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Theater Review: FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (Tour)
AS RELEVANT AND CELEBRATORY AS EVER, FIDDLER GETS A POWERFUL REVIVAL It takes a musical to make a village: At nearly three hours, this very replete revival, which plays the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa through May 17, takes its time — but not ours. Fiddler on the Roof, the beloved 1964 musical, richly rewards…
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Theater Review: JAY JOHNSON: THE TWO AND ONLY (Tour)
THE VOICE BEHIND THE VOICES Ventre Loqui: To speak from the belly. This is the etymology of the word ventriloquism, an art as old as : well, it depends who you ask. For some, there is no older art, as it was the trick of the devil to make the snake appear to speak to…
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Theater Review: FALSETTOS (National Tour)
NOT ONE FALSE NOTE The musical masterpiece Falsettos follows Marvin, an appealing, brainy, anxious, obsessive, wealthy Jewish gay man who struggles to create a tight-knit family out of his eclectic array of core relationships: an ex-wife, new boyfriend, adolescent son, psychiatrist, and “neighbors who are lesbians from next door.” Amidst a series of monumental life changes…
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Theater Review: MY LIFE ON A DIET (Renée Taylor at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
TAYLOR MADE If timing is everything with comedy Renée Taylor in My Life on a Diet is proof positive. This revival of her one-woman show, based on her 1986 memoir of the same title, is a master class in getting laughs. She takes sentences that wouldn’t necessarily be funny on the page and makes them…
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Theater Review: JERSEY BOYS (2018-19 National Tour)
THE BOYFRIENDS ARE BACK Back by popular demand but for only one week at the Auditorium Theatre, the mega-jukebox musical Jersey Boys continues to stir up a perfect storm of industrial-strength nostalgia. Replete with doo-wop harmonies, pile-driving rock anthems and blue-collar verismo, the trademarks of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, this well-packaged blast from the past…
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Music Preview: MONTEREY JAZZ FESTIVAL ON TOUR (Disney Hall)
GET YOUR JAZZ ON Hooray and hallelujah! Long before her third Grammy win, I have always been a fan of jazz vocalist and song interpreter extraordinaire Cécile McLorin Salvant. But seeing her live three times now has not only cemented my opinion that this is the most exciting thing in all music ’” not just…
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Theater Review: CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (National Tour)
THE CANDY MAN CAN’T The stage musical adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — Roald Dahl’s beloved children-of-all-ages’ story — has spun into town just, it seems, to make your teeth ache. Directed by Jack O’Brien, this already extended national tour arrives to a city near you even though it flopped on Broadway (27…
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Theater Preview: MOMENTOS MORI (Manual Cinema)
THIS IS THE MOMENTOS I have seen the Chicago-based performance collective Manual Cinema on their home turf twice, and the theatricality is awesome. This endlessly inventive group of artists uses disarmingly simple tools — live music, paper puppets, overhead projectors — to tell transformative stories. Their enchanting works unsettle the boundaries between cinema and theater….
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Theater Review: CATS (National Tour, 2019)
KITTY LITTER If I had my way, the slogan for Cats would be changed from “Now and Forever” to “Not Now, Not Ever.” Even when I saw the show back in the early 80s and again in the early 90s, I simply couldn’t make it through another act and bolted at intermission. After seeing the…
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Theater Review: A BRONX TALE (North American Tour)
A BRONX CHEER Unpretentious and unpreaching in its streetwise survival lore, the gangster fable A Bronx Tale is, as the name implies, just one of many small sagas from the lesser borough. Now on tour, this 2016 musical has a book by Chazz Palminteri, based on his semi-autobiographical solo show and the 1993 film directed by…
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Theater Review: THE CHOIR OF MAN (National Tour)
IN PRAISE OF THE PUB There’s no need for a plot, three-dimensional characters, or conflicts pending resolution — no, not when the setting and its songs sell themselves from the start. That feel-good premise pays off over 80 minutes in The Choir of Man, a British import now playing Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse on its first…
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Las Vegas Theater Review: PUPPETRY OF THE PENIS (Jewel Box at the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas)
THE WRONGEST SHOW IN TOWN I never knew that I was a prude until I attended Puppetry of the Penis at The Jewel Box inside Las Vegas’s Erotic Heritage Museum. Silly me; since it had played, among other venues, at the Edinburgh Theater Festival as well as Off-Broadway for a respectable run in New York,…
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Theater Review: WHAT IF THEY WENT TO MOSCOW? (Christiane Jatahy at REDCAT)
YOU MOSCOW, YOU MOSCOW The avant-garde seems more interested in re-invention these days than in invention, but from the point of view of someone who had thought that there was nothing new under the sun in the theater, it is amazing to come across, in the space of one year, Daniel Fish’s re-imagining of Oklahoma! in…
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Dance Review: MATTHEW BOURNE’S CINDERELLA (International Tour at The Ahmanson in Los Angeles)
IF THE BLITZ FITS… The audacious, eccentric and flashily theatrical choreographer, Matthew Bourne, is a man full of interesting ideas, most of which, under close scrutiny, are fairly half-baked, but prove catnip to dance enthusiasts while driving serious balletomanes to distraction. There’s the famous all-male Swan Lake and a theatricalization of The Red Shoes, the…
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Theater Preview: AN INSPECTOR CALLS (The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare)
SOCIETY UNDER CLOSE INSPECTION An Inspector Calls was first performed in 1945 at a time of great change — both World Wars were fresh in the minds of the people, women had become more prominent in the workplace, and it was possible to be class mobile, which is the idea that people can move upwards in class through…
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Theater Review: THE B-SIDE: “NEGRO FOLKLORE FROM TEXAS STATE PRISONS” A RECORD ALBUM INTERPRETATION (Wooster Group at REDCAT)
B-SIDE MYSELF Breathes there a soul who hasn’t sung along with a favorite album? And, ah, if the songs we sing were rare and challenging and related to one’s life, we might have all approached The Wooster Group’s Kate Valk, as Eric Berryman did with his 1965 Elektra recording Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,…
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Theater Review: HELLO, DOLLY! (National Tour)
BUCKLEY BUCKLES A BIT, BUT DOLLY DEFINITELY DELIVERS To start with, let’s agree to never say “Goodbye, Dolly.” Thornton Wilder’s genius for the common touch isn’t just a golden legacy in Our Town or The Skin of Our Teeth, both perfect comedies of life. There’s almost as much warm wisdom in The Matchmaker, Wilder’s craftily-plotted 1955 mating romp that…
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Concert Review: BERNADETTE PETERS (Disney Hall)
SAINT BERNADETTE Now that she’s hung up her late-Victorian hat after taking over for Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway last year, the inimitable Bernadette Peters has embarked on another international tour, making a stop at Disney Hall last Tuesday to share her love of theater, singing selections from musicals as if for the…
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Theater Review: US/THEM (Chicago Shakespeare)
OUT OF THE BLOOD OF BABES It’s a probably thankless and certainly unsettling undertaking: Us/Them is an hour-long performance piece by two young members of the Belgian troupe BRONKS. It dares to depict the 2004 Beslan school siege and massacre from the point of view of two child victims: One survives the take-over by 35 Chechen separatists….
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Theater Review: AN INSPECTOR CALLS (The Wallis)
MAKE A CALL ON THIS INSPECTOR In Stephen Daldry’s architectually inspired revival of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, an astute mixture of comedy of manners/tragedy of class/family crisis/ socialism versus capitalism/whodunit, the audience is asked, along with a trio of curious children, to get past that heavy red velvet curtain and enter a world of…
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