Areas We Cover
Categories
Tours
-
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,…
-
Cabaret Review: THEATER ADULT with GIANMARCO SORESI (Joe’s Pub at Public Theater)
QUIPS AND CHORDS Seasoned comedian Gianmarco Soresi asked a jovial audience member at Public Theater’s cozy Joe’s Pub: “Did you go to school for musical theater?”; “What was the last musical you booked?”; and “Could you sing a little of it right now?” At first this moment is playful crowd work, but when Gianmarco summons…
-
Concert Review: AN INTIMATE EVENING WITH NORM LEWIS (The Barns at Wolf Trap in VA)
NORM SETS THE STANDARD An Intimate Evening with Norm Lewis at The Barns last night was a magical journey through his musical theater career, brimming with charm, humor, and breathtaking vocals (there is one more performance tonight). The evening began with a dynamic rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” followed by the gentle, hopeful…
-
Concert Review: AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA (U.S. Tour at Jordan Hall in Boston)
MAKING THE OLD NEW “Make it new,” Ezra Pound urged the poets of the early twentieth century. For Modernists such as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Amy Lowell, and Pound himself, making it new meant innovating to produce something never before seen or read. Yet Boston’s Celebrity Series has now brought us two concerts…
-
Theater Review: KIMBERLY AKIMBO (National Tour, Pantages)
YOUR GREAT ADVENTURE AWAITS If you rearrange the letters of “progeria,” you can get “opera rig,” or “rigor ape,” or “prior age.” That last one is befitting. Progeria is an incredibly rare syndrome that causes people to age faster than normal. Though the turmoil of high school, a troubled home, and growing up in New…
-
Highly Recommended Theater: SYMPHONY OF RATS (West Coast Premiere, The Wooster Group at REDCAT in Los Angeles)
In Symphony of Rats, a President of the United States has strange encounters of the phantasmagorical kind. Surrounded by his presidential aides, he plunges into a series of incidents where he meets otherworldly beings, among them a giant rat with a special message. October 18-20 & 22-23, 2024, the legendary Wooster Group transforms REDCAT in downtown L.A. into a sort of mad laboratory for their latest deliriously trippy production Symphony of Rats, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte,…
-
Theater Review: KIMBERLY AKIMBO (National Tour, San Diego)
WILL YOU STILL NEED ME, WHEN I’M (LOOKING) SIXTY-FOUR? How would you live your life if you knew you were going to die of old age : in your late teens? All teens experience appearance issues, but Kimberly Levaco (Carolee Carmello) has it worse than most. Kim has a rare chromosomal disease very similar to…
-
Theater Review: TESLA: A RADIO PLAY FOR THE STAGE (Tour at Cal Tech and Big Bear Lake Performing Arts Center)
AN ELECTRIFYING TESLA Much has been written about Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current, radio and so much more, ever since his name became one of the world’s most known electric automobile brand names in 2003. Robbed of the scientific accolades he deserved by others more in tune with how to make…
-
Highly Recommended Theater: RANDY RAINBOW FOR PRESIDENT (McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert)
A RAINBOW COMES TO PALM DESERT If you’re looking for a truly iconic evening of laugh-out-loud comedy, you’re in luck. This Friday and Saturday, October 11 and 12 at 7:30, internet sensation Randy Rainbow is headed to the McCallum Theatre, a perfect venue for Rainbow’s hilarious brand of entertainment. With election season quickly approaching (let’s…
Search Articles
Please help keep
Stage and Cinema going!
