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Los Angeles
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Opera Review: AINADAMAR (LA Opera)
LORCA’S GHOST IN FRACTURED LIGHT “Verde que te quiero verde…” The first time I heard Lorca’s Romance Sonámbulo, its incantatory line “Green, how I want you green” slipped under my skin. The poem’s haunted beauty and dreamlike dread were something to feel rather than simply understand. That sensation returned at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where…
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Theater Review: FURLOUGH’S PARADISE (Geffen Playhouse)
When There’s A Second Knock On The Door: Love and Lockup in Furlough’s Paradise In Furlough’s Paradise, a. k. payne has crafted something that moves like a whisper but hits like a reckoning. Now in its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, this 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize-winning one-act plants two women in a…
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Theater Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (Nocturne Theatre)
HORRORS IN THE ROUND Little Shop of Horrors, based on the 1960 science-fiction film by Roger Corman, opened off-Broadway at the Orpheum Theatre in Manhattan’s East Village on July 27, 1982. The production, directed by lyricist Howard Ashman, was so popular that David Geffen and team swooped in to buy the rights. The music, composed by…
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Theater Review: HOW TO FAIL (Actors’ Gang Theater)
ONE MAN. 60 MINUTES OF DISASTER. EVERYTHING FAILS MAGNIFICENTLY! Ron Campbell is a clown all right. This is apparent from his first pratfall, which occurs about eleven seconds into his show, How to Fail. In this day and age of radical, assaultive clowns who prey on their audiences’ psychological foibles and are more comfortable staring…
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Theater Review: YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO THE END OF THE WORLD! (South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa)
END-OF-WORLD TRAGICOMEDY CRACKS, BLEEDS AND THRIVES The end arrives not with a sob, but with a drag queen in a glittering black pantsuit, standing in a celestial spotlight, grinning like they’re about to host the universe’s weirdest game show. Keiko Green’s You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! doesn’t so much begin…
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Theater Review: CORKTOWN ’39 (Rogue Machine at The Matrix)
IN CORKTOWN ’39, THE LIVING ARE JUST GHOSTS WITH BETTER TIMING Mark Mendelson‘s tightly composed set at The Matrix Theatre is a room cloaked in aging wealth at the Keating family’s Philadelphia home. Heavy curtains. Soft chairs. Whiskey always within reach. It feels like it once held power and still holds its consequences. That atmosphere…
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Dance Review: THIS REMINDS ME OF YOU (BODYTRAFFIC at The Joyce Theater in NYC)
LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE: BODYTRAFFIC DAZZLES AGAIN, THIS TIME AT THE JOYCE Some performances linger in the body long after the curtain falls. I caught L.A. Dance Company BODYTRAFFIC at The Wallis in Beverly Hills last December and left the theater nearly giddy, unsure if I’d just witnessed lightning in a bottle. As luck would have…
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Theater Review: HELLAS (The School of Night at the Broadwater)
A HELLUVA HELLAS Ancient drama gets short shrift here in Los Angeles. Sure, we get the stories, but the shows are usually adaptations, hardly ever a straight translation, and when we do, they’re performed in today’s style. In 2018, The School of Night did something radical: they performed Seneca’s Hercules Insane as written and with…
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Theater Review: IN THE BAR OF A TOKYO HOTEL (Tennessee Williams at the Hudson Backstage Theatre in Hollywood)
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ SELDOM SEEN PLAY SHOWS WHY IT’S SO SELDOM SEEN It can be a curse to start one’s literary or dramatic career with a masterpiece. Doing so serves to intensify the expectations of one’s readership or audience while inflating the artist’s creative anxieties. Towards the end of his life, author of the classic antiwar…
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Theater Review: ARISTOTLE/ALEXANDER (Company of Angels)
Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers. — Aristotle When you have endless arts options to choose from every day, you eventually develop simple, blunt, sometimes arbitrary, rules to help decide what to see. One…
