncredited; the Sinfonia del…
Theater Review: MEN OF SOUL (Black Ensemble Theater / Chicago)
by Mitchell Oldham | July 1, 2026
in Chicago, TheaterWHY A BOX OFFICE HIT CAN STILL LOSE MONEY
by Leslie Rosenberg | July 1, 2026
in Extras, FilmTheater Preview: PROOF (El Portal Theatre / North Hollywood)
by pwsadmin | June 30, 2026
in Los Angeles, Theater
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