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Los Angeles
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Los Angeles Concert Preview: A MICHAEL FEINSTEIN HOLIDAY CELEBRATION (Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge)
IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE FEINSTEIN Charismatic, appealing, boyish, excited, and eager to please, Michael Feinstein will bring his off-the-cuff, friendly, intimate style to the gorgeous Valley Performing Arts Center on Friday, December 8, 2017. For this one night only, the man who has single-handedly reinvigorated the American Songbook for the 21st century, will celebrate the…
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Theater Review: SOMETHING ROTTEN! (National Tour reviewed in Los Angeles)
SOMETHING SILLY; NOT QUITE ROTTEN BUT HARDLY FRESH What is it about William Shakespeare that inspires lesser authors (namely, everyone else) to try to take him down? George Bernard Shaw spent his life seeking to supplant or at least discount that other playwright. In Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard imagines the world’s greatest writer as an opportunist who…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: INFERNO (World Premiere Ballet from American Contemporary Ballet)
ACB’S JOURNEY INTO HELL: THE ONE TIME YOU MIGHT WISH THE TRIP WERE LONGER Inferno, American Contemporary Ballet (ACB)’s season opener was a musical blast from the past with a twist. Just in time for Halloween, Artistic Director Lincoln Jones’ latest ballet—set to music from Charles Wuorinen’s seven-part opus The Mission of Virgil—was one for…
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Tour Music Review: IN MY MIND: MONK AT TOWN HALL 1959 (Jason Moran and The Big Bandwagon)
A CONCERT THAT WILL STAY IN MY MIND There are certain experiences involving the arts that stay with you forever. A seamless meld of spiritual and artistic experience, Jason Moran’s tribute piece to Theolonius Monk’s legendary 1959 concert at Town Hall achieved something I rarely witness in the arts: As with a séance, Moran’s octet—rivaling…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (Musical Theatre Guild)
A CONCERT ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN Given the Madrid setting, Hispano characters, and Latin-inspired score, it’s possible that the musicalized version of Pedro Almodóvar’s film will one day make the rounds in regional theaters and high schools. But for now, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown—a 2010 Broadway flop that…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: KING CHARLES III (Pasadena Playhouse)
WOMEN BEHAVING BADLY In Mike Bartlett’s play about the imagined aftermath of Queen Elizabeth II’s death, men hold inherited titles, but women, both living and dead, hold the keys to power. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, the ghost of Lady Diana, Princess of Wales, and a fictional female Tory Leader of the Opposition orchestrate the events…
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San Diego Opera Review: AS ONE (San Diego Opera)
CLASSIC SOUND; MODERN THEME Composer Laura Kaminsky and co-librettists Kimberly Reed and Mark Campbell’s 80-minute chamber opera, As One, is a tribute to the fact that art must keep growing with the times. We expect modern themes explored in painting, music, dance, and more, but encountering today’s issues in opera causes a little more head-cocking….
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TALES FROM THE CRYPT THEATER OF MYSTERY (Captured Aural Phantasy Theater at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater)
ORIGINAL GHOST HOST A COUP FOR CAPT Captured Aural Phantasy Theater (CAPT), the only group authorized to perform EC Comics’ material live, offered a blood-bucket of charm at their recent annual Halloween show, Tales from the Crypt Theater of Mystery. For those who don’t know, Entertaining Comics was an American publisher of comic books specializing…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: LOVE’S PASSIONS AND POTIONS (The Verdi Chorus in Santa Monica)
THE VERDI CHORUS IS A BEST BET The Verdi Chorus will present its Fall 2017 concert Love’s Passions and Potions for two performances only at the First United Methodist Church in Santa Monica on November 18 and 19, led by Founding Artistic Director Anne Marie Ketchum. As the only choral group in Southern California that…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: L.A. DANCE PROJECT FALL PROGRAM (in residence at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
IS THAT ALL THERE IS? For his intriguing but overlong new work Second Quartet, which received its U.S. premiere at The Wallis last weekend, young French choreographer Noé Soulier writes in the program about his 28-minute piece: “Without the spectator having to recognize the motivations behind these complete movements, they are intended to stimulate his…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: YOHEN (East West Players and Robey Theatre Company)
