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Los Angeles
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San Diego Theater Review: WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING (Cygnet Theatre)
WHEN IT RAINS, IT SOARS Let’s start with the unavoidable down-side so we can end with the up-side. While Cygnet Theatre’s When the Rain Stops Falling is spectacular, it is terribly complicated and confusing. It’s challenging enough that the 2008 play time-jumps across four generations, sometimes with different actors playing the same character, but Australian playwright Andrew Bovell purposely holds…
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Los Angeles Cabaret Preview: CHRISTINE EBERSOLE: BIG NOISE FROM WINNETKA (The Wallis)
CHRISTINE EBERSOLE COMES TO THE WALLIS Two-time Tony award-winning actress Christine Ebersole has really done it all. I’ve seen her on the Broadway stage, on television, in films and concerts, and own her many recordings. Not only is she one of our most captivating performers, but she’s funny as all get-out. I still recall her amazing 1993…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: HAM: A MUSICAL MEMOIR (LGBT Center’s Renberg Theatre)
CARVING A “HAM” Direct from a critically acclaimed off-Broadway run, Harris’s HAM: A Musical Memoir makes its West Coast debut at the LGBT Center’s Renberg Theatre this Saturday, January 23, 2016. But the show can only last so long (as with any great ham, even if its refrigerated), so this strictly limited engagement will close on February 7. Tell me you remember…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: EMPIRE (La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts)
A MUSICAL THAT REACHES FOR NEW HEIGHTS Built during the Depression between 1930 and 1931, the Empire State Building became the world’s tallest office building’”surpassing the Chrysler Building by a whopping 204 feet. The design of the building changed 16 times during planning and construction, but 3,000 workers completed the building’s construction in record time:…
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: LES BALLETS TROCKADERO DE MONTE CARLO (Carpenter Center)
THE TROCKS ROCK! As part of their worldwide tour, one of the most original troupes on the globe is coming to Carpenter Center in Long Beach this weekend. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, affectionately know as “The Trocks,” are not just men in tutus and pointe shoes going for laughs (although even their title “the…
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Los Angeles Music / Film Preview: JUSTIN KAUFLIN & QUINCY JONES (The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
IT JUST KEEPS ON KEEPIN’ ON This Friday, January 22, Clark Terry protégé and jazz pianist Justin Kauflin will be appearing at the Wallis in Beverly Hills for one night only. Following an 8pm screening of Keep On Keepin’ On, Alan Hicks’ ode to the friendship between the prodigious lifetime Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Clark Terry and Kauflin (see…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: PAL JOEY (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
YOUR PAL IS COMING TO TOWN Sassy and brassy Pal Joey is a wondrous rouser that spins the tale of a roué gone rotten in Depression-era Chicago. As part of its Reiner Staged Reading Series, Musical Theatre West is presenting Rodgers and Hart’s original 1940 version of their masterwork, and I promise a glorious revival at CSULB on Sunday, January 24 at 7. With…
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Tour Review: 1984 (The Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT IS, OR ALL’S ORWELL THAT ENDS ORWELL When the meek and paranoid everyman Winston Smith scribbles “Down with Big Brother” in his journal, he soon blossoms into a determined and impassioned rebel. But taking a stand in the dystopian superstate of George Orwell’s sadly timeless 1984 hardly creates the happy endings we see in today’s books, films,…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: CAPITOL STEPS (Carpenter Center in Long Beach)
A CAPITOL IDEA FOR THIS WEEKEND One of the funniest troupes in the country resides in our nation’s capitol–hence the name Capitol Steps. For almost 35 years, they have skewered and satirized our political shenanigans in a take-no-prisoners fashion. They take pop songs and musicals to parody politics and current events, but every time I see…
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Tour Theater Review: BULLETS OVER BROADWAY THE MUSICAL (North American Tour)
BULL FROM BROADWAY In keeping with the never-ending trend of turning films into Broadway musicals, Douglas McGrath and Woody Allen’s 1994 comedy, Bullets Over Broadway, has been turned into a jukebox musical. It may have flopped on Broadway but, as with the disastrous If/Then before it, producers must know that tickets will be bought for this disappointing dreck,…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: NICHOLAS McGEGAN & SEAN CHEN (Pasadena Symphony)
