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Theater Review: THE BODYGUARD (U.S. Tour at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre)
REQUIEM FOR WHITNEY Even if you’ve never seen the 1992 film that gave birth to the musical in 2012 in London’s West End, the story is familiar: A pop superstar falls in love with her bodyguard. He takes a bullet for her. Though they can never be together, their love lingers on in her music….
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: MATTHEW BOURNE’S EARLY ADVENTURES (The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
THE EARLY BIRD GETS TICKETS NOW Touring internationally for the first part of the year, Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures’”a program of the newly knighted choreographer’s first works’”will have one U.S. appearance. And it’s right here in Los Angeles for one weekend only, May 17-21, 2017, at the Wallis in Beverly Hills. One of the greatest…
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Theater Review: ALADDIN (North American Tour)
A WHOLE NEW WORLD FROM BROADWAY: A MUSICAL THAT TRULY SOARS “Open sesame” indeed! It’s “Abracadabra” times ten as the arrival of Aladdin in Chi-town feels as triumphant as Prince Ali’s magnificent entrance into Agrabah at the top of the second act. A theme park of a musical, Disney Theatrical Productions’ eye-popping transformation of the…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE ENCOUNTER (Complicite at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
THEATER ON TAPE Once the mainstay of fringe festivals and performance art houses, one-person plays showcasing the likes of James Whitmore and Lily Tomlin became financially viable in the latter quarter of the twentieth century, but they were rare. Given the financial constraints of modern theater, however, solo shows are cropping up like opium poppies…
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Theater Review: CAVALIA’S ODYSSEO (North American Tour Under the White Big Top at Soldier Field)
260 HOOVES AND 96 FEET Pegasus would be proud: The vast White Big Top commanding the south parking lot of Chicago’s Soldier Field barely hints at the $30 million “theatrical adventure” beneath this tent. From the Canadian-based creators of 2011’s Cavalia comes Odysseo, an elaborate extravaganza celebrating the bonds between people and horses. What we…
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Theater Review: AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (National Tour reviewed at the Hollywood Pantages)
THE DANCING ENTRANCES, BUT THE BOOK DOESN’T STAND A CHANCE Back in the era that spawned musicals with tunes by Gershwin, Kern, Porter, and Rodgers, the Broadway Musical Comedy book was almost unnecessary. The 1920s and ’30s saw shows constructed piecemeal’”a comic star here, a songwriting team there, whoever was available, really. The cliché-ridden plots and dubious groaners…
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Theater Review: RAIN: A TRIBUTE TO THE BEATLES (U.S. Tour at the Oriental Theatre in Chicago)
SGT. PEPPER’S AT 50; LET IT RAIN For baby boomers wanting to share their childhood with their kids, for all the true-blue or late-blooming fans of the Fab Four whose great regret is that they never got to see the world’s greatest quartet in concert, or for folks who like to watch great songs return…
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Dance Review: WHIPPED CREAM (American Ballet Theatre World Premiere)
WHIPPED INTO SUBMISSION Explaining the creation of his 1924 two-act ballet, Richard Strauss stated, “I cannot bear the tragedy of the present time. I want to create joy.” Thus was born Schlagobers, which premiered at the Vienna State Opera. More sweet than meat, it was meant to satiate the angst caused by a brutal world…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE TOWN HALL AFFAIR (The Wooster Group at REDCAT)
BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER Having complained more than once that postmodern deconstruction often a) picks on literature that can’t fight back and b) discourages dialogue by speaking in and to a closed system, I am ecstatic to find that the new Wooster Group show dissects a text so dense and fraught that cutting it up only…
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Los Angeles Music Feature: MAX RAABE & PALAST ORCHESTER (on tour, stopping at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
HEAVEN, YOU’LL BE IN HEAVEN One could scrutinize the reasons that an apotheosis of songwriting appeared early in the twentieth-century, but there was something magical floating through the air that surrounded the world of popular music, not just in America but in Europe as well. Baby Boomers and Millennials have enjoyed a glimpse of this…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: INTO THE WOODS (Fiasco Theatre at the Ahmanson)
