Los Angeles

A WHITE BREAD SANDWICH Beverly Hills’ newest and best-looking addition, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts,  debuted its classical music series with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, a very promising choice given the quartet’s previous accolades: Ensemble in Residence at Stanford, winners of the Banff International String Quartet competition, and even a good line…

YOU SEE A poet out of time, an ancient soul yet our contemporary, has come to sing to us of quarrel.   He comes shabby from the road, dusty and reluctant.   It is a killing effort for this gifted creature to tell us all we know of the love that causes rage.   His story is the…

A TURN FOR THE BETTER A Henry James novella first published in 1898, The Turn of the Screw tells one of the most ambiguous ghost stories ever written. It involves a brother and sister (Flora and Miles), a housekeeper (Mrs. Grose), an unnamed governess, and two ghosts (Peter Quint and Miss Jessel). Not a lot…

A SHOW THAT’S BETTER THAN PROZAC Been to the drugstore lately?   Sick of taking semi-useless pills three times a day every day?   You’ve got your Losartan and your Lisinopril.   You’ve got your yummy Sarafem and your delicious Celexa.   There’s Venlafaxine and Mirtazapine.   Zoloft and Paxil.   To paraphrase the line from the movie The President’s Analyst,…

EVERYTHING IS NEW AGAIN It was quite a blow when it was announced that both Christoph Eschenbach and Christian Tetzlaff’”due to illness’”canceled their engagement with the LA Phil at Disney Hall last weekend. While I wish them both a speedy recovery, their withdrawal resulted in one of the most exciting evenings with the LA Phil…

FEAR THE HYPHENATE If a person is lucky enough, they will discover their passion in life and be able to fine tune and truly excel at that skill. Others flounder about, trying a bit if this and a bit of that, becoming a jack of all trades but master of none. They’re called “hyphenates.” In…

AND HE DOES In the 1980s, Barry McGovern and Gerry Dukes collaborated to cut three novels by Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) into a few monologues, divided by lighting cues (James McConnell) and set changes (Robert Ballagh) and an intermission, called I’ll Go On.   Though spoken by different characters in their original form,…

A SWING AND A MISS Theater, like baseball, is a team sport. To reign triumphant and put a tick in the “W” box, all the players must be at the top of their game. When everyone hits a home run its magic, but even if a few players are having an off day, check the…

SIC SEMPER BORE-ANNUS This solo musical effort by musician performer Hersey Felder has all the trappings of a work that is rich with worthy subject matter and culture.   Peppered with songs from what we’d charitably call “the American songbook” (Gershwin, Stephen Foster, Louie Gottschalk),  Abe Lincoln’s Piano is Felder’s tightly crafted autobiography, which is somehow threaded…

UNFINISHED BUSINESS Son of Semele’s 4th annual Company Creation Festival presents new works by nascent Los Angeles troupes.   The festival’s first offering, Bunk, is what you’d expect from such a venue: a lot of youthful energy in service of a promising voice.   That the play doesn’t make much sense at this point may be less…

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID The two most important aspects of the right kind of cabaret act are the singer and the songs. But when you go to see Laura Benanti’s new cabaret In Constant Search of the Right Kind of Attention at Catalina Bar & Grill (if you can get tickets to her last performance…

VIENNA SAUSAGE Salute to Vienna is a light-hearted event which reenacts the ridiculously popular New Year’s Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic (a.k.a. Neujahrskonzert). The inoffensive, fun, and slightly cheesy potpourri includes costumed dancers, opera singers, and an orchestra that plays the waltzes and polkas of Johann Strauss Jr. and his contemporaries. Figures vary, but the…

MORE LIKE ONE STARRY STARRY STARRY NIGHT If anybody knows how to put together a night of eclectic songs and singers, it’s Bruce Kimmel. While he has created some terrific revues, this prolific producer, playwright and performer has been the driving force behind cast albums, vocal albums, and (a personal favorite of mine) an original…

CONSPIRACY THEORISTS AND THEATER LOVERS, UNITE! Remember E. Howard Hunt? This intelligence officer was one of Nixon’s White House Plumbers, that clandestine band of operatives who were assigned to fix any of those nasty little security “leaks” emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Hunt, along with G. Gordon Liddy, plotted a burglary at the Democratic National…

MY FAVORITE NIGHTS Looking back over a year’s playgoing, it’s every bit as easy to be jaded about little broke theaters as it is about big grant-eaters. Little broke theaters are constant trials of inconvenience for an audience member – you share a bathroom with the cast; you’re confused by the stage-house configuration; you have…