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Los Angeles
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San Diego Theater Review: THE FULL MONTY (San Diego Musical Theatre)
THE FULL MONTY IS WORTH BARING IN MIND When the main factory in town shuts down and only menial work, far below previous pay grade, can be found, what’s a man supposed to do? For the two central men in The Full Monty, the answer is to create a one-night-only strip show to compete with…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: CANDIDE (LA Opera)
YES, WE CANDIDE There isn’t much I could say about the musical Candide that hasn’t been written about before. What I can say is never miss an opportunity to catch a production, especially when it’s a full-on spectacle like the one opening tonight with LA Opera. Leonard Bernstein created one of our greatest Broadway scores when he…
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: ASTAIRE DANCES (American Contemporary Ballet)
I’LL TAKE ASTAIRE’S WAY TO PARADISE The great ballet choreographer George Balanchine compared Fred Astaire to Bach, and Baryshnikov claimed Astaire gave him an inferiority complex. Katharine Hepburn once said about his partnership with Ginger Rogers: “He gives her class, and she gives him sex.” Astaire himself said, “I don’t make love by kissing, I…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: ARTURO SANDOVAL JAZZ WEEKEND (The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
ARTURO SANDOVAL’S AMAZING JAZZ WEEKEND IS HERE! He moves easily across many varieties of jazz and instruments — using his trumpet to produce a fiery assortment of resonances, interchangeably stately, amusing and starry-eyed. The mighty, vibrant, effervescent Cuban trumpet player, big band leader, and composer Arturo Sandoval — a protégé of Dizzy Gillespie — is…
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Los Angeles Music Review: DUDAMEL CONDUCTS BRAHMS (Los Angeles Philharmonic)
A WEEKEND OF FIRSTS Gustavo Dudamel returns to the podium this weekend — Thursday through Sunday, January 25-28, 2018 — to lead the LA Phil in a concert easily predicted to be a stunner. Brahms First Symphony, on which he labored for so long (over 14 years), is an openly passionate work, the last great…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE CHOSEN (Fountain)
LOVE AND “COMPASSIONATE SILENCE” We are living through an era that seems to value greed, hypocrisy, narcissism and blatant dishonesty over truth and meaning. This makes the journey into the world of Aaron Posner and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen that much more satisfying. It feels as impactful as a dear friend’s determined embrace, the kind…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: A DELICATE SHIP (Road Theatre Company in North Hollywood)
THESE THINGS MUST BE DONE DELICATELY If you lose your way trying to navigate the enigmatic journey Anna Ziegler wants to take us in her well-written but thematically dense A Delicate Ship, keep your eye on Josh Zuckerman – it’ll be impossible not to – because he has found the human trajectory that Nate, one of…
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Los Angeles Music Review: YARN/WIRE (Monday Evening Concerts at The Colburn School)
THEY’LL LEAVE YOU WIRED For those who don’t know, Monday Evening Concerts is L.A.’s longest running new music show, dating to back to 1939. To put its legacy in to perspective, the series hosted Pierre Boulez’s American debut and a few Stravinsky premieres. Now it exists much in the same way, premiering works by emerging or established…
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Music Preview: WELL-STRUNG (National Tour)
LOOKING GOOD FROM FRONT AND BACH The Los Angeles LGBT Center has announced a special one-night-only return of the internationally acclaimed singing string quartet Well-Strung. The four performers specialize in pairing universally recognized classical pieces while singing pop music hits by the likes of Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson, and others. As part of their…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: LOUISIANA PURCHASE (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
RARELY PRODUCED BERLIN SCORE COMES TO LIFE No doubt when folks hear “Louisiana Purchase,” they think of Thomas Jefferson’s gargantuan land acquisition from France in 1803, a purchase which resulted soon thereafter in Lewis and Clark’s expedition. So, is this the subject of the musical Louisiana Purchase? Nope. Wait… What..? You mean you’ve never even…
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Theater and Music Preview: IL RITORNO (Circa Contemporary Circus)
