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Los Angeles
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Los Angeles Cabaret Review: ABSINTHE (Spiegelworld Tent at L.A. Live)
TITS AND SASS My only problem with 20 year old acrobats and showgirls is that they’re not going to date me while I’m in Las Vegas to catch a show. The casinos that hire them aren’t stupid; sexual frustration is the foundation of the gambling followed by cocaine followed by hookers tourism industry. I personally…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: RULES OF SECONDS (Los Angeles Theatre Center)
GOOD FORM AND OTHERS Most playwrights look like they’d rather kiss an ass than kick it. I like John Pollono because he looks like he came expressly to throw a beating, and so it is facile of me to observe that Pollono’s fun new play opened Thursday with the intention of knocking its audience around….
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Los Angeles Music Review: TETZLAFF PLAYS DVOŘíK WITH ESCHENBACH (LA Phil at Disney Hall)
TETZLAFF PLAYS DVOŘíK There was atmosphere galore in Christian Tetzlaff’s intense interpretation of the Dvořák Violin Concerto last night at Disney Hall, but something was amiss’”or rather missing. This is precisely the type of performance that perplexes this critic: Everything is handled right by a soloist, well-steered by conductor, and executed perfectly by well-balanced players….
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Los Angeles Theater Photo Preview: CAROUSEL (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
COME RIDE THE CAROUSEL The photos are in for Musical Theatre West’s production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical masterpiece Carousel, which opens tonight and plays through April 9, 2017 at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach. Truly one of the greatest musicals ever written, Carousel explores the timeless message of message of love,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE TOWN HALL AFFAIR (The Wooster Group at REDCAT)
BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER Having complained more than once that postmodern deconstruction often a) picks on literature that can’t fight back and b) discourages dialogue by speaking in and to a closed system, I am ecstatic to find that the new Wooster Group show dissects a text so dense and fraught that cutting it up only…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: HE HAD IT COMING (Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles)
COMING AND CUMMING Gay men and show tunes? I know this sounds shocking, but I wonder how many of you know what a swell fit that is. And to prove it, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles (GMCLA) continues its super-spectacular 38th Season with He Had It Coming, a showcase of Broadway’s best songs for…
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Los Angeles Music Feature: MAX RAABE & PALAST ORCHESTER (on tour, stopping at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
HEAVEN, YOU’LL BE IN HEAVEN One could scrutinize the reasons that an apotheosis of songwriting appeared early in the twentieth-century, but there was something magical floating through the air that surrounded the world of popular music, not just in America but in Europe as well. Baby Boomers and Millennials have enjoyed a glimpse of this…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: INTO THE WOODS (Fiasco Theatre at the Ahmanson)
INTO THE SOUL OF INTO THE WOODS When I first saw Fiasco Theatre’s production of Into the Woods, it was without reservation that I told friends it was worth the drive from Los Angeles to San Diego’s Old Globe. Now, there is no excuse. Uniquely the most emotionally hard-hitting of any of the dozen or so…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE OFFENDING GESTURE (Son of Semele Ensemble)
DEFENSIVE ACTION Richard Brinsley Sheridan learned the consequence of gesture earlier than most of us. At 21, he fought two duels with the same man over the same woman; having once spared his opponent’s life, he was skewered in their second duel and had his face pulped with the butt of a sword besides. At…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ANTIGONÒN (Teatro El Público at REDCAT)
HIT AND MYTH In Sophocles’ Antigone, the titular character has returned to Thebes to warn her brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, about a prophecy that predicts they will kill each other in a battle for the throne of Thebes. But she’s too late. Both brothers are dead. Antigone’s uncle Creon, who inherited the throne, gave Eteocles a proper burial,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TWELFTH NIGHT (Filter Theatre at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
IF PIZZA BE THE FOOD OF LOVE… Well, that was frustrating. Now at the Wallis in Beverly Hills is England’s Filter Theatre, which deconstructs Twelfth Night to the bare walls (literally there’s no set). This isn’t even a deconstruction, really. It’s a slice-and-dice fringe affair with velcro hats and sticky balls, a real pizza delivery, tequila shots,…
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Interview: JUDY COLLINS (on tour and A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim CD release)
THIS PRETTY WOMAN IS A WONDER She was just nominated for a Grammy for the folk album Silver Skies Blue (a collaboration with singer-songwriter Ari Hest); last year, she headlined a PBS special A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim, and is releasing a CD this week with extra material not on the special; she’s currently…
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Los Angeles Music & Theater Preview: NIGHT AND DREAMS: A SCHUBERT AND BECKETT RECITAL (Disney Hall)
A NIGHT THAT WILL BE A DREAM Franz Schubert, the quintessential Romantic composer of the 19th century, was loved by Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, poet and director Samuel Beckett above all others. Writing to his cousin John Beckett on May 11, 1975 about the experience of listening to records of Schubert’s song-cycle Winterreise, Beckett described himself as “shivering…
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