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Concert Review: CELEBRATING JOHN WILLIAMS (LA Phil)
Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic’s Celebrating John Williams concerto on April 5, 2025, as not so much a concert as it was a cultural séance in which John Williams’ scores, so deeply embedded in the American psyche, were summoned and reanimated with startling freshness. The program, filled entirely with Williams’ most iconic works, could…
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Theater Review: SHOWSTOPPER (Gary Stockdale at Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks)
HIGH NOTES AND HARD KNOCKS: SHOWSTOPPER CHARTS THE SONGBOOK OF SURVIVAL Singer songwriter Gary Stockdale has a loyal but eclectic fan base. His long-term devotees date back to legendary TV producer Steven Bochco’s cutting-edge and sadly short-lived musical police drama Cop Rock, in which he played a drug dealer who stood before the bench and…
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Theater Review: SUBURBIA (Mojo Ensemble at Odyssey Theatre)
Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do. — American essayist Sloane Crosley First, I want to acknowledge the passing of Ron Sossi, Founding Artistic Director of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, who made theatre in LA…
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Theater Review: INTO THE WOODS (Musical Theatre West)
THE FAIRY TALES BREAK– AND THAT’S THE POINT The stories are still here. Cinderella. Jack. Little Red. Rapunzel. A Baker and his Wife, tangled in a curse and each other. Into the Woods has always worn its source material like a costume—but it keeps a blade tucked underneath. Musical Theatre West’s new production doesn’t sharpen…
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Theater Review: THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE (Wisteria Theater in North Hollywood)
BEE MINUS Now playing at Wisteria Theater in North Hollywood is one of the few wonderful musicals from this century so far, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, by William Finn (music and lyrics) and Rachel Sheinkin (book). Now 20 years old, this delightful musical follows a group of middle schoolers as they struggle…
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Theater Review: THE UNRAVELING (Ghost Road Theatre)
LOOM WITH A VIEW Ghost Road Theatre’s The Unraveling pulls you into its strange, hypnotic orbit and doesn’t let go. This is a truly original work with some breathtaking theatrical coups. Ann Noble is mesmerizing as Susan, a reclusive former professor who loved teaching Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, but modern-day students and their ever-present…
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Concert Review: HÄIM LEADS HANDEL & BACH (The Handel Project, LA Phil)
VOICES OF ANTIQUITY, REAWAKENED Historically informed performance is no longer a specialty. Period practice vocabulary has entered the mainstream, influencing how modern orchestras perform baroque repertoire. Yet Emmanuelle Haïm‘s recent Los Angeles Philharmonic program—Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Bach’s Magnificat—had more to offer than expertly researched performance practice. It was baroque music with life in its…
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Concert Review: ACCORDING TO RAY (MUSE/IQUE at Mark Taper Forum)
Rachael Worby, Founding Artistic and Music Director of MUSE/IQUE, is hosting the inspirational 2025 season “Make Some Noise: Music and Stories of American Defiance and Hope” which spotlights transformative American artists and thinkers who rejected norms and limitations to forge a new and better future, while teaching us that nothing is impossible. And what better…
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Theater Review: ONE FOR MY BABY (Broadway-Bound World-Premiere Musical at El Portal in North Hollywood)
SWINGS BIG, SHINES BRIGHT All Roads Theatre Company just set the bar sky-high with One for My Baby, a slick, jazz-soaked tribute to the music of Harold Arlen. This is old-school showbiz at its best—big voices, big orchestrations, and enough high-voltage talent to power a city block. With a Broadway-caliber cast and an 11-piece band…
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Opera Review: THE CAMP (JACCC Aratani Theatre in L.A.)
A PROMISING AND AMBITIOUS THE CAMP Los Angeles has had a flurry of new operas within the past few years. Among the most promising and ambitious I’ve seen is The Camp, by Lionelle Hamanaka (libretto) and Daniel Kessner (music), which just had a two-weekend run at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center Aratani Theatre….
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