Los Angeles

THE SIMí“N BOLíVAR SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA: A SONIC BOOM The 1812 Overture may be well-known for booming cannons, but conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolí­var Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela really pulled out the big guns when delivering Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 last Friday night. After Alina Pogostkina’s different spin on the oft-played Violin Concerto, the…

REFLECTIONS ON L.A. DANCE PROJECT The uneven and uninspiring effort presented by L.A. Dance Project last night isn’t bad news; it just means that this nascent company needs to hone its vision if it ever wants to be a world-class company. The perplexing title 3 Exceptional Performances may speak to the company’s ambitions, but the…

A VILE  VILLON MAKES FOR VILLAINOUS VIEWING Art isn’t pretty – and neither is Murray Mednick’s sharp, cynical comedy about the life of the great artistic poet François Villon, who, in 15th century France, wrote some of history’s great romantic poetry, all the while living the life of a boozing, whoring, murderous scoundrel. In the production’s…

THE BLOOMING OF A BUDD IN L.A. Based on Herman Melville’s classic American tale, adapted into a libretto by English novelist E.M. Forster and writer Eric Crozier,  Billy Budd  tells the story of the persecution and destruction of a pure-hearted sailor by a predatory master-at-arms. It’s a tragedy of “sexual discharge gone evil,” as Forster described it,…

LOVE WITHOUT THE TRIMMINGS My darling, dearest Noël: It only just occurred to me that I haven’t written you since I saw your play Peace in our Time. Do forgive me, lamb chop. Let me cut to the quick as I write from sun-drenched Beverly Hills and the pool is waiting, even in the middle…

A BLESSING FROM BLESSING Playwright Lee Blessing has done a gutsy thing. He puts himself in the head and heart of the mother of a ruthless African dictator who murders and tortures his compatriots with horrifying abandon. Though supremely talented, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Blessing is, after all, a white American far from the horrors that…

A HAPPY FEW, A HAPPY MANY Just about every Shakespeare production runs the risk of getting a packed house of high school students at least one performance in the run.   This situation is always touch-and-go.   On a bare black stage with a few chairs, as the Porters of Hellsgate often serve up their war stories,…

RICH AND BEAUTIFUL I like a play that vacuums the audience in the wake of its rocket so that we tumble after, happy travelers grateful for the bruises.   We bounce and roll along, too ecstatic to imagine stopping as the play flashes and bangs in our guts, in our faces.   But we can’t keep up…

THE MUSIC MAN BEHIND THE MUSIC MAN When Musical Theatre West announced their production of The Music Man, which opens tonight at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach, I actually got excited. I never tire of seeing this charming musical, and it occurred to me that I haven’t seen it since 2001, when Will &…

RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES It was the shot heard round the countercultural world – the Big Bang of the Beats, as it were. At a party one night in Mexico City in 1951, writer William Burroughs drunkenly talked his wife Joan Vollmer into standing against the wall with a water glass on her head while…

MTG DEFIBRILLATES DOA MUSICAL Sheaths can be written about how deadly the musical Death Takes a Holiday is, and where the creators went wrong. What’s more important is that director Calvin Remsberg, musical director Jim May, and a wholly flawless cast have pulled a Frankenstein: They electrified dead tissue and created a vivid being. It…

DAISEY: I LOVE HIM, I LOVE HIM NOT I’m jealous of Mike Daisey. In American Utopias at Royce Hall, the infamous monologist fulminated and commentated about three interpolated subjects near and dear to my heart: Disney, Activism, and Community Gatherings. The corpulent and energetic Daisey, who sat at a table mopping himself, was by-and-large riveting…

FIVE-ALARM ACTING SETS THE STAGE ABLAZE IN FIREMEN After sixteen years of a nomadic existence, Echo Theater Company has finally found a permanent home at the Atwater Village Theater. If their world premiere production of Firemen is any indication, they’ll be burning up the boards in these new digs for a long time to come….

 ¡VIVA, VIVER! Perhaps the vibrancy of the Afro-Brazilian dance culture lures you in with the strong beats of the drum. Maybe it’s the sensuality and seductiveness of its movement. Whatever the case, Viver Brasil did not fail to deliver on its presentation of Intersections/Ajê at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center. Rest assured that even…