Los Angeles

A HOMECOMING In last season’s Failure: A Love Story, Joseph V. Calarco played a veterinarian who at one point had to euthanize his good friend, a dog played by Gregory Nabours. The staged moment took less than five minutes, but remains as good an example as I have seen of the harmony of talent, skill…

A MILD MENDELSSOHN & A SOARING STRAUSS When scholars speak of the greatest concertos ever written for the violin, certainly the names of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bruch are bandied about. But for out-and-out popularity with audiences you can look to two, both of which’”regardless that they are performed and recorded with alarming regularity’”remain reigning favorites….

NEED TO KNOW MORE Since moving into my six-unit apartment eight months ago, I have encountered the loveliest neighbors a man could hope for. But just two weeks ago, a  tall, gangly, middle-aged man, who was watering the lawn at the four-unit building next door, saw my husband and I hurriedly entering the locked gate in…

HOME AND HEART When you go to Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, one of the great pleasures is seeing performers Orson Bean and his wife Alley Mills hanging out in the lobby either manning the concession stand or assisting in helping folks to their seats (that is, if they aren’t actually in the show). Both…

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN OPERA IS HERE I shudder when the time comes to see a “New American Opera.” The majority of new works are frustratingly inaccessible. Instead of reinventing opera, most composers stick with the same non-melodic minimalist recitative while librettists get more wrapped up in poeticism (such as repeating phrases for unfathomable reasons)…

SHORT ON WICKED; SHORTER ON LIT While Knott’s Scary Farm has been doing it for decades with its haunted mazes, interactive theater is gaining ground nationwide as a way to address dwindling and/or disinterested theatergoers. Live performances are battling with the internet’s popularity: The performing arts need audiences, and audiences are intrigued by the notion…

GOD HE’S GOOD A belated but welcome revue, Sondheim on Sondheim offers both songs and personal musings from one of Broadway’s best composer/lyricists. This inside look is rich with the stories behind the songs, new arrangements for old favorites, and a few obscure tunes. Part showcase  and part documentary, this Los Angeles premiere, as with other…

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE ALIVE AND WELL AND WAITING FOR GODOT Rajiv Joseph’s surprisingly complex and touching two-hander concerns a couple of guards assigned to stand watch at the walls in front of the newly built Taj Mahal, which will be revealed to the public for the first time since construction began 16 years earlier….

COME YE TO THE FAIR…LADY, THAT IS I’m rather certain one cannot visit enough  productions of My Fair Lady. The 1956 musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, tells the tale of Professor Henry Higgins, a puffed-up upper-class grammarian, and Eliza Doolittle, his lower-class, flower girl protégé whom Higgins turns into a lady by changing her…

HOT DOG SUCKING AHEAD You know, it’s funny, I was asking a friend just the other day if he knows of any show in town which has a guy sucking on a hot dog. And it would be great if it wasn’t a drama but something cutting edge. Oh, plus some wildly original vaudevillian humor….

SUNNY AND SCARE You think theater in Los Angeles can be frightening? Well, here’s entertainment that’s intentionally soulless. “It’s so funny, you’ll laugh your head off” takes on a whole new meaning with The Groundlings Halloween Show (a.k.a. You Paid to Die Tonight II),  a frightening amalgam of sketch comedy and all the scary shit you…

CRITIC COVETS HEART It is unfair but true that in watching 24th Street Theatre’s American premiere production of Finegan Kruckmeyer’s Man Covets Bird, one automatically compares it to Debbie Devine’s last directorial effort here, Mike Kenny’s  Walking the Tightrope,  in 2013. That show won all the wins and toured all the tours, made everybody feel all the…

WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME …I would Love you ten years before the flood; And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews – Andrew Marvell It’s a measure of progress that a play about white people can be written by a black guy and directed by an Asian guy on what…

SOMETHING UNSATISFYINGLY APOCRYPHAL There are a few things that might not be entirely true about the Blank’s “World Premiere” of Jeff Tabnick’s Something Truly Monstrous, which opened last night in Hollywood. To begin with a quibble, a two-hour show by Tabnick called Barrymore’s Body, with what sound like most of the same elements, went up…

INHOSPITALITY IN A HOSPITAL A few weeks ago I spent a couple of nights at a hospital waiting for someone to be born. A couple of weeks later I spent a few more nights at the hospital, including time at the ICU, trying to keep the mother comfortable while she tried to stay alive. In…