Los Angeles

ABNORMALLY REAL When you avoid musicals as strenuously as I do, after a while you wonder why.   For some time I decided that it was the generally trite treatment of serious issues, a gripe which doesn’t hold up to analysis given the works of Kander & Ebb, among others.   For years I was sure my…

BOTTOM IS TOPS Unlike Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, which are mostly named for their main character, his comedies have rather different kinds of titles. These differing titles alert us to the comedies’ vastly different subject matter, which is less about particular characters than about particular events. Who, for example, is the main character in Shakespeare’s…

SLEEPY IN SEATTLE In the city of Seattle, Sam is still coping with the loss of his wife who died one year ago leaving behind a pre-adolescent son, Jonah, for him to raise on his own. In Baltimore, Annie isn’t ready to give up on the storybook romance she is longing for, but agrees to…

AMERICAN TRAGEDY BECOMES MUSICAL COMEDY 1931 was a crossroads in American history. With no economic recovery in sight, the Depression had people edgy, and when Americans are edgy, they are discordant. An acrimonious populace is a perfect breeding ground for intolerance. As such, issues that were quelled during the over-consuming, over-spending 1920’s were coming to…

BRAIN FRIED Retaining a cephalopod’s far-ranging spinelessness and wide-ranging tentacles, Alicia Adams and Justin Zsebe’s vanity work, A Fried Octopus, makes a squishy thud at The Bootleg. Instead of a clear narrative, what we have is an absinthe-soaked progression of discussions and monologues that veer from subjects like Toulouse Lautrec, divine femininity, and women in…

WHAT A DRAG There are so many ways to glitter and be gay in modern American Musical Theater. The recent revival of La Cage Aux Folles depicts the unexpected bourgeois normality in a near-marriage of boa-wrapped impersonators at a gender-breaking Riviera nightclub. Kinky Boots, currently on Broadway, celebrates vogue-crazed drag queens with foot fetishes who…

COME FOR THE SONGS; STAY FOR THE SPIRIT. It’s fitting that Samuel Barber’s “Sure on this Shining Night” opens American Songs & Spirituals, Los Angeles Master Chorale’s final program of its 49th season: Residing within the text from an untitled poem by James Agee are the lines which augur the spectator’s experience after witnessing this…

NOT SO DULCE It’s a shame that so much love, talent and money was bestowed upon the new opera, Dulce Rosa, which is the inaugural project of LA Opera’s Off Grand series, a program which offers new operatic works in venues other than the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Opening at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica…

A FRATERNITY OF MASTER THESPIANS At its core, Jeff Stetson’s Fraternity is about the two options that face black men in today’s society (or, at least, the society of Birmingham in 1987, when the play was written): Either become part of the white establishment or cling passionately and tenaciously to the tenets of the early…

ALL THE WRONG MOVES The musical Chess highlights the tongue-twisting, swift, and pithy lyrics by Tim Rice and the soaring, dazzling music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA fame. In previous Stage and Cinema reviews of productions at MTG  and the Met Theatre, its history has been well-documented: The super-partnership of Rice-Andersson-Ulvaeus in 1979;…

ALIVE WITH AMBIGUITY If you require a neat and tidy ending, a feeling of clarity, and a sense of completion to insure your theatrical enjoyment, then Dying City – making its Los Angeles premiere at the Rogue Machine Theatre —is not for you. If on the other hand you appreciate that a life examined offers…

BEDEVILED An off-stage character is tortured by a Salem court in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a play which dramatizes the Salem witch trials of 1692. As heavy stones are placed upon his chest, the innocent man’s reported final words are “More weight.” This is exactly what Antaeus Company’s production needs in order to be more…

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…