Regional

BALLET SUPERSTAR RETURNS TO SEGERSTROM The title of two world premiere dance pieces at Segerstrom Hall this week could not be more apt: Diana Vishneva of the Mariinsky Ballet and American Ballet Theatre will have you on the edge of your seats. Commissions by Segerstrom Center and Ardani Artists for this unrivalled artist of the…

A NOURISHING TREE While lacking in emotional engagement, Daniel Beaty’s solo outing exploring the life of actor/singer/activist Paul Robeson undoubtedly entertains, educates, inspires, and leaves the audience with a great deal to talk about. With an international following of his music, stage performances and cinema work, Paul Robeson was one of the best-known black men…

SITE-SPECIFIC IS NOT SO SPECIFIC La Jolla Playhouse supported the trend of site-specific and immersive theater by presenting a four-day program of over 20 different performances in and around the Playhouse. The WoW (WithOutWalls) 2013 festival was a beehive of activity which sadly played only one weekend. It was an arena for nurturing and showcasing…

STOPPARD AND GO Tom Stoppard’s brilliant Travesties (1974) is literate and fiercely crafted, tackling ideas of love, wit, politics, art, theater, literature, intellectualism and whatever else flows its way through Stoppard’s cosmic inquisitiveness. The plot, if you can call it that, is complex and nonlinear. World War I veteran Henry Carr reminisces with failing memory…

WIT DOESN’T HOLD BACK Years back, Oldsmobile released a new line of sporty, sleek cars with the tagline “This is NOT your father’s Oldsmobile.”   For those who associate Lamb’s Players with lighter fare such as Godspell, Guys and Dolls  and Christmas specials, the powerhouse production of Wit which opened this week proves that this is NOT…

NO HALLELUJAH FOR THE LAST GOODBYE No one can deny why Jeff Buckley has achieved cult status. The coffeehouse-rock singer brought an aching, wrenching, ethereal and vulnerable quality to both his original songs and his covers of other composers’ work (his version of “Hallelujah” is widely regarded as the definitive interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece)….

TOO FEW Samuel D. Hunter’s slice-of-life one-act, The Few, returns to familiar territory for this up-and-coming playwright. As in his previous plays, Hunter takes us to small-town Idaho; this time, it’s 1999 and we are in the ramshackle trailer office of DZ (Eva Kaminsky), publisher of a small newspaper for truckers. Enter the paper’s founder,…

BUENA BUENA Back in the 1990s, Buena Vista Social Club took the world by storm. The album, inspired by the music played at a Havana members club, both celebrated and cemented the fluid formidability of popular pre-revolution Cuban music performed by Cubans. It sold over five million units worldwide, and notched a Grammy Award as…

NOT MUCH LIFE IN DEATH The miracle of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is that it contains so many themes relevant to today’s world’”the American Dream, the disconnect of father and son, a lifetime of work resulting in fiscal emptiness, self-deception’”that this 1949 play can truly be called timeless. Yet so lifeless and lacking…

STAGE NOIR In many ways, the stage adaptation of James Cain’s novel, Double Indemnity, is a radical departure from the iconic film from director/writer Billy Wilder. The film’”co-written by Cain’s contemporary and rival Raymond Chandler, who was known to deride Cain’s novels’”contains deliciously noir dialogue that Wilder and Chandler used to get past the censors….

I GET THE PICTURE Pageant of the Masters’ The Big Picture is perhaps the most three-dimensional idea from the fertile mind of director Diane Challis Davy. Continuing the 80-year tradition of celebrating art with a performance of “living pictures”’”tableaux vivants’”this year’s production is a tribute to the history of motion pictures and the ways in…

I DO BUT I DON’T With all the adorability, simplicity, cliché and generic tone of a Hallmark Card, I Do! I Do! opened last weekend at the Laguna Playhouse. Starring Broadway stalwarts Davis Gaines and Vicki Lewis, the 1966 two-character musical by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (The Fantasticks) has aged surprisingly well, considering it…

ALL THE WORLD’S AN OLD  GLOBE The Old Globe has officially opened the 2013 Shakespeare Festival, now on through September 29. Adrian Noble returns for his fourth and final season as the internationally renowned festival’s Artistic Director, taking the helm on both Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Tom Stoppard’s classic farce, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are…

IN GOOD COMPANY “It’s a revue, but not a revue,” Stephen Sondheim said about Company when he was interviewed at Segerstrom last year. This surprised me because the groundbreaking 1970 musical which opens at Cygnet Theatre this weekend is a concept musical, meaning that the themes of a show (in this case, marriage and commitment)…