DAMAGED GOODS Playwright Phillip Kan Gotanda’s elegiac drama is a powerful piece that encompasses many themes in a surprisingly tight and concise package; it’s about aging, it’s about the complexity of marriage, and, above all, it’s about a divide between cultures that may or may not be reconciled through love. It’s a drama about the…
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: WOOLF PAPERS (NW Dance Project at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach)
WHO’S EXCITED ABOUT VIRGINIA WOOLF? Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, NW Dance Project’s Artistic Director Sarah Slipper’s Woolf Papers—a reinvention of the classic novel—is an outstanding model of contemporary dance, provocative, theatrical, and deeply moving. Now, this exciting new piece is coming to the Carpenter Center in Long Beach for one night only on…
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Music Preview: BRUCKNER’S EIGHTH WITH CARL ST. CLAIR (Pacific Symphony at Segerstrom Concert Hall)
AN EXPERIENCE NOT TO BE MISSED On a website which attempts to list every Anton Bruckner orchestral recording offered to the public (abruckner.com), the discography collector and annotator John F. Berky states that the Austrian composer “expanded the concept of the symphonic form in ways that have never been witnessed before or since. When listening to a…
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Los Angeles Theater and Music Review: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (Mendelssohn music and Shakespeare scenes with the LA Phil)
COME FOR MENDELSSOHN, STAY FOR Mí„LKKI There are three things to consider regarding LA Phil’s huge production of Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has music interlaced with scenes from one of Shakespeare’s most produced plays: the orchestra; the production; and the venue. Since this is, after all, the LA Phil, I’m happy to report…
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San Diego Theater Review: HAND TO GOD (San Diego Repertory Theatre at the Lyceum Stage)
EVIL RIGHT AT HAND What could go wrong when a newly widowed mom leads three teens in a wholesome, Lutheran, extra-curricular church class tasked with creating a Christian puppet show? Thankfully for us, plenty, in this gripping, darkly-comic drama by Robert Askins which premiered off-Broadway in 2011. Trying to fill her empty life with something…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE RIDICULOUS DARKNESS (Son of Semele Ensemble)
THE RIDICULOUSNESS OF IT ALL I had a college film-course assignment: Read Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella The Heart of Darkness and then watch Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film adaptation, Apocalypse Now. In the novella, a British ivory transporter named Marlow develops a concentrated curiosity about an ivory-procurement agent named Kurtz while journeying up the Congo…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES (Antaeus Theatre in Glendale)
THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF SAVAGES Who would have imagined that a 30-year-old stage adaptation (by Christopher Hampton) of a 1782 novel (by Choderlos de Laclos) would be so devastatingly of the moment. In a time when sexual harassment, abuse, and assault are at the center of a national conversation many hope will bring about overdue…
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Music Preview: MARIINSKY ORCHESTRA (North American tour with Valery Gergiev at Disney Hall)
THE TRIFECTA OF MARIINSKY, GERGIEV, AND MATSUEV AT DISNEY HALL Beginning tonight, October 29, Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra will undertake their greatest tour of the season, presenting sixteen concerts in cities in the USA and Canada though November 15. During the tour, the orchestra will be appearing alongside such stunning pianists of the present day as Behzod Abduraimov, Denis Matsuev, Daniil…
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Los Angeles Opera Photo Preview: THE MEDIUM & THE MONKEY’S PAW (Pacific Opera Project)
TAKE A PAWS Pacific Opera Project (POP) is serving up six spooky performances of the world premiere of LA-based composer Brooke deRosa’s The Monkey’s Paw. This is the company’s first presentation of a world premiere opera, and it is paired with Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, one of his best works. Performances begin tonight, October…
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Music Preview: ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA (North American tour with Zubin Mehta)
ISRAEL PHILHARMONIC; ZUBIN MEHTA; YEFIM BRONFMAN; AND A U.S. PREMIERE AT DISNEY HALL Beginning tonight in New York, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is beginning its six-city North American tour. This highly anticipated but very short tour—they’re only on the road for two weeks through November 9—includes Toronto, San Francisco, West Palm Beach, Miami, and, happily,…
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