AN OPERATIC CIRCUS ODYSSEY The uber-innovative Australian performance troupe, Circa, returns to the States with its newest production, Il Ritorno, a unique production that melds circus arts with Baroque opera to explore themes of loss and displacement. This special engagement takes place one night only, Tuesday, January 23, 2018 at the gorgeous Musco Center for the…
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Los Angeles Music and Dance Preview: Mí„LKKI, STRAUSS & DANCE (Zimmermann’s Cello Concerto & Alpine Symphony, Susanna Målkki and the LA Phil)
DANCE! U.S. PREMIERE! ALPINE SYMPHONY! One of the reasons that the LA Phil is doing better than ever is the programming variety. With plenty of classics, we are also getting a slew of new music, much of it seeing its premiere at The Walt Disney Concert Hall (there will be over 50 such works next…
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Theater Review: SMALL MOUTH SOUNDS (National Tour at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
YOU LEAVE SEEKING PEACE AND A PLOT When a play comes along that is entirely different from any play that has preceded it, especially in our era of over-informative white noise and copycatting creativity, it deserves attention. Even Small Mouth Sounds — Bess Wohl’s 2016 work, now stopping at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica as…
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Theater Review: ALADDIN (National Tour)
A BROADWAY AMUSEMENT PARK THAT FLIES LIKE A CARPET “Open sesame” indeed. It’s “Abracadabra” times ten as the arrival of Aladdin in Hollywood feels as triumphant as Prince Ali’s magnificent entrance into Agrabah at the top of the second act. A theme park of a musical, Disney Theatrical Productions’ eye-popping transformation of the 1992 film…
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Los Angeles Art Preview: L.A. ART SHOW (Los Angeles Convention Center)
ART YOU TAKE PART IN I never in my wildest imaginings would have thought Los Angeles to become a mecca for art. But the combination of a rich cultural stew, the burgeoning arts life of downtown L.A., an explosion of galleries (of which Culver City was at the forefront), the opening of the Getty, better…
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Los Angeles Music Review: DEBUSSY, RAVEL, & BEYOND (Matthias Pintscher, Renaud Capuçon and the Los Angeles Philharmonic)
“MAR’EH” GETS A “M’EH” While musicians and devotees of “new” music may find Matthias Pintscher’s mar’eh cool, the patrons at Disney Hall were not having it at the opening night last Friday. Truly typical of way too many modern works, mar’eh (with an also-typical all-lowercase title spelling) is a violin concerto that’s an atmospheric stew-of-notes perfect for a melody-free…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: BUGABOO & THE SILENT ONE (Lounge Theatre in Hollywood)
THANKFULLY, NOT SO SILENT Based on her three previous theater outings alone, it’s fitting that writer/director Marja-Lewis Ryan has recently been tapped to be showrunner and executive producer of he upcoming The L Word sequel series. L.A. is lucky to have Ryan, who loves to keep working in theater even as her career in film…
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Theater Review: LUZIA (Cirque du Soleil on tour)
MEMORIES OF MEXICO, LUZIA UNLEASHES A RAIN OF JOY The Cirque du Soleil just made a run for the border ’” and not the Canadian one — as the Montreal-based human circus lavishes its unstoppable imagination on our neighbor to the south. Luzia, the latest (ad)venture under the redesigned white-and-gold Grand Chapiteau (its tent planted in the…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: HOW THE PRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS! (Troubadors at El Portal Theatre)
A PRINCH ASSAULT For 22 years, the Troubadour Theater Company (aka The Troubies) has amalgamated freely altered classics with music of a particular artist, creating riotous sketch/improv/entertainments that are liberally seasoned with an air of Commedia dell’Arte; this gives the immensely talented players the opportunity to act, sing, dance, improvise, and perform feats of acrobatic…
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Los Angeles Music Review: BRUCKNER’S SEVENTH; MOZART’S PIANO 23 (Michael Tilson Thomas, Khatia Buniatishvili and the Los Angeles Philharmonic)
SEVENTH HEAVEN While he existed in the Romantic Era, “Romantic” isn’t necessarily the word that springs to mind when I hear an Anton Bruckner Symphony (except perhaps his Fourth, actually titled Romantic). His giant mesmerizing symphonies, nine in total, are closer to religious experiences (a devout Catholic who never married, Bruckner dedicated his unfinished Ninth…
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