Areas We Cover
Categories
Los Angeles
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: WEST SIDE STORY (La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts)
A SUBURBAN WEST SIDE STORY Sadly, hate conquers all in West Side Story, but the love we see and feel can hold its own. Though over a half-century old, the Bernstein/Laurents/Sondheim/Robbins tour-de-force is, like its Shakespearean source, young as first love. You don’t revive it, you detonate it, as happens repeatedly in La Mirada’s mixed…
-
Los Angeles Music Preview: THE BEST OF WAGNER’S RING (LA Phil at Disney Hall)
PHILLIPE JORDAN, LORD OF THE RING Little more than 200 years since the birth of Wagner, and the world still can’t get enough of the German composer. Love him or hate him, he is one of the most influential composers of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The musical innovator introduced many musical offerings,…
-
Los Angeles Concert Feature: IDOLS & ICONS (The 33rd [and final] S.T.A.G.E. at Saban Theatre)
COME SALUTE THE END OF AN ERA It’s a bit surreal, but the the theater community’s longest-running AIDS-related benefit is having its final fundraiser on Saturday May 13, 2017. The Southland Theatre Artists Goodwill Event (best known by its acronym S.T.A.G.E.) will present its 33rd cavalcade of stars at the snazzy Art Deco-styled 1930 Saban Theatre…
-
Los Angeles Dance Preview: MATTHEW BOURNE’S EARLY ADVENTURES (The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
THE EARLY BIRD GETS TICKETS NOW Touring internationally for the first part of the year, Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures’”a program of the newly knighted choreographer’s first works’”will have one U.S. appearance. And it’s right here in Los Angeles for one weekend only, May 17-21, 2017, at the Wallis in Beverly Hills. One of the greatest…
-
Los Angeles Cabaret Preview: DAVID BURNHAM (Carpenter Center)
BURNHAM, BABY, BURNHAM When you first espy David Burnham on stage, his dazzling smile and chiseled looks belie the fact that he has a golden voice and boffo acting chops, both dramatic and comedic. When I first saw him in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the long-haired golden-throated tenor with teeny-bopper idol charisma stole…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: FAILURE: A LOVE STORY (Coeurage Theatre Company at the Kirk Douglas Theatre)
THE LOVE CONTINUES [Editor’s Note: To celebrate the work being done on intimate stages in Los Angeles, the Center Theatre Group (CTG) is producing Block Party at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. CTG received 76 submissions from intimate theatre companies throughout the L.A. area. Each company was able to submit one production that opened between January…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: THE ORIGINALIST (Pasadena Playhouse)
AN ORIGINAL IDEA The late Antonin Scalia (1936-2016) was an important conservative voice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1986 until his death. He was a loud-voiced proponent of the intellectual ideal of “originalism,” meaning that interpreting the U.S. Constitution (b. 1789) lies directly with what the framers meant at that time and that no “newfangled”…
-
Los Angeles Music Review MARTHA ARGERICH & STEPHEN KOVACEVICH (Recital at Disney Hall)
PRIMO AND PRIMO A strange thing happened on the way to the duo piano recital of the once-married pianists Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich at Disney hall last Saturday. A few minutes before the Debussy-heavy program began, the normal “turn off your cell phones” pre-show announcement (which doggedly refuses to castigate crinkling programs and whispered…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: THE ENCOUNTER (Complicite at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
THEATER ON TAPE Once the mainstay of fringe festivals and performance art houses, one-person plays showcasing the likes of James Whitmore and Lily Tomlin became financially viable in the latter quarter of the twentieth century, but they were rare. Given the financial constraints of modern theater, however, solo shows are cropping up like opium poppies…
-
Los Angeles Theater Preview: GROUNDLINGS SLEEPAWAY CAMP (The Groundlings Theatre)
IT’S TIME FOR S’MORE GROUNDLINGS Who doesn’t love sitting around a campfire scaring the crap outta some brat? Who doesn’t love canoe trips down a rocky brook? Who doesn’t love that first crush on a nubile camp counselor? Who doesn’t love listening to Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”? Who doesn’t love watching a deranged lunatic having his way…
