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Tours
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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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Los Angeles Theater: CUISINE & CONFESSIONS (The 7 Fingers at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
WORKING UP YOUR APPETITE Bringing the aesthetics of classical theater to the realm of the contemporary circus, the fearless performers of The 7 Fingers (also known as Les 7 Doigts) explore life’s big questions while preparing food on a set equipped with a functional kitchen. I first reviewed this astounding troupe’s Traces back in 2011….
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Los Angeles Cabaret Preview: ANDREA MCARDLE: ’70S AND SUNNY (Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood)
GET READY FOR “TOMORROW” The sun will come out on February 13, 2017, when Andrea McArdle lands at the Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood with her newest cabaret show ’70’s and Sunny. Manhattan in the 1970s was a hybrid of highlights and hedonism. Overrun with sex shops and financial turmoil, the city was at…
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Theater Review: THE BODYGUARD (U.S. Tour at the Oriental Theatre in Chicago)
PROTECTING YOUR ASSET The best thing about The Bodyguard, Lawrence Kasdan’s Oscar-nominated 1992 film, was how it put the late Whitney Houston on the map and in our hearts. Despite zero chemistry, erotic or dramatic, between Houston’s driven diva and Kevin Costner’s title character, Houston’s celebrity survivor scorched the screen, buttressed by Whitney’s terrific breakout numbers….
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Los Angeles Concert Feature: ALAN CUMMING SINGS SAPPY SONGS (Disney Hall)
CUMMING AND SAPPY Yes, Disney Hall is a large venue for a cabaret act, but you can expect Tony Award-winning actor Alan Cumming to turn the venue into the most intimate hotspot when he presents Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs this Sunday, January 29 at 7:30. In addition, you can expect much more than the…
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Tour Review: TORUK – THE FIRST FLIGHT (Cirque du Soleil, North American Tour)
JAMES CAMERON MEETS CIRQUE DU SOLEIL Cirque du Soleil writes a new chapter in make-believe with Toruk – The First Flight, a not so typical two-hour fantasy inspired by (but not based on) James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar. For one thing, there are no clowns (a happy relief for those who find them becoming more acrobatic…
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Theater Review: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (2016 North American Tour)
DROPPING THE DROPPING CHANDELIER Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mega-musical wants to be an opera about opera to end opera. Ironically, “Hannibal,” its first-act spoof of a 19th-century grand opera of the Meyerbeer persuasion, is no more overwrought or grandiloquent than the show that surrounds it, beloved as it is by countless legions. Like Webber’s early hit Joseph…
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Theater Review: THE KING AND I (National Tour)
NOT ALWAYS THE ROYAL TREATMENT, BUT STILL A PRINCELY KING It’s no puzzlement why The King and I is oft-revived. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s semi-historical domestic drama’”the unlikely alliance between a Siamese monarch in the 1860s and a British governess/tutor’”shows how history is all about people at pivotal points. Change comes from unexpected places in improbable…
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Theater Review: THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME (North American Tour)
DETECTING LOVE At first Christopher John Francis Boone seems a defective detective: A 15-year-old math whiz, this only child has Asperger’s Syndrome. The anomaly is enough to push adolescence way beyond awkward. Christopher’s autism manifests in manic multi-tasking, an inability to focus (or to lie), attention deficits, a maddening literal-mindedness, and a disarming directness that…
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National Tour Theater Review: IRVING BERLIN’S WHITE CHRISTMAS
I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS WITH A BETTER SCRIPT I suppose it’s possible that Irving Berlin’s White Christmas might succeed with audiences. Possible, that is, if they are willing to tolerate a lame, cliché-ridden plot in exchange for large samplings of the Irving Berlin songbook accompanied by tap dancing and snow (and even tap dancing in…
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