Los Angeles

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…

PACIFIC TRIO AND TWO U. S. PREMIERES Le Salon de Musiques’ fifth season’”the “Masters Rediscovered” series’”continues in the new year with the Pacific Trio. Having just returned from performances in Europe and Russia, Edith Orloff (piano), John Walz (cello), and Roger Wilkie (violin) will play two Léon Boëllmann U.S. premieres and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Piano Trio…

HERE’S YOUR NEW YEAR’S EVE COCKTAIL Last year, Pink Martini’”having brilliantly executed an extended song list covering at least a dozen styles of music sung in eight different languages’”turned the Hollywood Bowl into a festive party which involved the audience dancing in one giant conga line. With a clever, daring, delightful, masterful, and sophisticated concoction…

AN EXTRA CHANCE TO CHECK-IN With ticket sales hotter than the Great Chicago Fire, the even greater Robey Theatre Company has just announced an extension of their wildly popular, sold-out The Magnificent Dunbar Hotel  — but only  through Dec. 28, 2014, when it absolutely must close. Considering the logistics of compiling one of the biggest casts on…

JOY VEY A figurehead in the folk movement, Woody Guthrie wrote hundreds of political, traditional and children’s songs, as well as ballads and improvised works. Yet how many of you know that Woody Guthrie wrote Hanukkah songs? Indeed he did, and in a pairing as richly diverse as Guthrie’s life itself’”from the plains of tiny…