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Tour Review: THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (Shakespeare’s Globe)
THE GLOBE’S STUNNING PRODUCTION HIGHLIGHTS SHAKESPEARE’S PLEA FOR DIGNITY AS MUCH AS MERCY A decade ago a Chicago critic notoriously concluded his review of The Merchant of Venice by offering a rather perverse take on Shakespeare’s supposedly anti-Semitic play. In a case of devil’s advocacy he argued that Shylock’s punishment (for trying to cancel a debt by killing…
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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 (but not based on) James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar. For one thing, there are no clowns (a happy relief for those who found them irritating and obnoxious);…
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Theater: CABARET (Roundabout’s production on National Tour)
RUN TO THE CABARET You better tell Momma and everybody else to come see Roundabout’s production of Cabaret, which kicked off its national tour this year. It plays the Hollywood Pantages Theatre for a limited three-week run from July 19 – August 7, 2016, and continues through the summer of 2017. The backstage story that becomes…
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Theater Review: THE SOUND OF MUSIC (National Tour)
EV’RY MOUNTAIN GETS CLIMBED AGAIN It’s fitting that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final collaboration is a tribute to the art and craft they served so well’”music and singing. Like Mary Poppins, convent girl Maria Rainer is a very nice nanny (minus umbrella) who teaches by example and uses play to build courage and confidence. Fraulein Rainer…
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Theater Review: 42ND STREET (National Tour at Pantages Theatre Hollywood)
THE LAND OF 10,000 TAPS Call us saps or suckers but we can’t, it seems, get enough of “The Understudy Who Becomes A Star.” Not when the sweet and satisfying story is stuffed with thrills like “Lullaby of Broadway” and “Young and Healthy.” Some clichés justify themselves, if only because nothing less than hokey can…
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Tour Preview: OUT OF THIS WORLD (Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus)
THE COSMIC CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s traveling circus remains something to run away to see, if not join. For even diehard fans there are always new delights, and the current incarnation, Out Of This World, is taking audiences where no circus has gone before, upping the circus ante by conjuring up even…
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Theater Review: CHICAGO (National Tour at Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago)
CORRUPTION: MORE FUN WHEN CHOREOGRAPHED Now in its twentieth year, this slimmed-down, near-concert version of Kander and Ebb’s cynical and enthralling musical features, as the smoothly lying lawyer Billy Flynn, John O’Hurley (J. Peterman in Seinfeld and a fixture on Dancing with the Stars. (He last appeared in the show in the 2011 tour which…
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Tour Theater Review: KINKY BOOTS (National Tour at Pantages Hollywood)
BOOTS GOT MY KINKS OUT Another bus-and-truck tour of Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper’s Tony Award-festooned musical has “sashayed and shanted” its way back into Los Angeles at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, and it may just be the tonic you need after a rough day. Oh, yes, one can look at the show with the jaundiced old…
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Theater Review: RIVERDANCE (20th Anniversary Tour)
TWENTY YEARS OF HARD-HEELED HOOFING What Stomp delivered through percussive street-dancing, Forever Tango gave to Argentina’s national cooch dance, and A Chorus Line and 42nd Street did for tap, Riverdance breathtakingly offers Irish dance and its cultural spin-offs. Wowing rapt crowds at Chicago’s Cadillac Palace Theatre in its 20th anniversary world tour, this high-hoofing extravaganza can…
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Tour Theater & Film Preview: HISTORIA DE AMOR (Teatrocinema at REDCAT L.A. and MCA Chicago)
AMOR MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU’RE SORRY Based on the graphic novel of the same name by French writer Régis Jauffret, Historia de Amor, which opens this Thursday, March 31 at REDCAT in L.A., addresses the hardly distinguishable boundary between reason and madness, love and domination. An English teacher abducts the young Sofia and…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: DREAMGIRLS (La Mirada Theatre & Valley Performing Arts Center)
