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Los Angeles Theater Review: OLIVER! (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
YOU WILL BUY During a two hour car trip with my future husband, he — being from New York and loving Broadway musicals as much as I — decided to sing every song from Oliver!, his favorite show at that time. After about an hour, he began to sing “Where Is Love?,” which is one…
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Dance Review: ANNA KARENINA (World Premiere by Joffrey Ballet at the Auditorium Theatre)
LEO TOLSTOY TURNED TO LEAPS AND TWIRLS IN THIS WORLD PREMIERE BALLET MILESTONE So many superlatives to savor. Newly created by 35-year-old wunderkind composer Ilya Demutsky, who replenishes the rhapsodic romanticism of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and genius choreographer Yuri Possokhov, who finds new depths in dance, Anna Karenina, Joffrey Ballet’s first commissioned score, redeemed its promissory notes perfectly…
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Theater Review: MINNIE’S BOYS (Musical Theatre Guild at the Alex Theatre)
BOY OH BOYS With a fun and intermittently funny score by Hal Hackady (lyrics) and Larry Grossman (music), perky, adorable, enterprising direction by J. Scott Lapp, and some shining performances, Musical Theatre Guild’s concert-staged production of the more-than-rarely produced flop Minnie’s Boys turned out to be a pleasant and occasionally hilarious outing. This had some…
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Chicago Theater Review: A DOLL’S HOUSE, PART 2 (Steppenwolf)
A SEQUEL WITHOUT A SOUL Some nerve. It takes chutzpah on top of arrogance to dare to continue, let alone complete, another playwright’s stand-alone masterpiece. Lucas Hnath has the temerity to imagine a sequel to A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen’s proto-feminist classic from 1879. It remains the still-controversial tale of a Norwegian wife who, refusing to…
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Film: FINDING NEVERLAND: A MILESTONE IN HISTORICAL FANTASY
Following up his critically acclaimed Monster’s Ball, director Marc Forster took on this biography of playwright James Matthew Barrie, the scribe who penned the children’s classic Peter Pan. Johnny Depp stars as the turn-of-the-century writer as the film follows Barrie as he struggles to write and have his play produced. J.M. Barrie’s Finding Neverland also…
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Theater Review: HOW I LEARNED TO DRIVE (Raven Theatre in Chicago)
HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE THEATER Some plays take time to come into their own but they’re well worth a wait. Over two decades after its Off-Broadway debut, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive is only now reaching full impact. That’s thanks to the consciousness-raising of #MeToo, among other seismic changes in the body politic. With…
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Dance Review: MATTHEW BOURNE’S CINDERELLA (International Tour at The Ahmanson in Los Angeles)
IF THE BLITZ FITS… The audacious, eccentric and flashily theatrical choreographer, Matthew Bourne, is a man full of interesting ideas, most of which, under close scrutiny, are fairly half-baked, but prove catnip to dance enthusiasts while driving serious balletomanes to distraction. There’s the famous all-male Swan Lake and a theatricalization of The Red Shoes, the…
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Off-Broadway Review: MIES JULIE (Classic Stage Company)
DON’T MIES IT In Mies Julie, Yaël Farber’s contemporary adaptation of August Strindberg’s 1889 play Miss Julie, Farber swaps out Strindberg’s Swedish estate for a prosperous farm in the barren South African desert. Playing through March 10 at Classic Stage Company, Strindberg’s examination of class structure takes a backseat to themes of racial stratification and…
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Off-Broadway Review: THE DANCE OF DEATH (Classic Stage Company)
DANCING AROUND DEATH “I thought we might show more decorum by keeping our long miserable mistake to ourselves,” Alice tells Edgar after he expresses his intention to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary. “Oh come, Alice!” responds the aging artillery captain. “We’ve had fun. Now and then. And soon it will all be over. We’ll be…
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Chicago Theater Review: PIPELINE (Victory Gardens)
A PIPELINE TO GREAT THEATER The title of Pipeline refers to the much-reviled “school-to-prison” conduit that keeps minority kids from any outcome but incarceration, soft or hard. It’s driven by a fatal fusion of low and self-fulfilling expectations of failure, endless and pointless discipline, and inadequate encouragement or alternatives to crime. Disadvantage can take many forms. It’s…
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Theater Review: THE FATHER (Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at Theater Wit)
THE SOUND OF A BRAIN BREAKING Uncertainty is the default drive behind the 95 excruciating minutes of French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Father. Seldom has a staged mystery shifted so suddenly and strongly between competing realities. As the protagonist Andre says, “There’s something funny going on here.” But it’s not amusing: Yes, The Father is crammed with mistaken…
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Las Vegas Theater Review: VEGAS! THE SHOW (The Saxe Theatre at Planet Hollywood)
GIMME THAT OLD TIME VEGAS In front of a necropolis where Vegas marquees and hotel signs of old are the tombstones, an old, black janitor (the multi-talented Tezz Yancey) comes out with a broom and reminisces with us about the Vegas of old. It doesn’t take an idiot savant to know what cards the creators…
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Broadway Review: CALL ME MADAM (Encores!)
