Los Angeles

THE MANE EVENT Watching the Los Angeles premiere of writer/performer Benjamin Scheuer’s one-man show The Lion, directed by Sean Daniels, the element I am  most taken with is Mr. Scheuer’s radiant charisma. His earnestness, his sincerity, his spiritual and emotional investment, are penetrating as he tells his story, mostly through songs, accompanying himself on different guitars’”six…

THOROUGHLY THESPIAN Youth theater is mostly musicals, and many musicals are essentially infantilizing entertainments, most appropriate to teaching children how to perform. The kids themselves make up for a lot that I find unforgivable in book and music. In many kids’ shows half the cast can be expected not to have the choreography down pat,…

MAKE THE YULETIDE GAY Attending GMCLA’s Holiday Spectaculars is more like a pilgrimage for me, and is a no-brainer when choosing my wintertime concerts. This year’s musical extravaganza, Holiday Spectacular: Cool Yule, plays at Glendale’s  gorgeous Alex Theatre for four performances beginning this Thursday, Dec. 15, 2016, and running through Sunday. And while there is no…

IMPRO FOR THE HOLIDAYS -dad- Family sucks. Spending time with the people you moved away from is so un-American, so anti-Manifest Destiny, such an embarrassing parochial guilt-trip, that it’s been relegated to the worst weather of the year. What we call the holidays are a “let’s get it over with” season of grown siblings reduced…

WONDERFUL WONDERFUL Never heard of the 1953 musical,  Wonderful Town? Well, certainly you’ve heard of composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Even though the songs are terrific, none of them have entered the hit parade. Bernstein offers catchy melodies in tunes that range from conga to an Irish jig, and the lyrics…

METHANE DEPOSIT A new play opened at the Geffen this week. It is called Icebergs, and it was written by Alena Smith. It was directed by Playhouse artistic director Randall Arney. It is a show illustrative of several tendencies in modern regional theater: It is written by a Yale-educated TV writer. Smith’s best work is…

EVERYBODY LOVES SHE LOVES ME I’ll be the first to admit that it may be impossible to create a bad production of the 1963 jewel-box musical She Loves Me. This perfect show, based on the 1937 play Parfumerie by Miklós László, is so resplendent, so charming, and so well-constructed that a 2011 gathering of literati…

BLACK COMEDY AND KITCHEN SINK DRAMA: A BEAUTY-FULL IRISH STEW While the horror and suspense aren’t as palpable as previous efforts of The Beauty Queen of Leenane’”Martin McDonagh’s 1996 black comedy’”the dark humor, bleakness, and romance positively boil over, making Galway’s Druid Theatre Company’s revival a recommended trip. For 20 years, 40 year-old spinster Maureen…

LOVE STORY Watching 1984 live, in a roomful of high school students, my biggest surprise was how long two minutes lasts. I’m a hateful person now, and as a teenager even more so, but during Fairfax High School’s second period this morning, none of us could keep shouting epithets at Emmanuel Goldstein for even a…

BOYS WILL BE BOYS Musical Theatre West’s (MTW) Reiner Reading Series begins  its 2016-17  season with a musical from the beginning of the second decade of the Broadway Musical’s Golden Age. Some say this era began with Oklahoma! in 1943, but it’s also safe to say it began in 1927, the year that  Showboat was born. The fully…

DVOŘíK & SIBELIUS  AT DISNEY HALL An LA Phil favorite, prizewinning German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser (pictured left) makes his return under the baton of exciting young Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali (pictured below) for a performance of Dvořák’s monumental and much-loved cello concerto. Also this Friday through Sunday (Nov. 11-13, 2016), Rouvali  leads the acclaimed L.A. orchestra in…

AGITPOOP When Urinetown opened up Off-Broadway in  2001, then splashed all over Broadway just after 9/11, the show was hailed as a Brechtian revamp of musical theater. About an overpopulated, under-hydrated world in which private toilets are outlawed, Urinetown is a simultaneous assault on fascist economics and on mindless revolution. It’s supposed to be a black…

THE PHARAOH-EST OF THEM ALL Egyptian Pharaoh Akhnaten was not just provocative in his lifetime. Today, over three millennia after his reign, Egyptologists still debate theories about his life and relative importance. After his death, succeeding Pharaohs did their best to erase every trace of the man who had dared to displace the many gods…