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Theater Review: AS YOU LIKE IT (Oregon Shakespeare)
AS YOU LIKE IT, OR DON’T These are strange times we’re living in, and political correctness makes strange bedfellows. For years now, Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been a leader of inclusionary casting — meaning actors who have been looked over in the past will be readily accommodated regardless of physical disabilities, age, race, sex, deafness…
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DVD Review: MRS. WILSON (PBS)
RUTH, THE TRUTH, AND A SLEUTH Actress Ruth Wilson is well known in her native UK, and is slowly gaining acclaim here in the U.S. (check out her work as the psychotic enemy of Idris Elba in the hard-hitting detective-drama, Luther). So when she approached BBC to produce a project close to her heart, they…
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Theater Review: THE UNDENIABLE SOUND OF RIGHT NOW (Raven Theatre in Chicago)
KEEPING ROCK REAL Letting a good thing go is a hard fate: Change is always constant but it’s never guaranteed to be good. A tough transition in Chicago’s indie rock scene is feelingly chronicled in Laura Eason’s The Undeniable Sound of Right Now, a Chicago premiere at Raven Theatre. The title sounds like a visceral response to an expiration date —…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: DANIEL’S HUSBAND (Fountain Theatre in Hollywood)
THE PLAY THAT GOT AWAY I don’t know the exact play Michael McKeever was writing prior to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in favor of federal marriage equality, but I suspect it worked much more than this now locked-in reconstruction that made its way to Off-Broadway by 2018, and is now getting its Southern California…
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Theater Review: FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (Tour)
AS RELEVANT AND CELEBRATORY AS EVER, FIDDLER GETS A POWERFUL REVIVAL It takes a musical to make a village: At nearly three hours, this very replete revival, which plays the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa through May 17, takes its time — but not ours. Fiddler on the Roof, the beloved 1964 musical, richly rewards…
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Theater Review: MAD BEAT HIP & GONE (Promethean Theatre Ensemble)
TAKE TO THE ROAD Walt Whitman may have patented the “song of the open road,” but the Beat Generation gave it their own course correction and made it into a map. These writers of the Eisenhower Era, most notably Jack Kerouac in On the Road, turned bittersweet wanderlust into their own manifest destiny. In a time before…
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Music Review: GREAT OPERA & FILM CHORUSES (Los Angeles Master Chorale at Disney Hall)
RESOUNDING SOUNDTRACKS In 1770, Jean Jacques Rousseau employed music to accompany certain dramatic scenes in his play Pygmalion. A hundred years later, music to accompany theatrical melodrama was de rigueur. By natural progression, music became an essential part of silent cinema. Phonograph, piano, organ or a loosely assembled band played along with the earliest movies,…
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Review: SISTER ACT (San Diego Musical Theatre)
WELL DONE HAVING FUN ON THE RUN AS A NUN Don’t you just hate it when your boyfriend turns out to be a mobster and murders someone right in front of you, forcing you to flee and hide — all when your Disco Diva career is ready to take off? Well, that’s what happens to…
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Theater Review: TOO HEAVY FOR YOUR POCKET (TimeLine Theatre)
ANOTHER DREAM DEFERRED The price of progress is no abstraction, not during the fully-freighted 160 minutes of Jiréh Breon Holder’s civil rights drama Too Heavy for Your Pocket. A TimeLine Theatre time capsule thrillingly staged by Ron OJ Parson, this blast from the past goes beyond yesterday’s infamous clash of activists against fire hoses to…
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Off-Broadway Review: FIDDLER ON THE ROOF IN YIDDISH (Stage 42)
SO WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE? As Shakespeare said, “Good wine needs no bush.” Thus, there is no need to add to what New Yorkers have already discovered, that no matter how many productions of Fiddler on the Roof you’ve sat through, you ain’t seen nothing yet until you’ve seen it in Yiddish, until you’ve heard…
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Broadway Review: TOOTSIE (Marquis Theater)