CALL ME UNDERWHELMED For City Center’s 75th anniversary season, Encores! has revived a show from its second year, Call Me Madam — only the second show it has ever repeated. Irving Berlin’s 1950 star vehicle for Ethel Merman was a smash hit for Encores! in 1995 as a concert starring Tyne Daly (the recording of which…
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Las Vegas Theater Review: KÁ (Cirque du Soleil)
GOOD KÃ, BAD KÃ There is so much money, time and skill invested in KÃÂ — the Cirque du Soleil mid-east, tribal-flavored spectacle at MGM in Las Vegas that you don’t want to say anything bad about it. The sheer grandeur and never-before-seen technical stagecraft eclipses one’s desire to note that this is, basically, a $200…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TWO TRAINS RUNNING (The Matrix Theatre)
RUNNING ON FULL After producer Sophina Brown’s celebrated production last year of King Headly II — one of ten dramas of the late August Wilson’s 2oth-century chronicle The Pittsburgh Cycle — she staked a claim to produce the entire oeuvre. Her promise is Los Angeles’s gift. Opening last weekend at the Matrix Theatre, Two Trains Running, a…
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Theater Review: JULIA SWEENEY: OLDER AND WIDER (Geffen Playhouse)
OUR LOVELY FRIEND RETURNS AT LAST I have never seen Julia Sweeney on film or television. Okay, almost never: there’s Pulp Fiction and Stuart Little. Yet while Sweeney is notable for having been in those films, I can’t quite remember who she played. She’s been working steadily in projects but I guess I haven’t had the desire…
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Theater Preview: AN INSPECTOR CALLS (The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare)
SOCIETY UNDER CLOSE INSPECTION An Inspector Calls was first performed in 1945 at a time of great change — both World Wars were fresh in the minds of the people, women had become more prominent in the workplace, and it was possible to be class mobile, which is the idea that people can move upwards in class through…
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Music Review: PHILIP GLASS SYMPHONY NO. 12 (World Premiere with the LA Phil)
SHATTERED GLASS The Lodger symphony, Philip Glass’s brand new Symphony No. 12, is a work that the composer had discussed with David Bowie prior to the glam-rock king’s death (the two were friends and mutual admirers for many decades). Glass wanted to turn the 1979 album Lodger, a collaboration with Brian Eno and producer Tony…
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CD Review: SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD (2018 Encores! Off-Center Cast Recording)
A WHIRL AT A NEW NEW WORLD Like a breath of fresh air, this new recording of Jason Robert Brown’s Songs for a New World far exceeded my expectations from this uneven song cycle. This is an early work from the Tony-winner for Parade and Bridges of Madison County. “It’s about one moment,” Brown once…
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Opera Review: ELEKTRA (Lyric Opera of Chicago)
AN ELEKTRA WITHOUT ELEKTRICITY The first show I ever reviewed in Chicago was The Hypocrites’ All Our Tragic at the Den Theatre, a marathon twelve-hour distillation of every surviving Greek tragedy. It was an extraordinary experience. I’ve also seen a one-night performance of the complete Oresteia of Aeschylus and read both Sophocles’ and Euripedes’ versions…
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