Areas We Cover
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Los Angeles
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Theater Review: HAPPY DAYS (Mark Taper Forum)
HAPPY DAYS IS HERE AGAIN I had never read nor seen Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Happy Days, now at the Mark Taper, but was excited at the prospect of seeing the great Dianne Weist in the flesh. Like many people, I’ve loved her ever since Hannah and Her Sisters, one of Woody Allen’s best films,…
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Music Review: DUDAMEL & LANG LANG (LA Phil)
BACK TO BUSINESS Star pianist Lang Lang overcame his left-hand injury — the tendonitis that caused him to hand off four of five scheduled Beethoven Concertos with the LA Phil this month. His limited schedule has allowed for quicker recovery time, but it also allowed four other pianists from around the globe to show off…
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Theater Review: M. BUTTERFLY (South Coast Rep)
MEH BUTTERFLY M. Butterfly asks the audience to accept a love story in which a French career diplomat takes a Chinese opera diva as his mistress for 20 years, unaware that the diva is actually a man. Truth being stranger than fiction, the story is based on a real life affair that David Henry Hwang…
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Theater Review: YOGA PLAY (Moxie Theatre Company in San Diego)
PUTTING CAPITALISM ON THE MAT Which of the following defines yoga to you? A series of gentle exercises meant to relax and invigorate the body; A Hindu spiritual and ascetic discipline using breath control and meditation; An 83 billion-dollar international industry of mats, equipment, clothing, and accessories. All three are true, but for Joan (Jo…
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Theater Review: AT THE TABLE (Road Theatre at Lankershim Arts Center in North Hollywood)
THERE’S A LOT AT THIS TABLE At the Table takes place in Catskills, a resort area in the low mountains in E New York State that I hold dear to my heart since I spent many summers there — as many Jewish New Yorkers did. The setting is the house of Nate (Christian Prentice), who…
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Review: THE SECRET GARDEN (3-D Theatricals)
A FLOWERING PRODUCTION The Secret Garden, the hauntingly romantic musical by Marsha Norman (book and lyrics) and Lucy Simon (music) opened on Broadway 1991 and ran 709 performances. The show starred Mandy Patinkin, Rebecca Luker, John Cameron Mitchell, and Robert Westenberg; 11-year old Daisy Egan became the youngest recipient of a Tony Award for Best…
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Theater Review: JULIUS WEEZER (The Troubies at El Portal in North Hollywood)
CAESING THE MOMENT What do you get when you mix Shakespeare’s beloved tragedy Julius Caesar with the hard-driving rock band Weezer? Adapter, director and choreographer Matt Walker, who also plays Cassius, arrived at the mash-up known as Julius Weezer, and you should be prepared before attending that you will no doubt wind up laughing your…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: DANIEL’S HUSBAND (Fountain Theatre in Hollywood)
THE PLAY THAT GOT AWAY I don’t know the exact play Michael McKeever was writing prior to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in favor of federal marriage equality, but I suspect it worked much more than this now locked-in reconstruction that made its way to Off-Broadway by 2018, and is now getting its Southern California…
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Music Review: GREAT OPERA & FILM CHORUSES (Los Angeles Master Chorale at Disney Hall)
RESOUNDING SOUNDTRACKS In 1770, Jean Jacques Rousseau employed music to accompany certain dramatic scenes in his play Pygmalion. A hundred years later, music to accompany theatrical melodrama was de rigueur. By natural progression, music became an essential part of silent cinema. Phonograph, piano, organ or a loosely assembled band played along with the earliest movies,…
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Review: SISTER ACT (San Diego Musical Theatre)
WELL DONE HAVING FUN ON THE RUN AS A NUN Don’t you just hate it when your boyfriend turns out to be a mobster and murders someone right in front of you, forcing you to flee and hide — all when your Disco Diva career is ready to take off? Well, that’s what happens to…
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Theater Review: BRIGHT STAR (Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont)
