Los Angeles

LOVE THAT GOES BUMP IN THE NIGHT Conor McPherson’s plays are so rooted in the characters that plot is really revelation. With unforced warmth, he captures loneliness in the act of self-effacement, and love as the best way to prove we’re really here. Geffen Playhouse’s offering  The Night Alive  is no nocturne’”much in the vein of McPherson’s…

A RIDE YOU WON’T FIND IN ANAHEIM Any neighborhood with the elevated name of Silver Lake should have freshwater dolphins and interesting old hotels and a disfigured serial killer who stalks the shrubbery on the anniversary of his parasailing accident. Instead recently on a steep pavement I witnessed this conversation between an attractive pedestrian and…

A FAMOUS LITERARY FEUD MAKES GREAT DRAMA In a 1980 television interview with Dick Cavett, novelist and literary critic Mary McCarthy made an especially biting comment about her longtime adversary and fellow writer, playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman, saying that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Unfortunately, Hellman was watching…

NOTHING FISHY ABOUT THIS PROGRAM Former music critic and Chicago Symphony Orchestra program annotator Phillip Huscher wrote that Anselm Hí¼ttenbrenner, one of Franz Schubert’s regular drinking partners, loved to tell the story of the night he invited the composer over to share some bottles of Szekszárd, a Hungarian red wine he had received as a…

UP THE RABBIT HOLE There’s been a good deal of speculation over the last hundred-and-something years regarding the sexuality of Charles Dodgson, an Oxford professor of mathematics more famous for his writings under the pen name Lewis Carroll. Severally, storytellers Dennis Potter and Robert Wilson have investigated the subject; so have many market-minded biographers.  That Dodgson…

EVERYONE’S INTERESTED IN THE LATEST PASSION The majority of Bach’s choral music dates from 1723 onward during his long tenure as Cantor of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. It was during that lengthy period, which lasted until his death, that he composed more than 230 cantatas (many lost to posterity) and five “passions,” of…

AN EXPERIENCE NOT TO BE MISSED On a website which attempts to list every Anton Bruckner orchestral recording offered to the public (www.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…

UNTO US A CHILD  IS MADE This fascinating drama by playwright Zayd Dohrn is set in the bizarre subculture of women who buy dolls that eerily resemble actual babies. Can this possibly be enough material here for a play?   There are many reasons for buying super-realistic baby dolls, one supposes – you could collect them, or…

MUTANT — AS IN FREAK OF NATURE After watching the roaring, sputtering, and cursing along with regretful descriptions of drug use and parental abuse back in the “bad old days,” I had to ask myself, “Wha’ kind of crazy fucking show is this?” I’m not really one to use such language, but writer-performer Mitch Hara’s…

SAILING THROUGH FOG The title of Eugene O’Neill’s 1921 drama Anna Christie is the nom de guerre chosen by a hard-knock 18-year-old who decides that if she’s going to get pawed, she’ll damn well get paid for it. She hates men, God damn them, especially sailors, starting with the absentee father who entrusted her upbringing…

IN GOOD COMPANY “It’s a revue, but not a revue,” Stephen Sondheim said about Company when he was interviewed at Segerstrom in 2013. This surprised me because the groundbreaking 1970 musical is a concept musical, meaning that the themes of a show (in this case, marriage and commitment) are woven throughout the play, but do…

A YEAR OF ECSTATIC MOMENTS Last year, as ever, I missed what I am told was some of the best theater that went up in Southern California. I don’t know what’s Best or Most. I saw shows that knocked me out and shows that didn’t. It is always a profound inspiration to see people do…

TRIFONOV MAKES DISNEY HALL DEBUT All it took was one performance from 23-year-old Daniil Trifonov to resoundingly validate why he is the current Big Thing of the piano world. The Liszt-like master’s rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Hollywood Bowl (followed by a jaw-dropping encore of Stravinsky’s Firebird for piano) convinced me…

THE GREATEST PIECE NEVER HEARD Missa Solemnis is one of Beethoven’s last works, and one of his greatest. He labored over it for four years (the most time he ever gave to composing), and then wrote on the completed score, “From the heart, may it go further to the heart!” While the epic Solemn Mass…