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Los Angeles
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Recommended Theater: A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD (Morgan-Wixson Theatre Youth Production)
HOP INTO SPRING Friendship is among the hardest subjects to parse, but this musical based on Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” stories, considers friendship warts and all. Frog and Toad worry about each other over big things and small. They argue. They become angry. At times they fail to hear what the other is saying,…
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Theater Recommendation: WHITTIER BOULEVARD (Latino Theater Company at Los Angeles Theatre Center)
WITTIER AND WHITTIER “Let’s take a trip down Whittier Boulevard! ¡Arriba, Arriba!” sang Chicano surf-guitar band Thee Midniters in 1965. Inspired by a classic film named for a different famous boulevard, Latino Theater Company kicks off its 2023 Spring Season with an original, satirical comedy that takes its title from the 14-mile heart of East L.A….
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Theater Opening: A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena)
After the roaring success of Pasadena Playhouse’s wonderful production of Sunday in the Park with George, now comes A Little Night Music, which officially opens May 1, 2023. This is the second mainstage production of the theater’s six-month-long celebration of the works and impact of Stephen Sondheim, the first major festival honoring his legacy since his passing in…
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Theater Review: 1776 (National Tour)
2023 COMES TO 1776 The founding of the United States of America has always been largely misunderstood, even by its own citizens. Fifty landowners got together in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and debated for two years on the efficacy of declaring a rationale for Independence; they needed sensible reasons for breaking away from the mother country, Great…
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Music Review: SIBELIUS AND BRAHMS (LA Phil: Osmo Vånskå, conductor; Inon Barnatan, piano)
STORMS, ROLLERCOASTERS, AND TURBULENCE It was a wild night with the LA Phil at Disney Hall last weekend. For Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1, guest conductor Osmo Vänskä successfully immersed us in the young Brahms’s ominous soundscape. He let the music breathe naturally, holding out long rests unapologetically and often got down to the floor…
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Theater Review: COLONIALISM IS TERRIBLE, BUT PHỞ IS DELICIOUS (Chance Theater in Anaheim)
MANY PARTS ARE EDIBLE It’s fascinating to watch a new generation of Asian playwrights — Mike Lew, Qui Nguyen, Lauren Yee, Dipika Guha, Christopher Chen — writing about the quest for identity as it pertains to traditional upbringing, here or abroad, and current frustrations as modern Asians in America, often addressing race within a meta,…
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Theater Review: IT’S ONLY A PLAY (Theatre 40)
IT’S ONLY A FLOP There’s a glaring contradiction in It’s Only a Play: Written by the usually crafty Terrence McNally, a 20-time Broadway playwright, this two-act love letter to Broadway theater and its “plays of fools” ’” depicted in full fratricidal frenzy at an opening night party ’” utterly mocks its message. The joke is on…
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Theater Review: MENSTRUATION: A PERIOD PIECE (Big Little Theatre Company at the L.A. LGBT Center)
I CAN’T GET THAT TASTE OUT OF MY MOUTH Get ready for a show that is all vagina and no vulva. This bloody awful musical by Big Little Theater Company is of the women, by the women and for the women, especially lesbians — there are lesbians on stage, in the audience, and behind the…
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Theater Review: GRIEF: A ONE MAN SHITSHOW (Theatre Row’s Studio Theatre, Off-Broadway)
WHERE’S THE GRIEF? A LOT OF GOOD SHIT, BUT WE NEED MORE SHOW Grief. It almost seems to come on a daily basis. You hear people grieve over politics, a lost job, a breakup, the weather — grieving which, in many ways, manifests itself in complaining (misery loves company, yes?). As Colin Campbell tells us…
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Music Review: TCHAIKOVSKY AND SIBELIUS (LA Phil; Conductor Dalia Stasevska, Violinist Randall Goosby)
STASEVSKA, STASEVSKA, STASEVSKA There is much good news about this morning’s program with the LA Phil. Let me start with the most important. Dalia Stasevska, a 38-year-old Kyiv-born musician who lives in Finland, was the Guest Conductor (she is now the Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic). Say that Ukrainian last name over and…
