Los Angeles

THE NORTH PLAN STARTS ON COURSE THEN GOES SOUTH A ruthless splinter group has seized power in Washington and a low level bureaucrat who has escaped with the new regime’s “hit list” is on the lam and heading for a backwoods Missouri town in Jason Wells’ political satire. The North Plan, now playing at The…

THE ROYALE PACKS A PUNCH SLAP There are many things to recommend about The Royale, currently making its World Premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. The staging is brilliant, the fight choreography mesmerizing, the lighting stunning, the music and sound enthralling, and many of the performances are excellent. So what then prevents this drama from…

DON’T CALL ME MAD Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the life of artist Vincent Van Gogh provide rich, if unlikely material for opera. Although there is little romance to speak of in either subject, there is plenty of conflict. It is the conflict of madness, of inner turmoil told in the…

NOW THIS YOU GOTTA SEE Of the 32 shows I attended in Chicago recently, the most charming experiences were with four musical revivals, three from Broadway’s heyday — the 1930s through the 1960s — and one from somewhere near the onset of its slow and painful decline — the 1970s to the present (Sondheim doesn’t…

AS IF CELLIST ALISA WEILERSTEIN PERFORMING SHOSTAKOVICH WASN’T ENOUGH: Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) will conclude its 44th season this weekend with the appropriately titled program, Concerto Finale. This season has showcased both LACO’s eclectic repertoire and the orchestra’s proficiency which more than substantiated PRI’s proclamation that LACO is “America’s finest chamber orchestra.” From a…

A  PLAY WHICH  FALLS ON ITS FAITH Faith is one of the most prevalent themes in David Rambo’s God’s Man in Texas, and very likely where you place your faith or where you spend your Sunday mornings will inform your opinions of this production. On the one hand it is a dramatized sermon. On the other, as…

YOU MIGHT ENJOY THE  ACTING, BUT WILL YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC? It’s not easy to believe in magic watching Phylicia Rashad’s direction of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. While Rashad has a knack for the naturalistic style of theatre, evidenced in her astounding production of A Raisin in the Sun, she seems to have missed the…

A CAT IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a tricky play even before it leaves the page. Nearly sixty years after its first performance, Williams’ brilliant poetic language and the story’s pervasive darkness can easily steer it into the realm of melodrama. “Oft-revived,” it is both commercially and artistically primed…

MILES FURTHER, JAZZ FARTHER Pianist/keyboardist Herbie Hancock, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, trumpeter Sean Jones, and bassist Marcus Miller settled into Disney Hall to pay tribute to  arguably the greatest pioneer of Jazz music after Duke Ellington, Mr. Miles Davis. Hancock greeted the nearly sold-out audience with an emphatic “Los Angeles is in the House!”…

THE NEVERLAND AFTER DARK This ain’t Mary Martin’s Peter Pan. Or Walt Disney’s. Or Stephen Spielberg’s. With Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers, playwright Michael Lluberes has his own take on the familiar story, at once faithful in spirit to Barrie’s original tale yet also interested in exploring Victorian attitudes about both children and…

BEWITCHED, BEGUILED AND THRILLED Mark Saltzman is one smart cookie. He approaches his new bio-musical of the legendary Lorenz Hart with a passionate curiosity about the great man’s life and career: intellectual curiosity about what was and imaginative curiosity for what might have been. Rodgers’ collaboration with Hart may be somewhat dwarfed in the public’s…

A ROCKY ROCKY MOUNTAIN ROMANCE In mountaineering lingo, “committing†refers to forcing yourself into a place of no return leaving nowhere to go but forward; and so it is with life, loss and love in Sharr White’s (The Other Place*) two-hander, Annapurna, making its Los Angeles premiere courtesy of the Odyssey Theatre. A drama with…

AFTERNOON DELIGHT Some people indulge in “culture” because they think that’s what they are supposed to do. They will slog their way through hours of highbrow offerings on PBS, slumber through a symphony or sit stupefied by a Shakespearian epic all because it makes them feel intellectually superior. The only problem is they aren’t having…

PASSION OVER PERFECTION wild Up is an electric ensemble of twenty-two twenty-somethings who vigorously perform a maelstrom of eclectic musical works ranging from J.S. Bach to They Might Be Giants. Led by the dynamic and skittish Artistic Director-Conductor Christopher Rountree at REDCAT in Disney Hall last Wednesday, the zestful ensemble performs  a bizarrely arranged program of…