KEEPING THE DREAM(GIRLS) ALIVE Dreamgirls opened on Broadway in 1981, won six Tony awards, and ran for nearly four years. Since then, the Michael Bennett musical has been revived, presented in concert, revised, made into a movie, played at high schools, community and regional theaters, and toured. Now at La Mirada Theatre we get a revival of…
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National Tour Theater Review: MATILDA THE MUSICAL (Oriental Theatre in Chicago)
MIND OVER MUSIC Imagine Annie with psychokinetic powers, Nancy Drew as a mind-reader, or Cinderella acting as her own fairy godmother. Self-empowerment of the Mulan persuasion fuels this upbeat, knock-down, pell-mell 2011 musical. A multi-Tony and Olivier award winner, Matilda the Musical is now on its first national tour, a Broadway in Chicago presentation at Chicago’s…
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National Tour Theater Review: A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO LOVE AND MURDER (Ahmanson)
KISSING KILLING COUSINS Serial killers can be fun. In the film Theatre of Blood Vincent Price sardonically played a Shakespearean actor, a hate-filled ham who doggedly “offs” the critics who panned him, snuffing out each scribe in endgames inspired by the Bard (don’t get any ideas). Who’s Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? was a less important…
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Los Angeles Film & Music Preview: BEN-HUR: A TALE OF THE CHRIST (1925 Silent Film and Rock Orchestra Score at VPAC and Segerstrom)
HURRY TO BEN Published in 1880, Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ not only beat out Harriet Beech Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in sales, it remained the reigning champion of best-selling books for over half a century, finally being toppled by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936). Not only does the…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: STORM LARGE AND LE BONHEUR (The Broad & Haugh Performing Arts Center)
A STORM IS BREWING Singer, songwriter, raconteur, author, actor, playwright, and powerhouse performer Storm Large is on tour with her band Le Bonheur and they’re coming to the L.A. area for two shows only. The only difference in venues here is that her appearance at the Broad in Santa Monica (February 26) is pricier than…
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Dance Preview: CHORÉ (Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa)
A HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT In 1993, H.R.H. the Princess of Hanover appointed Jean-Christophe Maillot as the head of Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo. Backed by his experience as a dancer under Rosella Hightower and Hamburg Ballet’s John Neumeier, Maillot – the previous choreographer-director of the National Choreographic Centre of Tours – has since…
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: LES BALLETS TROCKADERO DE MONTE CARLO (Carpenter Center)
THE TROCKS ROCK! As part of their worldwide tour, one of the most original troupes on the globe is coming to Carpenter Center in Long Beach this weekend. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, affectionately know as “The Trocks,” are not just men in tutus and pointe shoes going for laughs (although even their title “the…
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Tour Review: 1984 (The Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT IS, OR ALL’S ORWELL THAT ENDS ORWELL When the meek and paranoid everyman Winston Smith scribbles “Down with Big Brother” in his journal, he soon blossoms into a determined and impassioned rebel. But taking a stand in the dystopian superstate of George Orwell’s sadly timeless 1984 hardly creates the happy endings we see in today’s books, films,…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: CAPITOL STEPS (Carpenter Center in Long Beach)
A CAPITOL IDEA FOR THIS WEEKEND One of the funniest troupes in the country resides in our nation’s capitol–hence the name Capitol Steps. For almost 35 years, they have skewered and satirized our political shenanigans in a take-no-prisoners fashion. They take pop songs and musicals to parody politics and current events, but every time I see…
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Tour Theater Review: BULLETS OVER BROADWAY THE MUSICAL (North American Tour)
BULL FROM BROADWAY In keeping with the never-ending trend of turning films into Broadway musicals, Douglas McGrath and Woody Allen’s 1994 comedy, Bullets Over Broadway, has been turned into a jukebox musical. It may have flopped on Broadway but, as with the disastrous If/Then before it, producers must know that tickets will be bought for this disappointing dreck,…
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