Los Angeles

FATHERS AND SONS The sensitive, expressive, and pensive son. The emotionally cool, impatient, and badgering father. Together, this family dynamic seen throughout history is so familiar that playwright Daphne Malfitano even titles her new play in Latin. Paternus, now receiving its world premiere at Rogue Machine, begins with pater Steve and his scion Stephen trapped…

L.A.’S BIGGEST FAN It surprises me that Lady Windermere’s Fan isn’t produced as frequently as the ubiquitous  The Importance of Being Earnest. Beginning Friday, Chalk Rep is remounting last year’s sold-out, site-specific production, and I highly recommend you give it a visit. The titular character in Oscar Wilde’s play is a vivacious young woman, married only…

FEINSTEIN’S GOT PLENTY OF SOMETHING Charismatic, appealing, boyish, excited, and eager to please, Michael Feinstein appeared before a proliferation of people (and a pulchritude of peacocks) to gush out Gershwin songs at the L.A. Arboretum last Saturday. This consummate showman’s one-man tunefest began with a 1950’s educational-style film on two huge LED video screens on…

A TRIO AND A FIFTH While there are quite a few well-made recordings of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano, rarely will you get a chance to see it performed live. Often referred to as the Triple Concerto, it is a distinctive work in its category; it establishes an amalgamation between the…

TAIKO TAKES LOS ANGELES BY STORM Ever since man could bang a stick on a rock, percussion has been a way for humans to express themselves. From the battlefield to the theater to your teenager’s bedroom, percussion has evolved from communicative and ritualistic purposes into an art form. We take for granted the use of…

HELLO, GORGEOUS Jonathan Tolin’s keen and tremendously funny new show Buyer & Cellar, performed by Michael Urie, imagines what it would be like for Alex More, a young gay man struggling to make it as an actor in Hollywood, to find himself working in the artificial mall Barbara Streisand built in the basement of her…

A BLOODY BUT WORTHWHILE MESS When Kenneth Clark asked of William Shakespeare, “who else has felt so strongly the absolute meaninglessness of life,” he illustrated the point with this speech of Macbeth’s: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time, And all…

I DREAM’D A DREAM TO-NIGHT The National Ballet of Canada (TNBC), which presented its thrilling rendition of Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 2012, returned to the Music Center last night with a gloriously Technicolor production of Romeo and Juliet, commissioned by TNBC’s artistic director, Karen Kain (the world…

BELL OF THE BOWL Violinist Joshua Bell has been known to hold old-fashion salon-type concerts in a performance space on the second floor of his renovated apartment in New York City. It had long been his desire to invite different kinds of artists and various friends and have an eclectic mix of people playing in…

A HOT AUGUST CAST Having witnessed many Broadway hits at the beginning and end of their runs (and the touring companies they spawned), it is fair for me to say that the magic and crackling electricity accompanying subsequent casts is rarely the same. And so it has been for Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, a…

DOOM DOOM DOOM In the Boom Boom Room is a David Rabe play that did not win a Tony in 1974.   In it, Rabe demonstrates no particular affinity yet for female characters, of whom there are many.   It is not subtle or quiet, but few Rabe plays are.   In angry, long-winded street poetry, inarticulate folk…

GODDAMN CHEKHOV, AGAIN I suspect nobody really likes The Seagull except theater people.   It established for the modern age some of the essential playwriting untouchables:   a play about actors and writers, and plays, in which the value of art is a major theme?   In which not only is acting used as a metaphor for human…

SOBER CANNIBALS, DRUNKEN CHRISTIANS This show made me wish I had chosen to sit through Lost Moon Radio’s Million Dollar Hair again. If this sounds like faint praise, it is; I did not enjoy Million Dollar Hair.   But Moby Alpha, as conceived and performed by Seattle sketch comics Chuck Armstrong and Charlie Stockman, is unfunny…

DARK SUBJECT MATTER LEAVES US IN THE DARK Inspired by Theater of the Absurd, Cuban expatriate Marí­a Irene Fornés (b. 1930) cut her teeth during the Off-Off-Broadway avant-garde movement. She may have nine Obie Awards to her credit, but this feminist playwright’s deliberately dark and opaque style willfully obfuscates her narrative, which keeps the meaning…