OH MY STAR! Bright Star is a heartwarming musical written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell inspired by their 2013 bluegrass album Love Has Come for You. The show had a Broadway run in the spring of 2016 with direction by Walter Bobbie, choreography by Josh Rhodes and a set design by Eugene Lee. Now,…
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Music Review: SALONEN’S STRAVINSKY: MYTHS (Los Angeles Philharmonic)
BORE-PHEUS AND EURYD-ENNUI When we think of Stravinsky’s music, contemplative, encompassing beauty isn’t what pops into mind. Yet that’s what we get in the very rarely performed ballets, Orpheus (1947) and Perséphone (1934). As part of LA Phil’s erstwhile Music Director’s series, Salonen’s Stravinsky, Esa-Pekka Salonen continues his salute of (mostly) lesser played works by…
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Theater Review: TIME NO LINE (John Kelly)
TEMPUS FUGIT There are great performance artists and, rarer still, there are great artists who perform. John Kelly is both. His Time No Line is a quietly breathtaking meditation on his life and art culled from the journals he kept from 1976 to the present day. He can be mathematically precise poring over details in…
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Theater Preview: DIE, MOMMIE, DIE! (Los Angeles Theatre Works at UCLA)
SHE’S BA-A-A-CK AND SHE’S FA-A-A-ABULOUS Charles Busch’s play Die, Mommie, Die! is equal parts Greek comic-tragedy and Hollywood kitsch — a melodramatic campy cult classic in the vein of 1960s gothic horror films such as Hush:Hush, Sweet Charlotte. I saw the very first production at the Coast Playhouse back in 1999 starring the cabaret and…
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Music Preview: VíKINGUR ÒLAFSSON (Solo Piano at Disney Hall)
AS GOOD AS GOULD While my heart sank to hear that Murray Perahia had to pull out of his recital at Disney Hall this Sunday, April 21, 2019, nothing prepared me for the fantastic news that pianist Víkingur í“lafsson will replace him with a program of mostly Bach with some Glass (Perahia will return as…
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Theater Review: SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (The Soraya in Northridge and The La Mirada Theatre)
LET THE GOOD TIMES POUR When people say a musical is old-fashioned they usually mean it in a negative way, which is silly. There are bad, good, and brilliant musicals, and Singin’ in the Rain is brilliant. The stage version of Singin’ in the Rain was adapted from the 1952 MGM movie written by Betty Comden…
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Theater Review: FALSETTOS (National Tour)
NOT ONE FALSE NOTE The musical masterpiece Falsettos follows Marvin, an appealing, brainy, anxious, obsessive, wealthy Jewish gay man who struggles to create a tight-knit family out of his eclectic array of core relationships: an ex-wife, new boyfriend, adolescent son, psychiatrist, and “neighbors who are lesbians from next door.” Amidst a series of monumental life changes…
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Theater Review: EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (Ensemble Theatre Company in Santa Barbara)
SOME, NOT ALL, IS ILLUMINATED Sadly, not everything is illuminated in British playwright Simon Block’s fascinating but problematic adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s best-selling novel about a young American writer who hires a Ukrainian translator to take him to the town where a woman named Augustine saved his grandfather’s life in WWII. Or so Jonathan…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TINY BEAUTIFUL THINGS (Pasadena Playhouse)
CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE THEATER Well, there certainly is nothing wrong with good advice. And there’s plenty of that in the structurally unconventional Tiny Beautiful Things, Nia Vardalos’s stage adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s epistolary best-selling book which, in the incarnation at Pasadena Playhouse starring Vardalos herself, feels like a warm little hug when it could…
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Music Review: MIRGA LEADS TCHAIKOVSKY & DEBUSSY (LA Phil)
MIRGA DESERVES THE HEADLINE, BUT PATRICIA STEALS THE SHOW Here’s how it starts: Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja — born in Moldova, trained in Vienna — saunters onstage at Disney Hall as if she’s headed to the beach; she wears a comfy lived-in black outfit that says “flea market” more than “concert hall”; then, she slips off…
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