Los Angeles

ALBEE SEEING YOU AT THE RENBERG On the surface, Edward Albee’s The Goat,  or Who Is Sylvia? is about a middle-aged architect, Martin, who has a zoophilic love affair that threatens to destroy his family and everything he’s worked for, including an international prize for architecture. Look a little deeper, and you’ll see that this extraordinary…

INTO THE FOLD Recently divorced, and abandoned by her beloved three-legged dog, well-respected origami artist Ilana has fortified herself in her studio. Surrounded by paper, Chinese take-out boxes, and a giant, hovering origami hawk, the dejected, worn-down, and corrosive Ilana will be coaxed back to life by high school teacher Andy’”a goofy, kindhearted, and energetic…

SHINING NEW LUMIERE ON A FABLED CLASSIC Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera created a sensation when it was first unveiled as a serialization in the French newspaper Le Gaulois from September 1909 to January 1910. Based   partly on actual events that haunted the Paris Opera in the late 19th century, the tale…

A FLAT-FOOTED RACE In April 2014, lawyer and LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling was banned from the NBA for life and fined $2.5 million by the league after private recordings of him making racist comments were made public by TMZ, a gossiping media outlet that I believe is a far greater threat to humanity than…

THE UNIVERSAL AND THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE Holst’s The Planets and the U.S. premiere of English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Erskine, a Concerto for Drumset & Orchestra: This very odd pairing arrived courtesy of the LA Phil on Tuesday, and while one was out of this world, the other was decidedly earthbound. The eponymous instrumentalist of Turnage’s four-movement…

A SORT OF JUDGMENT The Life and Sort of Death of Eric Argyle, Ross Dungan’s 2013 play about fate-after-death, is pleasantly eloquent and several times touching in a comforting way, but it offers little structural or thematic originality. A quietly desperate nobody straight out of T.S. Eliot dies a bumbling death and has his life…

THE PERFECT COCK Whether breeding chickens or designing your kitchen with rooster tchotchkes, it can be challenging to find the perfect cock. But if you’re looking to find  it in the theater, your search is over. I refer to the play Cock, the Los Angeles premiere of which opens at Rogue Machine this week. The punning,…

UNBURIED RED-HEADED STEPCHILD In the mid-1990s, Sam Shepard rewrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1978 play, Buried Child, for a new Steppenwolf production that director Gary Sinise dragged from Chicago to Broadway, where I saw and loathed it. It was a page-one, for-the-yokels rewrite, shrugging off the ambiguous Gothicism of the original to dress itself in frothy…

DANIEL EZRALOW: WHAT IS DANCE? To say that Daniel Ezralow is a busy man this week is an understatement. After making a worldwide name for himself as a dancemaker and aerial choreographer for theater, film, opera, concerts, and television, Ezralow is debuting his new Los Angeles-based company, Ezralow Dance, at the Ford Amphitheatre this Saturday,…

NOT AS TRYING AS IT COULD HAVE BEEN A slight bio-drama is given heft by larger-than-life performances in this latest outing from International City Theatre in Long Beach. Trying is based on playwright Joanna McClelland Glass’s own experiences as a 25-year-old woman from Saskatoon working as a secretary for the great, cantankerous Francis Biddle’”attorney general…

ONE IN A MILLION Rabid theatergoers who often attend plays are akin to miners panning for gold: The drudgery and disappointment from months of discovering rocks is dissipated when a precious nugget arrives. One in the Chamber is one such gem. Writer/director Marja-Lewis Ryan has crafted a harrowing account of a normal American family torn…

FORD INTO PECKINPAH VIA THE CHICKEN HYMN I’m a big fan of John Ford and Howard Hawks; My Darling Clementine and Red River are apex achievements in Hollywood studio storytelling. But Ford and Hawks were limited in ways that Impro Theatre is not. When Impro addresses the American Western as a system of philosophy and…

FIRST PERSIAN PLURAL To see the oldest extant Greek tragedy performed  sort-of  as it was 2500 years ago, but excluding masks and including Anne Bogart’s affection for fabric and yoga positions, you may now attend Aeschylus’s Persians  in a lovely amphitheater up in the Malibu hills. Essentially an after-the-fact ode to the Greek fighting spirit, delivered by a…

MORE MEAT If you are one of the many theatergoers who caught Pacific Resident Theatre’s production of Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Road (and possibly the special Christmas follow-up) during its unprecedented 6-month run, then you’ll likely be anticipating the third installment, The Unfryable Meatness of Being. If you missed Out There you might…

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE OF LOS ANGELES BALLET Along with the film industry, one of Los Angeles’ greatest entertainment assets is music. While theater, dance, opera, and other mediums continually attempt to match world-class cities such as New York, Chicago, and those in Europe, music’”especially classical music’”is thriving. (This may well be due to…

THE RUBRICS OF FAITH A play as well presented and satisfyingly written as most of Robin Uriel Russin’s new The Face in the Reeds deserves special mention. The Family Holiday Dramedy with Heart is normally a dismal category, rarely featuring characters this sharp or dialogue this funny. The genre has its limitations, and through prudence…

HOLLYWOOD COMES TO PASADENA Surrounded by lush vegetation and a seemingly endless expanse of verdant lawn, with a clear, starry sky overhead, the L.A. Arboretum was a perfect setting to enjoy Hooray for Hollywood, the Pasadena POPS’ celebration of Hollywood film music, hosted (and at times conducted) by the charming and talented principal conductor, Michael…

ALLEY HIGH There are many reasons why some previously produced Broadway musicals are rarely performed: The sheer size of the show makes it prohibitively expensive (The Most Happy Fella, 1956); the terrific score is hampered by a troubled book (Chess, 1986); or the material is so hackneyed that modern audiences won’t go for it (Bajour,…

SOUR CHERRIES It’s been 110 years since The Cherry Orchard premiered. While Chekhov insisted that his play about the fall of Russian aristocracy’”and the fallout from the abolition of serfdom’”was a comedy, director Constantin Stanislavski saw the now oft-produced, 14-character, 4-act script as a tragedy. Clearly, they are both correct. The tragicomedy centers on Ranevskaya,…