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Los Angeles
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Theater Review: WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (South Coast Rep)
A CLASSIC THAT STILL CUTS DEEP A perfect cast brings Albee’s brutal masterpiece roaring to life—if with slightly less bite than usual There’s a reason Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? refuses to age: it’s one of the greatest plays ever written, a savage autopsy of marriage, illusion, and the lies we need to survive. South…
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Theater Review: THE SHARK IS BROKEN (Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach)
THREE MEN IN A BOAT, WAITING FOR A FISH At Laguna Playhouse, the making of a blockbuster becomes a chamber piece about ego, craft, and survival Gildart Jackson, Will Block, and Adam Poole The mechanical shark that tormented Steven Spielberg during the filming of Jaws in the summer of 1974 was nicknamed Bruce, after the…
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Concert Review: FROM MOZART TO MAHLER (Pacific Symphony)
INTIMACY AND ENORMITY: MOZART AND MAHLER IN COSTA MESA Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, is a peculiar piece to a classical program. It omits oboes entirely, replacing them with clarinets for a softer, more inward blend, and there are no trumpets or drums at all, no means of making a…
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Theater Review: ALL MY SONS (Antaeus Theatre)
THE POSTWAR AMERICAN NIGHTMARE STILL RESONATES A gripping Antaeus revival reminds us how easily communities excuse the unforgivable A successful small-town businessman, a distraught wife, a lovelorn idealistic son, and the ghost of a missing pilot haunt the yard. The themes that moved audiences in the 1940s still touch us today in Antaeus Theatre Company‘s…
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Theater Review: GOD OF CARNAGE (South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa)
CIVILITY CRUMBLES, BUT THE COMEDY NEVER BUILDS South Coast Rep’s revival exposes how thin satire needs sharper direction to truly sting Melinda Page Hamilton and Kim Martin-Cotten The first time I saw Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage was at The Ahmanson Theatre with an all-star cast, one so good that they practically hid that the…
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Dance Preview: STILL/HERE (Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company on Tour at Royce Hall)
STILL HERE, STILL ESSENTIAL The tour of Bill T. Jones’s landmark dance comes to Royce Hall with undiminished force The first time I saw Still/Here, it was at BAM. It was 1994, the year of Stonewall’s 25th Anniversary and The Gay Games in NYC. So, yes, there was celebrating, but the AIDS epidemic was still…
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Opera Review: AKHNATEN (LA Opera)
STILL THE PHARAOH-EST OF THEM ALL, AKHNATEN STUNS AT LA OPERA An intellectually rigorous, visually arresting production that embraces the opera’s challenges rather than disguising them John Holiday as Akhnaten There is a structural difficulty at the heart of Akhnaten that admiration alone cannot resolve—although admiration at last night’s opening at The Chandler is never…
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Theater Review: FOURSOME (IAMA & Celebration at Atwater Village Theatre)
FOR SOME, MAYBE — FOR OTHERS, A CHORE An exhausting exercise in enforced fun and emotional emptiness (Seated) Felix (Jimin Moon), Noah (Matthew Scott Montgomery, (on floor) Kobe (Calvin Seabrooks, and Tahj (Adrián Javier) are two couples You know that one friend who exhausts everyone in the room? That annoying one in your wider friend…
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Theater Review: RICHARD III (A Noise Within)
A GENDER-FLUID RICHARD III ROOTED IN HISTORY AND PERFORMANCE TRADITION A commanding central performance anchors a sharp, theatrically confident staging The Tragedy of Richard the Third, William Shakespeare’s second-longest play after Hamlet, and the fourteenth most produced play in his canon (the first being Midsummers Night’s Dream), has an exceedingly straightforward plot. Richard wants to…
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Opera Preview: RIVERSIDE LYRIC OPERA (Grand Re-Opening Gala Concert on March 7)
OPERA RETURNS TO RIVERSIDE, AND IT’S BRINGING A 54-PIECE ORCHESTRA The Riverside Lyric Opera’s gala concert on March 7 marks a rare moment for the Inland Empire: a full-scale operatic event with world-class talent, right in its own backyard. Riverside has one of the largest collections of Mission-style architecture in Southern California, a university campus…
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Theater Review: SYLVIA SYLVIA SYLVIA (Geffen Playhouse)
