Los Angeles

B MINOR MASSIVE Bach’s Mass in B Minor is big. Really big. Compiled from new and recycled compositions over the first half of the 18th Century (completed in 1749) the piece consists of 27 movements in 5 parts. The full mass was not performed as a whole until nearly a century after Bach’s death. The…

SKETCHY THEATER Velvet Pile’s comedic look at identity and commercial branding, A Word from Our Sponsors, is running as part of the Son of Semele Company Creation Festival. Comprised of comedic duo Alexis Notabartolo and Amanada Barnes, Velvet Pile uses comedy to explore arbitrarily existent social constructions such as gender roles and standards of beauty….

ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK To open their second season, the Independent Opera Company (IOC) is performing Franz Lehar’s 1905 operetta The Merry Widow. It appears to be a scaling back after the company’s fairly ambitious production of Verdi’s Macbeth, which closed out their first season. In contrast to Macbeth, The Merry Widow is…

WHEN A WORD OR TWO WILL NOT DO A Word or Two is an apt title for Christopher Plummer’s solo show about Christopher Plummer and Christopher Plummer’s love of language. He wants to celebrate language in all of its “infinite variety, majesty, and beauty.” His love of language gave him an escape early in life,…

WHAT A DOG Poor Dog Group’s S.M.S.I.W.O.O.F. (SaveMySoul In a WorldOfOddFoices) or 8 bottles of vodka is a dance-centric, multimedia performance based on text messages sent between the members of the ensemble. Given the abstract nature of this performance art, it is rarely possible for the viewer to know the creator’s explicit meaning. It is…

STATIC ELECTRA Your college classics teacher be damned:   For all the talk about the Greek literary themes of hubris and arête, the Greek tragedies are just gussied up soap operas, with atrocity, lust, and rage being served up in heaping, blood-soaked portions.   The fusty professors can ruminate all they want; these plays are about violent…

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED For over half a century, Rachel Rosenthal has been surprising audiences with her unique take on the theatrical experience. A master of performance art, she was recently honored by the city as a “Living Cultural Treasure of Los Angeles.” Over the decades she has shocked, stunned, entranced, amazed, enlightened, and even dumbfounded…

NOTHING MINOR ABOUT IT First-timers to Bach’s B Minor Mass, which Los Angeles Master Chorale is offering for two performances this weekend, may possibly be overwhelmed. First of all, a glance at the 27 movement titles alone can be intimidating: “Kyrie eleison,” “Et in terra pax,” and “Qui tollis peccata mundi,” especially for the non-religious…

TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR When Umi Garrett played Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star with her hands behind her back on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2009, what first appeared as cutesy fun-and-games suddenly turned into a recital to be remembered: The 8-year-old budding piano prodigy stunned the world executing a section from Franz Liszt’s technically formidable…

THAT AIN’T THE WAY TO HAVE FUN, SON One of the most exciting events to come out of Los Angeles theater in the last few years was Zombie Joe’s Urban Death,  a naturalistic horror show in the style of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. I stated in my review that his creepy one-hour compilation of original, jocular,…

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,…