Los Angeles

REVEL IN RAVEL AND BASK IN BEETHOVEN I’m so excited about LA Phil’s upcoming program this weekend (March 28 – 30) that I don’t know where to start. Well, actually I do. Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. In 1909, impresario Serge Diaghilev commissioned Ravel to write a score for a new ballet which would be based…

A FISHY MONSTROSITY What is it about the story of Jonah that has so captured the world’s imagination? Is it the stupidity of a man trying to run away from God, as if that were even possible? Is it the preposterous idea of a man living for three days inside a whale? Or perhaps it…

PASADENA SYMPHONY’S SPRING CONCERT BLOOMS THIS WEEK Come for the most famous four notes in classical music history, stay for the Pasadena Symphony and POPS (the Symphony has incorporated the Pasadena POPS into its Association under this new name). This estimable organization has been doing splendid work this year, especially with Beethoven’s Ninth last February,…

PROMETHEUS BOUND In a production as stately and reverent as its subject was startling and rebellious, Philip Hayes Dean has directed his own one-man-with-musical-accompanist play to a standstill.   I don’t know how you’d do this if you wanted to: to reduce a renaissance man like Paul Robeson to the dusty subject of a mediocre history…

NOT EVEN GOD Hugh Whitemore’s 2001 play God Only Knows breaks some of the most basic rules of dramaturgy: a gun is introduced which does not go off; an argument is begun which is not finished; a story is alluded to but not played out.   A half-hour in, a character says “Let’s not have a…

TENOR EVENTUALLY SINGS BUT NEEDS MORE NOTES Farce is difficult. You need to get your audience to suspend disbelief as mischief, mayhem and lots of slamming doors abound, and a series of unlikely and improbable events unfold. Get it right and the ridiculous becomes the hysterical. Get it wrong and it lays there like a…

DEMOLITION DERBY Sometimes at the end of a play such as The Lieutenant of Inishmore or Killer Joe, I gaze upon the total destruction of the set and think, “I’m glad I don’t have to clean that mess up.” Such was the case with Derby Day, now physically and emotionally wrecking the stage at the…

IT’S SAFE TO PUT YOURSELF IN HARMONY‘S WAY Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s high-energy, surprisingly melancholy new musical, Harmony, depicts the real-life story of the all-male singing ensemble, the Comedian Harmonists. Through buttery, close harmonies, an excellent cast, and fluid staging, this unusually dichotomous musical follows the Interwar boy band through their formation in the…

LAURELS FOR LAURIDSEN With dozens of worthy events to choose from this Sunday, March 16, the choice to see Los Angeles Master Chorale’s all-Lauridsen program at Disney Hall was a no-brainer. Yet a fascinating thing happened recently; a few friends and family members asked, “Who is Lauridsen?” I tell them he is one of the…

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…