Areas We Cover
Categories
Tours
-
Theater Review: PRICE: A REPRESSED REPERTOIRE (SEQUENCES) (New Theater Hollywood)
ACTS, REPETITIONS AND REPRESSIONS There’s a new theater in town, Los Angeles, aptly named New Theater Hollywood, run by artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. I discovered it quite by accident in an article in the LA Review of Books, which described it as “sceney.” I simply had to go. I checked out the first…
-
Concert Review: SARAH BRIGHTMAN’S A CHRISTMAS SYMPHONY (International Tour)
A CHRISTMAS SYMPHONY? MORE LIKE A TRIBUTE TO A SELF-ANOINTED OPERA DIVA QUEEN Now an annual tradition, the international tour of Sarah Brightman’s A Christmas Symphony first began in 2022. Then she visited 22 cities in Canada and the US in 2023. This year, the tour includes 14 new cities in the Western United States…
-
Theater Review: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (The Streetcar Project Tour in LA, NY, SF, DC & more — Highly Recommended)
NOW, THERE’S OH SO MUCH MORE TO DESIRE Since struggle for power among the classes is one of the main themes in Tennessee Williams’ still-shocking A Streetcar Named Desire, it makes perfect sense that director and co-creator Nick Westrate would choose to update the Pulitzer Prize winner for modern times. But wait til you hear…
-
Highly Recommended Concert: A CHANTICLEER CHRISTMAS (National Tour at Walt Disney Concert Hall)
LET ME MAKE THIS PERFECTLY CHANTICLEER I may be enamored by the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Messiah, I may be enthralled by Pasadena Symphony’s Holiday Candlelight, I may be excited by the Gay Men’s Chorus’s Holiday Spectacular, but A Chanticleer Christmas, which plays Disney Hall on Dec. 17, is always the best choral show of…
-
Concert Review: GEORGE GERSHWIN’S RHAPSODY IN BLUE (What Makes It Great? With Rob Kapilow)
YES, IT WAS GREAT! Celebrity music educator Rob Kapilow – joined by virtuosic pianist Clayton Stephenson and members of the Berklee Contemporary Symphony Orchestra conducted by Julius P. Williams – provided an enlightening and entertaining evening of musical analysis and performance last Friday night at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall. Assisted by Stephenson and orchestra members…
-
Theater Preview: THE GOLDEN GAYS: THANK YULE FOR BEING A FRIEND (Tour at Diversionary Theatre in San Diego)
PICTURE IT: MIAMI, 1985, AGAIN, BUT WITH SINGING When Bea Arthur initially gave a firm “No” to participating in the 80s sit-com The Golden Girls, she nearly denied millions of soon-to-be loyal fans 180 episodes of endearing, quotable, tremendously-funny memories. Thankfully, with a not-so-minor change in the roles (reversing Betty White and Rue McClanahan’s casting),…
-
Highly Recommended Cabaret: MEOW MEOW: FELINE FESTIVE HOLIDAY (The Wallis, Beverly Hills, & Stanford U)
SANTA’S FUR IS GONNA FLY WITH MEOW MEOW’S FELINE FESTIVE HOLIDAY When you hear the words “performance art,” do you envision a motionless Marina Abramović allowing a 10-foot boa constrictor to wrap itself around her head? And when you hear the term “cabaret,” do you think of tired patter, same-old showtunes, and folks who’re trying…
-
Highly Recommended Cabaret: MARVELOUS: AN EVENING WITH MARILYN MAYE (Hollywood’s Catalina Bar & Grill, Palm Springs’ The Purple Room, NYC’s Birdland)
Adore, adore, adore her. You have to believe me — at 95, the great Marilyn Maye simply enchants, and holds the room in the palm of her hand. Very, very few cabaret performers have this ability (my top three are Eartha Kitt, Elaine Stritch and Ms. Maye). She recently had a sold-out show at Carnegie…
-
Theater Review: CAT KID COMIC CLUB (Tour at Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City)
EVERYONE BELONGS IN THIS CLUB Last year at this time, I saw the family-friendly and totally entertaining Dog Man: The Musical, in which comic book hero Dog Man, with the head of a dog and the body of a policeman, does his best to save the city from Flippy the cyborg fish. And now Flippy…
-
Theater Review: HEXEN: AN ANCESTRAL WITCH PLAY (Tour at El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood)
CONFRONTING THE CURSE It is a signal accomplishment to produce 70 minutes of solo theater which are all the things Hexen manages to be: solemn, playful, enchanting, insightful, and finally, deeply moving. I first encountered Dreya Weber, the sole performer of Hexen (“witches” in German) at the bar before the show. When an exceedingly quirky…
-
Theater Review: LIFE & TIMES OF MICHAEL K (Handspring Puppet Company and Baxter Theatre at The Wallis)