-
Los Angeles Theater Preview: APOCALYPSE PLAY (Moving Arts at Atwater Village Theatre)
FINAL WEEKEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD If you think the end of the world is scary, how about the end of a run of a terrific new play and you missed it? The Ovation-recommended Apocalypse Play closes up shop this weekend, and you definitely want to be around for the end. I know…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: MAN OF LA MANCHA (A Noise Within in Pasadena)
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS As a part of A Noise Within’s 25th Season, co-Artistic Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott helms an extraordinary production of this 1964 hit musical, Man of La Mancha, adapted by Dale Wasserman from his 1959 teleplay I, Don Quixote, which was adapted from Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605 Don Quixote. The timeless score…
-
San Diego Theater Review: FIRST DATE (San Diego Musical Theatre at Horton Grand Theatre)
A FIRST DATE THAT GOES WELL The device of having characters receive advice from a conscience or someone from their past is tried and true in musicals: They’re Playing Our Song‘s Vernon’s gets help from his Greek Chorus “boys”; Grease‘s Frenchy is (beauty)schooled by the Teen Angel; and now, First Date‘s Aaron and Casey get input, helpful…
-
Los Angeles Music Review: SALONEN & SIBELIUS (Los Angeles Philharmonic at Disney Hall)
THOSE SUMPTUOUS STRINGS OF SIBELIUS Fresh-faced and vital, Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program centered on Finland’s greatest composer, Jean Sibelius. I was somewhat concerned since a few separate music lovers I know found last Thursday’s performance, the first of a 3-performance weekend, underwhelming. I admit that there’s…
-
San Diego Theater Review: THE GEEZE AND ME (THE TENTH Avenue Arts Center)
IT’S WORTH SINGING ABOUT GETTING OLDER Perhaps the only thing worse than getting older is thinking about it. So when a nascent theater company puts on a show’”a musical no less’”about the fear and associated feelings regarding aging (and the odds of becoming what is referred to as a “Geeze”), some theatergoers may understandably be hesitant to…
-
Los Angeles Opera Review: THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (LA Opera)
A LENGTHY BUT LOVELY OFFENBACH Just as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in the middle of writing his famous Requiem so did Jacques Offenbach die composing his fantastical opera Tales of Hoffmann. Both works have been seen as highly personal compositions: Mozart writing his own requiem and Offenbach standing in for Hoffmann, his protagonist. The similarities…
-
San Diego Theater Review: ON THE 20TH CENTURY (Cygnet Theatre Company)
A LONG RIDE ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY In today’s world of seeing T-shirts in fancy restaurants, it’s almost difficult to envision that, once upon a time, people would dress to the nines for a 16-hour train ride, being attended to by spiffy stewards, waiters, and chefs. But that’s exactly what hundreds of New York’s elite did…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF COMEDY [ABRIDGED] (Falcon Theatre in Burbank)
THIS COMEDY IS TRAGIC Painfully unfunny to the point of torture, Falcon Theatre’s production of The Complete History of Comedy (abridged) puts a nail in the coffin of vaudeville and burlesque, and left me stone-faced. Lacking inventiveness and freshness, Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor’s script trammels us with a trajectory of comedy from its birth (plastic dolls shooting…
-
Theater Review: AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (National Tour reviewed at the Hollywood Pantages)
THE DANCING ENTRANCES, BUT THE BOOK DOESN’T STAND A CHANCE Back in the era that spawned musicals with tunes by Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Rodgers, the Broadway Musical Comedy book was almost unnecessary. The 1920s and ’30s saw shows constructed piecemeal’”a comic star here, a songwriting team there, whoever was available, really. The cliché-ridden plots and dubious groaners…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (Antaeus Theatre in Glendale)
UP ON THE ROOF Tennessee Williams’ complete oeuvre went from totally brilliant to completely flat as he evolved in his work, beginning in the early 1940s and ending in the early ’80s. Considering that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) is considered one of his top five dramas, it’s a logical choice for classical theater…
Search Articles
Please help keep
Stage and Cinema going!
