Los Angeles

O’HARA  SALON Broadway icon Kelli O’Hara ventured far west  of the Great White Way Friday night to perform Broadway favorites and a few originals to  a  well-sold house  at Valley Performing Arts Center, which is not only beautiful and glamorous, but has  the finest sound of any concert hall I’ve attended. This captivating creature proved her timelessness by never resorting to…

WHAT I DID FORSYTHE LOVE The Music Center begins its 2016-17 dance season this Friday, October 21, 2016, with Celebrate Forsythe, a remarkable evening devoted to the works of  William Forsythe. Equally special is that three separate ballet companies will each perform in the program. For more than 45 years, the innovative Forsythe has been  broadening the  world…

DEFICIENT DRAMA DILUTES DELUSION In 2011, writer/director Jon Braver created Delusion, a new kind of haunted house. In the ensuing years (except last year, 2015, which was dark), with a different tale presented annually, Braver has brought Los Angeles a much-celebrated high-end Halloween attraction that is so popular that it now sells out before opening…

REVEALING THE SOURCE There’s so much  buzz about The Source, which opens at REDCAT next week, that an extra performance has been added (the show runs Oct.19-23, 2016). The most fascinating aspect of its popularity is that people I know who are attending are curious about something: What is this show really about? The Source, which  premiered…

DUDAMEL AND BELL MORE THAN WELL Drop your plans this weekend and get to Disney Hall to  witness conductor Gustavo Dudamel leading  the Los Angeles Philharmonic in an astoundingly satisfying program. Fortunately, last night’s performance  (which I’m happy to say was full to the brim with patrons),  began a weekend of four performances through Oct.16. The draw here must…

THE STRINGS THAT BIND At first, the geometric shape dangling from thin cables in the fly loft appears simply as an “X”. Manipulated by slightly concealed upstage puppeteers, this creation–made up of thin green slats connected by small o-rings–morphs like a piece of paper manipulated by an origami artist. Soon, it will become an  animated, continually…

EAU DE MANCHESTER Kim Rubinstein’s new Odyssey production treats Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 A Taste of Honey not as a Chippendale museum piece but, smartly, as a serviceable old Sears sectional sofa. Rubinstein tarts up Delaney’s experimental kitchen sinker-cum-jazz cabaret confessional with an abundance of style. These are the basic choices for a director almost sixty…

YO-YO MA JOINS LACO FOR ONE-NIGHT ONLY EVENT When classical music is performed correctly–a joyous amalgamation of proficiency and interpretation–it’s actually very difficult to put words on our experience. It’s best to  just wants to sit back and be swallowed up by the dreamy music.  As Jeffrey Kahane departs Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO)–the 2016-17 season is…

WHAT A WORLD 1969. The final year in what was one of the most turbulent decades in American history. The battle between counterculture dissidents and the corporate establishment could melt lead, and in the middle the blood was drained from the ideal Ozzie and Harriet family and the U.S. was headed to a most uncertain…

FELLED Brimmer St. Theatre Co. only puts up a play when it thinks it’s got one worth doing, and always one that it has developed in-house. Some years it doesn’t produce anything but readings. This seems to me a better plan than that of many companies that fill ten slots a year with whatever they…

SUICIDE ISN’T PAINLESS My dad had a great record collection. At 16, I would drive over after school to smoke cigarettes and listen to Stan Getz. One afternoon I found Pop putting his affairs in order. The divorce had broken him. Whiskey had taken its own toll, and an ill-advised romance had sucked up his…

TO SIR MA’AM WITH LOVE It’s an irresistible setting seen in many successful films and plays: When an underdog teacher shapes her troubled teenaged students, she is rewarded by bucking a system that all but excludes the seemingly hopeless youth. Chicago playwright Philip Dawkins (The Homosexuals, Failure: A Love Story) gives the genre a refreshing…

DIAMOND LI’L Musical Theatre West’s Reiner Reading Series wraps up its amazing season with a musical from smack dab in the middle of Broadway’s golden age.  Given the terrific score (music by Gene De Paul, and lyrics by Johnny Mercer) and deliciously satiric book (Norman Panama and Melvin Frank), it’s no surprise that Li’l Abner brought…

BRINGING BERNSTEIN TO LIFE Older spectators will remember Leonard Bernstein not just as a conductor, composer, and pianist, but as one of the most vivid personalities and astonishingly effective communicators in the history of American classical music. His life may have ended on notes of regret and frustration, but he was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, and…

NEW BALLET PREMIERES IN L.A. It is said that American novelist James T. Farrell regretted writing the Studs Lonigan trilogy, novels that were so iconic that fellow Chicagoan “Studs†Terkel adopted the hero’s name for a pseudonym. Farrell always believed he’d written better books but they suffered because of Studs’ popularity. We don’t know if…

SHAKESPEARE UNDER ATTACK A comedy’s brewing up in Santa Monica. Soon, winds will whip, distressed voices will call out and a ship’s timbers will be shivering, cracking, and smashing against a coastline in Shakespeare’s play about the confusion caused at Countess Olivia’s court by a set of identical brother and sister twins. Two castaways’”the lady…