A CLASSICAL UNFINISHED EMPEROR In a program in which familiarity breeds joy, the Pasadena Symphony begins the New Year with three of the most popular pieces in the repertoire, led by the insanely affable and exuberant Nicholas McGegan: Prokofiev’s short but mighty Classical Symphony, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, best known…
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Film Preview: THE CONTENDERS (MoMA’s Film Series at the Hammer Museum)
THE CONTENDERS REIGNS SUPREME For the past eight years, the Film Department of New York’s Museum of Modern Art has scrutinized releases, searching for the select few films from the previous twelve months which qualify for the end-of-the-year screening series known as The Contenders. Whether mainstream movies, independents, foreign-language films, documentaries, or art-house sensations, this intelligently and brilliantly…
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Film and Los Angeles Music Review: HEART OF A DOG & CONCERT FOR DOGS (directed by Laurie Anderson)
HEART OF DOGNESS In the middle of two hundred people and sixty dogs in the Silent Movie Theatre, in that low, dark room, some of the heads silhouetted against the screen ahead are those of standard poodles. There’s a barky collie and a St Bernard. There’s a scattering of smaller dogs, like Tango the mellow…
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Los Angeles Music Review: DAVID BENOIT TRIBUTE TO CHARLIE BROWN (Carpenter Center in Long Beach)
GREAT GOOD GRIEF It’s clear that jazz pianist David Benoit has more than an affection for all things Charlie Brown. The pensive character from Charles Schultz’ strip, Peanuts, has certainly inspired many–from filmmakers and musicians to the “Average Joe” who contemplates the enormity of just existing–but Benoit presented his charming Christmas concert with a childlike persona that was…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE CHRISTIANS (Center Theatre Group at the Mark Taper Forum)
CROSSFIRE Between religious zealots, especially those who use the word of God to control the populace rather than to create peace, and the liberation of a new world’”gay marriage, Roe v. Wade’”more and more people are leaving organized religion. Especially in America. A recent study indicated that millennials are leaving the church in droves. Some…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE LATINA CHRISTMAS SPECIAL (Los Angeles Theatre Center)
ME SO FELIZ A friend mentioned that three comediennes–a Cuban American from Miami, a Mexican American from Texas, and the daughter of an “over-dedicated Mexican mother and a compliant Lithuanian father” from Sun Valley, CA–are putting on a show in which they indulge in reminiscences about their childhood Navidades (Christmases). He invited me, but I declined, telling my friend…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: ALL-RACHMANINOFF (Cristian Măcelaru and Kirill Gerstein with the LA Phil)
GET YOUR RACHS OFF I can think of nothing better to do this holiday season then something that has nothing to do with the holidays. It’s not easy to find, but in the midst of the Messiah morass, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is offering an All-Rachmaninoff program this weekend that is sure to bring you…
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Tour Theater Review: IF/THEN (National Tour)
WHAT/EVER Saved from total disregard by a libretto that occasionally manages to engage with humor and knowingness, this brave attempt to examine the subject of fate versus choice utterly fails to cohere into a moving experience. Composer/lyricist Brian Yorkey and composer Tom Kitt, the creators of Next to Normal, use parallel time-lines to explore the…
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Theater Review: THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (U.S. National Tour)
HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR BRIDGES? Given Marsha Norman’s awkward and dispiriting adaptations for The Secret Garden (1991) and The Color Purple (2005), the most surprising, but not the best, element of the musicalized version of The Bridges of Madison County is her libretto. Neither is Jason Robert Brown’s score the greatest thing on stage at the Ahmanson Theatre, where this short-lived…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: DEAR MR. SINATRA, A SWINGING CENTENNIAL (John Pizzarelli, Cheyenne Jackson and Monica Mancini at Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge)
THE BEST IS YET TO COME ON SINATRA’S BIRTHDAY Frank Sinatra was not only one of the most popular entertainers of the 20th century, but he was arguably the greatest singer as well, recording more than 1,500 songs. His extraordinary interpretative genius and the way he could rescue some songs from obscurity and extend the…
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