TOOT-TOOT-TOOTSIE, HELLO! I’m here to sing the praises of all those musical comedy freaks who have been jonesing for a contemporary musical that will bring back, in some new form, the golden age of Broadway musicals, because one has come their way. You know the kind I mean. Each song, complete with entrancing melody and…
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Theater Review: THE CHILDREN (Steppenwolf)
THE PARENTS CRUSADE The setting is the story in The Children, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Chicago premiere. Set designer Chelsea M. Warren depicts a cluttered seaside cottage off the east coast of England. It’s seen from across a cliff, as if an exhibit in a human zoo. This remote shelter is located just outside an “exclusion zone,” the site…
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Theater Review: BRIGHT STAR (Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont)
OH MY STAR! Bright Star is a heartwarming musical written by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell inspired by their 2013 bluegrass album Love Has Come for You. The show had a Broadway run in the spring of 2016 with direction by Walter Bobbie, choreography by Josh Rhodes and a set design by Eugene Lee. Now,…
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Music Review: SALONEN’S STRAVINSKY: MYTHS (Los Angeles Philharmonic)
BORE-PHEUS AND EURYD-ENNUI When we think of Stravinsky’s music, contemplative, encompassing beauty isn’t what pops into mind. Yet that’s what we get in the very rarely performed ballets, Orpheus (1947) and Perséphone (1934). As part of LA Phil’s erstwhile Music Director’s series, Salonen’s Stravinsky, Esa-Pekka Salonen continues his salute of (mostly) lesser played works by…
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Broadway Review: GARY: A SEQUEL TO TITUS ANDRONICUS (Booth Theatre)
SEND IN THE CLOWNS A bloody war is ended. The bodies pile up. Who will clean up the mess? What to do? What to do? Oh, yes. Send in the clowns. On this note, Taylor Mac, the certified genius whose A 24-Decade History of Popular Music was the most dazzling, mesmerizing, audacious, life-changing theater experience…
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Theater Review: HAMLET (Chicago Shakespeare)
THE PARALYZED PRINCE Century after century, thespian tyro after marquee headliner, something remains rotten in the state of Denmark. A defining challenge for thousands of careers, Hamlet persists as both a title and a test, Shakespeare’s longest if not deepest tragedy. At nearly three hours, Barbara Gaines’ magisterial modern-dress revival is a valuable and workmanlike continuation…
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Theater Review: TIME NO LINE (John Kelly)
TEMPUS FUGIT There are great performance artists and, rarer still, there are great artists who perform. John Kelly is both. His Time No Line is a quietly breathtaking meditation on his life and art culled from the journals he kept from 1976 to the present day. He can be mathematically precise poring over details in…
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Opera Review: MOBY-DICK (Chicago Opera Theater at the Harris Theater)
THE WHALE WINS There’s only one more performance — on Sunday at 3 at the Harris Theatre — of Chicago Opera Theater’s awesomely ambitious Moby-Dick, a nearly-three-hour 2010 epic with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Gene Scheer. As much an exercise in mounting hubris and ironclad obsession as was Captain Ahab’s pursuit…
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Theater Review: THE JUNGLE (Curran Theatre in San Francisco)
IT’S A JUNGLE IN HERE From 2015 to 2016, The Jungle was a makeshift camp in a landfill site in Calais, France, the port city where the Channel Tunnel to the UK begins. Inhabited by refugees from nations normally unfriendly to one another — Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, and others — they put…
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Theater Preview: DIE, MOMMIE, DIE! (Los Angeles Theatre Works at UCLA)
SHE’S BA-A-A-CK AND SHE’S FA-A-A-ABULOUS Charles Busch’s play Die, Mommie, Die! is equal parts Greek comic-tragedy and Hollywood kitsch — a melodramatic campy cult classic in the vein of 1960s gothic horror films such as Hush:Hush, Sweet Charlotte. I saw the very first production at the Coast Playhouse back in 1999 starring the cabaret and…
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