Los Angeles

IT’S CHRISTMAS, CATS Since its inception in 1935, the Count Basie Orchestra has not just outlived the era in which it was spawned, but has remained a well-oiled machine of Big Band jazz, even after Basie’s death in 1984. After a bit of a sputter with sound issues and energy, their holiday concert last night…

A STUNNING PREMIERE OF A  GLIÈRE QUARTET I’ve had ravishing experiences before with Le Salon de Musiques, the premium music outlet which presents sterling chamber music concerts, but the two String Quartets on December 8 offered the most transporting, pleasurable, awe-inspiring, invigorating, relaxing, emotional and meditative experience I have had all year. Founding artistic director François…

A CELEBRATION WITHOUT THE SEASONING A few years ago, Metropolitan Master Chorale’s Christmas concert bowled me over. The fairly young chorus under the Artistic Direction of Glenn Carlos looked poised to be the next great competitor in a crowded Los Angeles market. The unique selections and strong singers with a beautifully braided blend had me…

PUPPETS, THE PACIFIC, AND A PROFICIENT PIANO CONCERTO It’s not an uncommon occurrence with a Los Angeles Philharmonic program: I come expecting Yuja Wang’s interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 to truly blow me away. While she certainly had her place in the sun, it was Gustavo Dudamel’s triumphant leadership with Stravinsky’s Petrushka that…

LET ME MAKE THIS PERFECTLY CHANTICLEER I may be enamored by the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Festival of Carols, I may be enthralled by Pasadena Symphony’s Holiday Candlelight, I may be excited by the Gay Men’s Chorus’s Holiday Spectacular, but Chanticleer’s Christmas concert, which plays Disney Hall on Dec. 20, is always the best choral…

WINTER HIGH, WINTER LOW The Troubadour Theater Company opened a self-congratulatory love story Friday night, blowing a kiss to its own repertoire with its tenth annual holiday song-and-dance show at the Falcon.   (They have done more than ten holiday shows, but not all of them at Garry Marshall’s lovely theater.)   When some companies do this…

THE DEW ON THE GORSE In the 1960s, Beckett and Pinter started a vogue of shabby-old-man-reminiscing plays so influential that as late as 1995, Sebastian Barry went ahead and wrote one too.   But far from the esoterica of Krapp’s Last Tape or The Caretaker, Mr. Barry’s The Steward of Christendom is a cop’s-eye-view travelogue of…

A HIT-AND-MISS HOLIDAY HYBRID IS AT LEAST MORE HO HO THAN HO HUM Silliness and charm reign supreme in The Actors’ Gang’s original Christmas show, The Queen Family’s Very Special Holiday Special. As with their Atomic Holiday Free Fall (2011), the troupe has created a framing narrative to loosely lace together a series of musical…

FROM THE DECK OF THE H.M.S. CYNIC Remember when George Lucas took the awesome, mystical enigma of The Force and shrank it to the antiseptic science of midi-chlorians, essentially just a kind of microbe? A similar literalism has infected J.M. Barrie’s Never Never Land. Fairy dust has been replaced by star stuff, a sort of…

OVER THE DARK HARBOR WATER Walking a cold, mostly deserted Santa Monica Pier on the way to this show, I passed a photographer’s booth blaring the Azealia Banks song about “cunt getting eaten.”   A Brechtian juxtaposition: the family-friendly commercial beacon of the Pacific Park Ferris Wheel, reduced to a giant neon vagina inviting and enveloping…

EXPENSIVE VANILLA-SCENTED PERFUME For its inaugural stage dramatic production at the glittering new Bram Goldsmith Theater, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is presenting a charming candy box of a play that seems as much as an audition piece for the venue as it is a night of stagecraft in its own right.  …

WOULD YOU LIKE COFFEE, TEA OR THE AMERICAN DREAM? Sometimes we take a short vacation just to get away from it all. A few days. No big tourist attractions or monumental natural sites are necessary. Just a pleasant little excursion with the benefits of some local color, even in a far-off land, where you can…

A CULLED CORRAL OF CHORALISTS You think that deciding which Nutcracker to see this holiday season is daunting? Selecting which vocal concert to attend is an even tougher nut to crack. Whether amateur or professional, containing sacred pieces or hummable traditionals, accompanied by orchestra or just piano, the list of worthy contenders in the Los…

TO BE! (TRAPPED INSIDE YOUR OWN PRODUCTION) The explosion of solo performance pieces in the 1970s and 80s extended the creative lives of fine artists like Lily Tomlin and made stars of social philosophers like Eric Bogosian.   A show along the lines of Bogosian’s Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead avoided the ostentation…

I WOULD, BUT I HAVE TO GET TO THE SALON I had attended chamber music concerts in intimate salons before, but until last year I had never seen one in Los Angeles. Le Salon de Musiques changed all that. Now in their fourth season, this sterling outfit continues to offer nine programs a year. The…

WITHOUT TRUTH, EXISTENTIALISM IS INCOHERENT The premise of Colin Mitchell’s Breaking and Entering, which just ended its seven-performance run, is the best element of an existential play that ends up being far less profound and accessible than intended. Milly, a young woman and obsessive fan, breaks into the mansion of WJ Trumbull, a hermetic novelist…