Los Angeles

MTG BRINGS ANGELS TO LOS ANGELES The angels of concert-staged-reading productions come winging into town this week with a production of City of Angels, the 1989 musical spoof and homage to hard-boiled detective fiction, 1940s film noir genre, and the men who made both. This rarely produced gem was a huge hit, playing 879 performances…

AFRICAN MYTH ON THE BAYOU An atmosphere of mythic mystery suffuses Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s compelling drama about family, sacrifice, and deceit.   Awash with undercurrents of melancholy and rage, here’s a drama that manages to wrestle both powerful themes and ferocious emotions, even within a remarkably intimate context. It’s admittedly true that we find ourselves occasionally…

BRIGHT LIGHTS ON A DIM HORIZON Two hit men wait in a shitty Vegas motel for the boss to give them a goddamn call.   One of ’em (Leon Russom) is an all-business, no-shit guy on the verge of retirement; the other (Garrett Michael Langston) is a congenital fuck-up first-time gunman twitchin’ to get in over…

MERRY-GO-ROUND PLAYWRITING More of a writing exercise than a fleshed-out drama, Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries begins with an intriguing premise, but sputters to a halt when we realize that this much-hyped “Pulitzer-finalist” has written himself into a corner. Flip-flopping throughout a 30-year time span, the play is constructed as a series of meetings between…

DON’T MIZ IT Unlike most of the characters in the blockbuster sung-through musical Les Misérables, the show itself will never die. Consistently presented either on Broadway, national tours, and/or globally since the English-language version opened on the West End in 1985, audiences can’t get enough of Victor Hugo’s story about ex-con and do-gooder Jean Valjean…

MORE LANG FOR YOUR BUCK While Jessica Lang has made a name for herself in the dance world as an independent choreographer, dance patrons in Los Angeles may find this dancemaker difficult to place. Because the majority of troupes that visit here offer programs by the company’s namesake (Paul Taylor, Lar Lubovitch, Bill T. Jones),…

DEARTH OF DRAMA Steven Drukman’s Death of the Author takes its name, premise, and some of the devices in its dialogue from a Roland Barthes essay on postmodernism.   It’s wonderful to see Drukman adapt Gore Vidal’s riposte to William Buckley about crypto-Nazis and fold it into a pun on Marxist literary theory.   But there’s nothing…

A PRODUCTION FOR TUTTE TO COSíŒ UP TO For those who think that the “semi-staging” for Così fan tutte, which opens on Friday at Disney Hall, is simply a world-class orchestra accompanying opera singers holding a libretto in their hands, you are in for a surprise. Fully staged, fully memorized, and beautifully designed, the operas…

IF YOU GUILD IT, THEY WILL COME There is an outstanding music outfit which offers a series of chamber music concerts, introducing world renowned artists to Los Angeles audiences. Having seen some of its recent presentations of repertoire played at its premier level by sparkling chamber musicians, including the Borromeo and Avalon String Quartets (review),…