Regional

A SCALED-DOWN GYPSY NONETHELESS GOES  OFF THE SCALE Gypsy, the musical theater biography of striptease performer Gypsy Rose Lee, is really about Gypsy’s mother, Mama Rose, immortalized by Ethel Merman in the original 1959 production. Not just a chronicle of the superstar ecdysiast’s checkered childhood, Gypsy is a celebration of the addictive insanity of show business….

IT’S TIME TO PARTNER UP Pageant of the Masters, now in its 82nd year, is a singularly unique entertainment that has perfected the art of tableaux vivants (“living pictures”). With world-class designers and over 600 volunteers (including actors and a research team), this elegant and classy outfit’”equal parts museum, play, concert, and lecture’”re-creates for seated…

THE MUSICAL WITH LEGS A Chorus Line  remains as fresh as the day it appeared just over  forty years ago, when the standard Broadway musical was already fading away, making room for the jukebox musicals and mostly hollow spectacles we are still forced to endure (Catstricide, anyone?). The miracle of A Chorus Line is that it is…

LAMB’S SERVES UP A TASTY DINNER WITH MARLENE There’s an old parlor game of trying to decide:   If you could attend a dinner party and choose any guests you wanted around the table, whom would you select?   For Eric Hanes, who visited Paris from Sweden in 1938, he might well have picked the people who…

NOT YOUR AVERAGE VIOLINIST; NOT YOUR AVERAGE TANGO Coming up on April 15 and 16, 2016, in Irvine and La Jolla, acclaimed violinist Augustin Hadelich will be joined by dazzling pianist Joyce Yang and dynamic guitarist Pablo Villegas for an evening of Spanish-themed music built around André Previn’s three-part piece Tango Song and Dance, written…

GIVE YOURSELF OVER TO ABSOLUTE PLEASURE Those familiar with the movie version of The Rocky Horror Show may be shocked to find that there is no typo in the title of the stage version: Here, there is no “Picture” before “Show.” Before anyone had thoughts of a movie about the gang from Transsexual Transylvania, there…

A NEW BIRTH FOR LIBERTY Adapted from the short story by Dorothy M. Johnson that also inspired the legendary John Ford 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a classic tale of love, honor, ambition and revenge set against the backdrop of the American West. While Quentin Tarentino is valiantly keeping the oater…

WHOOSH! “All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare memorably said. “And all the men and women merely players.” In a world premiere at the Old Globe, Anna Ziegler’s new play The Last Match  successfully plays off the Bard’s famous monologue, equating tennis with life, athletic striving with human struggle, and delivering a deft, luminous play. Dueling it…

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…

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:…

CREATING A NEW CAROL While Michigan-born illustrator Haddon Sundblom developed the popular image of Santa Claus for Coca Cola advertising in the 1930s, it was the  Victorian era which introduced most of the  Christmas customs still practiced worldwide, including the illuminated / decorated tree and holiday greeting cards. In 1843, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published,…

SHOWS THAT TELL, SHOWS THAT SHOW A list of the most popular investigative themes for artistic works in 2015 would certainly include (1) art itself, particularly within the same medium, and (2) the relevance of identity politics to (1). With Indecent, which opened last week at the La Jolla Playhouse in a joint production with…