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Los Angeles
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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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Theater Review: SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (La Mirada Theatre)
SWEENEY TODD SLICES DEEP — EVEN WITH A FEW MISSTEPS Jason Alexander’s ambitious concept does not blunt the impact of a blisteringly performed revival McCoy Rigby Entertainment has been doing solid work for decades, but they have outdone themselves with their new production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, now playing in…
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Theater Review: POETRY FOR THE PEOPLE: THE JUNE JORDAN EXPERIENCE (Fountain Theatre)
POETRY AS ACTIVISM, MEMORY, AND INVITATION A moving, participatory tribute to June Jordan that insists poetry still matters June Jordan was a seminal feminist poet and essayist who—beyond gender—tackled issues of race, sexual identity, and political activism. She believed that the truest means of understanding the challenges these forces posed to American society, and of…
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Theater Review: AGAINST ALL ODDS: COINCIDENCE, CHAOS, AND EVERYDAY MIRACLES (Stephanie Feury)
MY WINNER WITH LAWRENCE As part of the 30 Minutes or Less Festival presented by Matthew V. Quinn and Bertha Rodriguez at the Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre in Hollywood, writer-performer Lawrence Meyers manages to fill every nanosecond on stage with his Against All Odds: Coincidence, Chaos, and Everyday Miracles. Clever and witty to a fault,…
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Theater Review: GILDED SPINDLE (Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre)
ZANDER RAPHAEL SPINS PUPPETRY INTO GOLD Gilded Spindle offers Shannon L. Reagan’s retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin tale with a slight #MeToo twist. While the talents and artistry of Reagan, the Wyndwolf Players and Wyndwolf Puppets are present on the stage of the Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre, the roughness of the production itself is unable to…
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Theater Review: KIND STRANGER … A MEMORY PLAY (Zephyr Theatre)
Kind Stranger … A Memory Play, conceived and performed by Rick Simone-Friedland is successful as a historical rendering of Playwright Tennessee Williams’ life. It is also successful as a reconstruction of Williams’ public persona–that calm, lackadaisical soul who answers questions in a slow Southern drawl between lingering puffs on the black ivory cigarette holder. But…
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Theater Review: BROWNSTONE (Open Fist Theatre Company at Atwater Village)
THREE ERAS, ONE MISSED OPPORTUNITY Brownstone collapses under unfocused, baffling staging Catherine Butterfield’s Brownstone (2008) is built around a solid, even enticing idea: we have three couples, each occupying the same second-floor apartment in a Manhattan brownstone during three eras—1930s, the 1970s, and the turn of the 21st century. Instead of three separate acts in…
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