Los Angeles

SLOWGIRL SIMMERS In cooking it is often necessary to heat a mixture slowly bringing it to a simmer and keeping it just below the boiling point, allowing all its savory sweetness to surface. Such is the case with the Geffen Playhouse’s production of Greg Pierce’s Slowgirl. Performed “alley” style (an oblong stage flanked by seating…

CLASS ON THE FIFTH FLOOR The line on Los Angeles is that we’ve built the entertainment capital we deserve.   I needn’t go into detail here about our fabled shallowness and bad taste.   We know what we know about us.   But if you’d like to disprove the axiom that the only culture in L.A. departed for…

I LOVE LUCIA Lucia di Lammermoor, Gaetano Donizetti’s darkly romantic tale of honor, betrayal, loss and madness, opens this Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and plays through April 6. Directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer with scenic and projection design by the amazing Wendall K. Harrington (Tony-winner for The Who’s Tommy), this all-new production by Los…

WAITING TO CLIMAX To use a sexually potent metaphor, STePz’ display of tap choreography was long on foreplay, producing many unfulfilled climaxes which led to an awkward happy ending. The slow build up, I believe, was due to the show’s lack of intensity, and should not to be mistaken for the caliber of tap dancing…

POP MISSES AN OP Pacific Opera Project’s production of Carmen is difficult to review, only because the benchmark is unclear. Bizet’s ever-popular four-act 1875 opera about a gypsy temptress and the soldier she seduces is being presented under the guise of a “POP-Up” Production. With about a week of rehearsals and minimal production costs, the…

NOTSOGUD Everything you need to know about Ruskin Group Theatre’s current world premiere production is revealed in the title: TALHOTBLOND: everybody lies online. If you are at all tech savvy’”or for that matter have in the last decade read a paper or watched TV (Dateline: To Catch a Predator)’”this news will be anything but a…

I FOUND MY LOVE WITH AVALON Based in Chicago where they have been the quartet-in-residence at the Northern Illinois University of Music in DeKalb since 2007, The Avalon String Quartet offered patrons of The Music Guild such a seamless performance that any catch-all adjectives’”“brilliant,” “kudos”’”fail to elucidate my experience. For once, my notebook was set…

GOAT ON A BOAT Edward Albee’s diligently disturbing tragicomedy, The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, is running at California Repertory Company in the belly of the Queen Mary’s Royal Theatre. One of Albee’s most well-known works, Goat follows the dissolution of a perfect family after central character, Martin, reveals that he is having a zoophilic…

A SHORT TAKE ON A LONG TRIP Sometimes critics get caught up in their own words and feel the need to expand upon their self-important ramblings beyond all reason.   They spew forth with so much falderal that their point is completely lost, and they simply end up beating a dead horse.   The same can be…

MICRO MACRO FELDMAN Last Wednesday at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena, LA-based freelance pianist Richard Valitutto played four solo piano works, “two short and two long,” by American composer Morton Feldman. For those uninitiated to Feldman, his work is hard to describe. A convenient description would be “soundscape music,” as in plodding, thoughtful music. It…

A HEART-POUNDING, COSMOS-QUESTIONING PIECE OF THEATER Today may be your last chance to see Blue Cube’s hauntingly philosophical drama, Coldwater, but now that it has been tried out as part of Son of Semele’s Company Creation Festival, the hope is that this exciting work will soon get its own run. The plot follows three characters…