A LIVING PORTRAIT Regular patrons of the theatre are accustomed to passively sitting back, letting the story flow off the stage and course through them. Life & Times Of Michael K is not traditional theatre. It’s not really a play. This beautiful and spellbinding stage adaptation of the award-winning 1983 novel by South African-born writer…
-
Highly Recommended Dance Theater: THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET: PRINCE OF DENMARK (U.S. Premiere at The Harris Theater, Chicago, November 23 & 24, 2024)
THE REAL TRAGEDY WOULD BE MISSING THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET Legendary director Robert Lepage and dancer/choreographer Guillaume Côté reunite to re-imagine theatre’s most timeless, persistent and haunting stories. Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet: Prince of Denmark makes its highly anticipated U.S. premiere for a limited two-day engagement at Harris Theater in Chicago. This production is…
-
Theater Review: MINDPLAY (Huntington Calderwood, Boston)
MIND FOR ALL ITS WORTH The antidote to anxiety is control — or so the mind would have us believe. Our knee-jerk reaction to worrying about a situation, event, person, outcome, or (let’s face it) life in general can be a desperate attempt to exert our limited human influence over it all. And we all…
-
Theater Review: PAW PATROL LIVE! A MIGHTY ADVENTURE (International Tour by Nickelodeon at Hobby Center, Houston)
PAWFECT FOR THE KIDDIES I have often felt that anything that gets children exposed to live theatrical productions is such a gift. A staged show can have such an enormous impact on both creativity and cognitive development. With that said, Nickelodeon’s PAW Patrol Live! A Mighty Adventure certainly had an impact on all the little…
-
Theater Review: ARMS AROUND AMERICA (Dan Froot & Company; World Premiere at The Nimoy Prior to Tour)
VOICES INSTEAD OF BULLETS Although Arms Around America, which opened last night at The Nimoy in Westwood, is about guns and their people (or “ammo-sexuality,” to steal a wonderful phrase from the show), it is also a feast of sounds, a display of musical bravura and an all-around fabulous evening of unconventional live theatre. Serving…
-
Concert Review: VENETIAN SPLENDOR: Vivaldi Four Seasons & Gondola Songs (Avi Avital and SF’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, SoCal Tour: Soka, Granada Theatre, The Soraya)
BRAVO, AVI! As part of a SoCal tour, Israeli Mandolinist Avi Avital and San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra stopped at at Soka University Concert Hall on Sunday, Nove 10, 2024. The concert’s main feature was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with the solo violin part transcribed to Mandolin by Avital himself. The program repeats tomorrow night Nov…
-
Theater Review: BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE MUSICAL (National Tour)
TIME I’LL NEVER GET BACK Without hyperbole, I can say that Back to the Future is the worst musical I have ever seen. Any time I see a show that truly knocks it out of the park, it fills me with so much joy to be able to review it. Nothing quite compares to the…
-
Recommended Theater: LIFE AND TIMES OF MICHAEL K (Handspring Puppet Company and Baxter Theatre at The Wallis)
THE WALLIS HOSTS EXTRAORDINARY THEATER Handspring Puppet Company (War Horse) joins Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre to bring Life & Times of Michael K to the Bram Goldsmith Theater at The Wallis in Beverly Hills November 21 to 24, 2024. I was lucky enough to catch it at St. Anne’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and it’s a must-see to…
-
Concert Review: RUFUS-RETRO-WAINWRIGHT-SPECTIVE (Rufus Wainwright at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
A RUFUS CONVERT During Rufus Wainwright‘s homey, intimate concert last night at the packed 500-seat theater at The Wallis in Beverly Hills, he chuckled that he didn’t really want to do A Rufus-Retro-Wainwright-Spective again. Constantly appearing in different shows, he noted that the three-night engagement here was “a lot.” And he ain’t kiddin’. Over three nights,…
-
Off-Off-Broadway Review: WHORE’S EYE VIEW (Tour@HERE)
Whore’s Eye View is a unique event, more of a lecture on the history of women’s sexuality than the personal monologue one would expect from a sex-worker. Now at HERE Arts Center as part of an international tour, and directed by Katherine Wilkinson, writer/performer Kaytlin Bailey literally starts from the Fertility Goddesses and biblical Lilith,…
Search Articles
Please help keep
Stage and Cinema going!