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Cabaret Recommendation: MUSIC AT THE ODYSSEY (Celebrating Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter)
IT’S DE-LOVELY As I suspected, this Friday’s Music at the Odyssey show celebrating Rodgers and Hammerstein, George Gershwin and Cole Porter has sold out. And with good reason. The previous show, all Sondheim, was one of the most delightful cabarets I’ve ever seen. The bounteous talent was top-notch, the musicians breezy, and the space intimate. And…
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Music Review: Mí„LKKI LEADS DVOŘíK (LA Phil)
DONE WELL INDIVIDUALLY, BUT A CURIOUS AND UNNECESSARY PAIRING Conductor Susanna Målkki returned to Disney Hall with a contrasting program of Antonin Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, Op. 46 and a U.S. premiere of an LA Phil commissioned Double Concerto by Felipe Lara written for Claire Chase, flute and esperanza spalding, bass and voice. The Slavonic Dances…
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Theater Review: THE HUMAN COMEDY (Actors Co-op)
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN There is a world premiere now playing at Actors Co-op in Hollywood that is both ambitious and successful. The Human Comedy, set in the fictional California town of Ithaca in the San Joaquin Valley (think Fresno area), was first written as an MGM screenplay by Armenian-American William Saroyan, who was also…
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Theater Review: LET ME IN (Theatre 68 Arts Complex)
LET ME IN, OR GET ME OUT? In writer/director Brynn Thayer‘s Let Me In, now running at the newly and spiffily remodeled Theatre 68 Arts Complex in North Hollywood, actor Jorge Garcia of Lost fame gives a moving, funny, and incredibly nuanced performance as a New York cop on the day of his retirement. Mr….
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Theater Review: DID YOU SEE WHAT WALTER PAISLEY DID TODAY? (La Mirada Theatre)
DROP-DEAD FUNNY What happens when you take Little Shop of Horrors and mix it with The Pink Panther cartoons, and throw in a little dash of Urinetown? You get this fantastic dark musical comedy Did You See What Walter Paisley Did Today? Based on Roger Corman’s 1959 horror-tinged beatnik satire A Bucket of Blood, the…
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Opera Preview: PELLÉAS ET MÉLISANDE (LA Opera)
THE CRASH OF SYMBOLISM As part of its 2022-23 season, LA Opera is presenting Debussy’s one-of-a-kind enigmatic masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande in its entirety, conducted by Music Director James Conlon at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion The production, which originated at Scottish Opera, was created by the internationally acclaimed director David McVicar. Tickets for performances March 25 through…
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Theater Review: THE LONELY FEW (World Premiere Musical at the Geffen Playhouse in L.A.)
COME FOR THE SCORE, LEAVE FOR THE BOOK Prior to Geffen Playhouse’s world premiere musical The Lonely Few, a pair of orange ear-plugs in ironically loud cellophane is offered to patrons, indicating a loud show will soon be upon us. We enter the amazingly transformed Audrey Skirball Kennis black-box theater, which now has patrons seated…
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Recommended Concert: PIANO QUARTET MILANO (The Music Guild, St Alban’s Church, Westwood)
The Music Guild presents Piano Quartet Milano on Monday April 3, 2023 at 8pm. The concert takes place in the beautiful, intimate and sonically sound St Alban’s Church. ========== Program (scroll down for details): Handel/Halvorsen: Passacaglia in G Minor, Op. 20 Faure: Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 15 Brahms: Piano Quartet No….
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Theater Review: ONCE (Laguna Playhouse)
ONCE UPON AN AMAZING TIME Good theater allows audiences to see the world from the eyes of the creators. In this triumphant production of Once, which opened last night March 12 at Laguna Playhouse, we are invited into the world of a downtrodden buttery-voiced Irish man and a struggling single immigrant mother. A whirlwind of…
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Highly Recommended Concert: RED EYE 2 TOKYO (Boston Court in Pasadena on April 1, 2023)
THEY RISE AGAIN Red Eye 2 Tokyo, founded by composer and multi-instrumentalist Shih-Wei Wu, will return to the stage for the first time after the pandemic shut down to bring you some rocking J-traditional Jazz fusion sound on Saturday April 1, 2023 at 8 at Boston Court in Pasadena (for tickets, visit Boston Court). There…
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