THREE SYLVIAS, ZERO THRILLS Beth Hyland’s world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse arrives with the kind of literary bait that makes theater people clasp their reusable water bottles in delight. Sylvia Plath’s ghost returns to her old Boston apartment. A present-day novelist moves in. The novelist unravels as her marriage curdles and her deadline circles…
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Concert Review: DUDAMEL CONDUCTS BEETHOVEN AND LORENZ (LA Phil / Disney Hall)
THREE THEORIES OF WITNESS At Disney Hall with the LA Phil on February 12, Ricardo Lorenz’s Humboldt’s Nature opened the evening by staking out a proposition: that orchestral music can think, not merely illustrate. The piece follows Humboldt’s intellectual life not as biography but as cognitive event, a consciousness moving through accumulated observation toward something…
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Theater Review: INCITATION TO THE DANCE (Theatre West)
A STRANGER IN THE HOUSE A smart, suggestive script meets a production that can’t quite generate the heat it promises. No, it’s not a typo. With a title guaranteed to make you double-take, Michael Van Duzer’s unabashedly gay new play, Incitation to the Dance, opened last Friday at Theatre West. David Mingrino, Casey Alcoser, Michael…
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Concert Preview: MISSA SOLEMNIS (Gustavo Dudamel and The LA Phil at Disney Hall)
Beethoven’s towering Missa Solemnis arrives at Disney Hall for a rare, monumental performance. Dudamel leads a massive musical and choral force in one of Beethoven’s most demanding—and least-heard—masterworks. “From the heart—may it go further to the heart.” That’s what Ludwig van Beethoven inscribed on the score of his Missa Solemnis, a work he labored over for four years—the…
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Theater Review: AMADEUS (Pasadena Playhouse)
PATRON SAINT OF THE SECOND-RATE A rigorously intelligent and theatrically thrilling revival that restores Shaffer’s parable to full force Schopenhauer once drew a distinction between talent, which hits a target no one else can hit, and genius, which hits a target no one else can see. The remark could serve as an epigraph for Peter…
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Music Review: WILD UP: THE GREAT LEARNING (The Broad)
EXPERIMENTAL SOUND MEETS MUSEUM SPACE — WITH MIXED RESULTS A well-intentioned immersion in Cardew’s radical score undone by acoustics, logistics, and audience reality On Saturday February 7, Wild Up performed The Great Learning, Paragraphs 2 and 7 by radical English composer Cornelius Cardew inside The Broad, in conjunction with the exhibition Robert Therrien: This is…
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Opera Review: ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO (Pacific Opera Project)
MOZART MEETS THE FINAL FRONTIER Pacific Opera Project boldly goes where singspiel has gone before Begin with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 1789 complex and comic singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail, aka Abduction from the Seraglio, commissioned by the Habsburg monarch Joseph II, who famously complained to Mozart, “Too many notes.” Now take Gene Roddenberry’s visionary…
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Theater Review: THREE COCONUTS (West Coast Jewish Theatre in Santa Monica)
SHABBAT, SLAPSTICK, AND THREE SUITORS IN 1968 CHICAGO The comedy cracks open plenty of laughs, then lets the shell sit too long. A domineering Jewish mother, her sharp-tongued teenage son, three oddball suitors, a hippie pimp, and two Chicago cops walk onto a stage. Chaos follows. The question is whether the play knows when to…
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Theater Review: MY SON THE PLAYWRIGHT (Rogue Machine)
TWO MONOLOGUES IN SEARCH OF A DIALOGUE Justin Tanner has spent decades making chaos look easy. Those early Cast Theatre productions like Pot Mom and Zombie Attack trafficked in a particular brand of Los Angeles mayhem — high energy and unruly and knowing. With My Son the Playwright, now receiving its world premiere at Rogue…
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Theater Review: PUNISH ME: A PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER (Hudson Backstage Theatre)
A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND POSING AS THEATER. SAFE WORD: CURTAIN An erotic psychological thriller script without the erotic, psychology, thrill, or script Dear Gay Theater-makers, I am writing today to encourage you to see the terrible new play Punish Me, by triple-threat writer-producer-actor Michael Dukakis, currently renting space at the Hudson Backstage Theatre. Do I recommend…
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