Tony Frankel

FOOD FIGHT Using Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children (1939) as a template, writer Peter Howard has created a wartime tale about the need to survive in challenging times. But the war isn’t an overseas conflict. It is one that takes place in a school cafeteria, where Ana, a.k.a. Lunch Lady Courage, has arrived to…

EVERYBODY HAS A BALL AT THIS CINDERELLA Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella (La Cenerentola) was written in 1817 during the bel canto era when operas were written to showcase beautiful singing, but LA Opera’s delightful production, which opened on Saturday, actually showcased the talents of Spanish Director Joan Font. The spirited and humorous production skittered around a…

NETHER NOR Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, right? Not anymore. It’s fascinating that the World English Dictionary defines reality as “the state of things as they are or appear to be, rather than as one might wish them to be.” As they appear to be. Are we to take that…

HAVING ISSUES WITH ISSUES Ken LaZebnik’s On the Spectrum, which opened last week at the Fountain Theatre, belongs to a genre known as Theatre of Identity, aka Social Issues Theatre; the idea is to promote a particular cultural identity – in this case, autism. Plays like the currently running Tribes (which deals with deafness) were…

SOUL MASSAGE It’s easy to walk into a salon and pamper your body with a facial, pedicure, or rubdown, but there is a different salon in town where once a month there is an opportunity to have your soul massaged: a Chamber Music Concert Series called Le Salon de Musiques, a compendium of LA’s most…

L. A. THEATER RISES FROM THE DEAD With an assemblage of the bravest actors in Los Angeles, Zombie Joe returns with an all-new Urban Death, the naturalistic horror show in the style of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. In just under an hour, this ghoulishly delightful series of vignettes serves up unfathomable repulsions, profound evils, distressed…

GAY ABSTRACTION For years, Ken Roht has proved himself to be one of the most inventive theater practitioners in Los Angeles. His avant-garde works include the renowned 99 Cent Only shows, which contain extravagant costumes by Ann Closs-Farley and sets wholly manufactured with items acquired at the 99 Cent Only Store. The original, entertaining and…

WHAT WERE JEW THINKING? Baby boomers should recall the time when a great comedy album could be played with regularity. Some of my favorites were Bill Cosby Is a Very Funny Fellow…Right! (1963), which contained his iconic “Noah” sketches; George Carlin’s Class Clown (1972) with its infamous track entitled “Seven Words You Can Never Say…

THE CORN IS HIGH INDEED Messrs. Rodgers and Hammerstein reinvented American Musical Theater for the ages when they created Oklahoma! in 1943, incorporating song and dance to tell their story rather than detract from it. The musical avoids creaking with age because Hammerstein’s book shuns overt sentimentality, and the lyrics are chock-full of poetic imagery…

ON THE WAY TO PARADISE [EDITOR’S NOTE: Since this 2013 review, Paradise has been re-tooled. Please see our new review of the 2018 production.] There is a telling item buried among the bric-a-brac of Stephanie Kerley Schwartz’s detailed country set of an economically depressed, coal-mining, hillbilly burg named Paradise:   A tin sign shows a forest…

MUSICAL WITH A CHECKERED PAST GETS A CHECKERED PRODUCTION Chess, the musical about two chess tournaments between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War, is the 1979 brain child of lyricist Tim Rice, who teamed up with ABBA composers Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus to create the (still) immensely popular 1984 concept album….