Los Angeles

AVOIDABLE MADNESS There’s a show running right now at a smaller venue of a state-of-the-art West Side arts complex.   It’s a foreign import, a one-woman show that, in a different format as Ruby Wax: Losing It, has spent years touring asylums with its garbled message of exculpatory hope for those suffering mental illness.   Because the…

A LOT OF HOLES IN THIS CONCERT, AND A LOT OF PROBLEMS ARE BURIED IN THOSE HOLES Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, and Hugo. This list of iconic movies…

DOSTOEVSKY’S NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground at Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre in North Hollywood ought not to surface. This willfully banal production of the Russian classic refrains from connecting with the audience and instead, serves only their self-absorbed conceits. More concerned with making a joke about Lankershim Boulevardland than it is with both  relating…

A REQUIEM IN FLOWER The Los Angeles Master Chorale captures the shared human experience with a pairing of Brahms’ sublime Ein Deutsches Requiem and the West Coast premiere of The World in Flower, Peter Lieberson’s lyrical and moving message of tolerance written in memory of his wife and muse, famed mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, with…

TALKING HEADS Mark St. Germain’s commercially successful two-hander Freud’s Last Session, suggested by The Question of God by Dr. Armand M. Nicoli, Jr., is about a speculative meeting between the titular founder of Psychoanalysis and Christian author/Oxford professor C. S. Lewis.   Having cut its teeth at The Barrington Stage Company followed by a long run…

IN PRAISE OF MOZART’S REQUIEM I’ll never forget the first time I heard Mozart’s Requiem. I was wandering through the streets of Paris on a warm summer evening and I happened to stop at the magnificent Madeleine Church on the Place de la Concorde. Inside was a full orchestra with choir and soloists rehearsing the…

EXOTICISM INCARNATE Renée Fleming and Susan Graham, two of the ecosphere’s leading superstars of opera, have crisscrossed the globe accumulating legions of fans. While they have on occasion appeared in the same opera together, rare is the opportunity to see these two songstresses sing for you in a salon-styled concert. Well, pop the cork on…

‘TIS PITY IT’S A SHORT RUN Cheek by Jowl’s touring production of John Ford’s revenge tragedy, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, landed at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse for a brief run. The true pity would be to miss this extraordinary production. John Ford’s play is a Jacobean hot mess. Giovanni (a charismatic Orlando James) is in…

A SECRET NO MORE Have you ever been to a Chamber Concert in a grand venue such as Walt Disney Hall or Carnegie Hall but wished you could experience the program in the intimacy of a hostess’ living room? Many is the time after a concert that I have craved to mingle with the virtuosic…

CRACK YOUR CHEEKS By placing himself in the charge of his fickle children, old King Lear abandons the security of his own reason to wander an inhospitable wilderness. Â  It’s a fitting metaphor for a venerable script at the mercy of a production lacking the chops to do it justice, and for an audience perched for…

THE JOY OF TEARS Having experienced 307 U.S. National Parks, I am keenly aware of the musical sounds of nature, such as the haunting accelerando of wind through pine needles, the drone of a bee, or the ever-changing sounds of water, as with bubbling staccato over stones, or a cascading scherzo down a ravine. Tan…

SANTASTIC! Sometimes in life, it’s the last Christmas present we open that makes up for all the lousy ones we unwrapped before. In what is truly the most dismal season of holiday-themed shows, I happened upon one on Christmas Eve which, unbeknownst to me, has been an annual event for 13 years. Santasia: A Holiday…

‘HANDEL’ED WELL, BUT NOT THE SECOND COMING Los Angeles Master Chorale returned to Walt Disney Concert Hall to conclude its holiday programming with the perennial holiday classical chestnut, Handel’s Messiah. The choir was impeccable under Music Director Grant Gershon’s athletic conducting, and the use of a chamber orchestra brought authenticity to the iconoclastic 1741 English-language…

LAMC BRINGS PEACE AND JOY TO DISNEY HALL Los Angeles Master Chorale’s (LAMC) Christmastime Baroque concert, Rejoice!, had as its headliner Bach’s Magnificat, but less-than-stellar soloists for this work – one which is better-suited for an intimate venue – made the piece more fascinating as a musical study than triumphant as a performance. Still, under…