INTO THE SOUL OF INTO THE WOODS When I first saw Fiasco Theatre’s production of Into the Woods, it was without reservation that I told friends it was worth the drive from Los Angeles to San Diego’s Old Globe. Now, there is no excuse. Uniquely the most emotionally hard-hitting of any of the dozen or so…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ANTIGONÒN (Teatro El Público at REDCAT)
HIT AND MYTH In Sophocles’ Antigone, the titular character has returned to Thebes to warn her brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, about a prophecy that predicts they will kill each other in a battle for the throne of Thebes. But she’s too late. Both brothers are dead. Antigone’s uncle Creon, who inherited the throne, gave Eteocles a proper burial,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TWELFTH NIGHT (Filter Theatre at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
IF PIZZA BE THE FOOD OF LOVE… Well, that was frustrating. Now at the Wallis in Beverly Hills is England’s Filter Theatre, which deconstructs Twelfth Night to the bare walls (literally there’s no set). This isn’t even a deconstruction, really. It’s a slice-and-dice fringe affair with velcro hats and sticky balls, a real pizza delivery, tequila shots,…
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Interview: JUDY COLLINS (on tour and A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim CD release)
THIS PRETTY WOMAN IS A WONDER She was just nominated for a Grammy for the folk album Silver Skies Blue (a collaboration with singer-songwriter Ari Hest); last year, she headlined a PBS special A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim, and is releasing a CD this week with extra material not on the special; she’s currently…
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Theater Review: HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (National Tour)
PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MORE INCHES “I’m the new Berlin Wall. Try to tear me down!” That defiant dare marks the flaming arrival of Hedwig Schmidt, survivor-heroine of John Cameron Mitchell’s riveting 1998 rock opera, a work that inevitably honors the freak-show pizzazz of The Who’s Tommy and the free-spirited androgyny of the late…
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Dance Review: ASPEN SANTA FE BALLET (on tour at the Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge)
FINDING HAPPINESS IN DANCE Just before Aspen Santa Fe Ballet’s (ASFB) program, Valley Performing Arts Center’s Executive Director Thor Steingraber announced that the outfit was signed to be in residence for two more years. Based on last night’s offering, the company’s second visit here, I hope to see much more of this 20-year-old company. Even with a world…
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Los Angeles Cabaret Preview: CHARLES BUSCH: THAT GIRL/THAT BOY (Rockwell Table and Stage in Los Feliz)
THAT GIRL, THAT BOY…HELL, THAT STAR It was well over 30 years ago that I first saw writer, actor and drag legend Charles Busch. Not only was he hi-larious in his long-running Off-Broadway hit Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, but he looked stunning. Over the years, it has been impossible to avoid this genius as he has become most…
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: ALVIN AILEY DANCE THEATER (Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
AILEY IS ALWAYS A REVELATION(S) After many happy visits to the Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Alvin Ailey Dance Theater returns to unleash a sumptuous, three-program showcase for a five day engagement (March 8-12, 2017) with new glories (four west coast premieres) and the restoration of golden memories (five classic works). Program A will ignite three west coast premieres:…
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Theater Review: FUN HOME (National Tour)
IN AND OUT AT HOME The Tony-winning 2013 coming-of-age memory play/chamber musical Fun Home’”based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 semi-autobiographical graphic novel’”is a worthy coming-out tale. We get the inside portrait of a lesbian daughter who learns more than she wanted from her gay dad. With music by Jeanine Tesori (Caroline. or Change, Shrek) and lyrics and…
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Theater Review: FINDING NEVERLAND (National Tour at the Hollywood Pantages)
NEVERLAND MORE LOST THAN FOUND Playwright Alan Knee called Sir J. M. Barrie “the man who was Peter Pan.” If so, it was an author’s compensation as much as creativity. James Barrie was a shy Scotsman, awkward and diffident in public with an extroverted artistry to compensate for self-effacing insecurity. In the 2004 tearjerker motion picture…
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