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CD Review: OSCAR, WITH LOVE (Various Artists)
OSCAR, WITH LOVE AND BEAUTY AND RESPECT AND… It’s a simple idea that could easily have caused higgledy-piggledy results. In fact, many tribute albums involving various artists contain tracks that are jarringly inconsistent and smack of commercialism. Not so here. Kelly Peterson, the widow of Oscar Peterson (1925-2007), personally produced this extraordinary three-disc set which…
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Theater Review: THE GIANT VOID IN MY SOUL (Ammunition Theatre Company at Pico Playhouse)
FILLING THE VOID IN L.A. THEATER Neither my friend nor I were looking forward to this play — I mean, good grief, when I heard that it was about a couple of “fools” going on a journey to fill the void in one of the best friend’s soul… Well, frankly, it just sounded like forgettable,…
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CD Review: BRUCKNER 9 with reconstructed finale (Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, John Gibbons)
BACK TO BRUCKNER That there are over 100 recordings of Bruckner’s Ninth — his final and unfinished symphony — speaks to the enormous popularity of this spectacular creation. In 1926, American critic Paul Rosenfeld stated that “Bruckner’s symphonies have scarce commenced heaving their mighty volumes through time, before we know we are come into a world…
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Theater Preview: DO RE MI (Musical Theatre West Reiner Reading Series in Long Beach)
GIMME THAT DO-RE-MI, BOYS The 1960 musical Do Re Mi is about a would-be big shot named Hubie Cram, a wheeler dealer who just can’t make the big time. As his wife Kay says, they have 400 hula hoops in their garage and the phase has already passed. This time Hubie has acquired 300 jukeboxes;…
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CD Review: FIVE (Tony Banks)
GIMME FIVE Tony Banks gathers no moss. At 68, the co-founder of Genesis is releasing yet another album, his tenth outside of the band. After a successful career as songwriter, singer, film scorer, and multi-instrumentalist (most especially on keyboards), Banks turned to orchestral compositions. His third, released in February 2018, is labelled “classical” but the…
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CD Review: BRUCKNER SYMPHONY V (Altomonte Orchester St. Florian; Remy Ballot, conductor)
FEELS FIVE TIMES AS LONG It’s no doubt coincidental that the fifth recording in a series of Bruckner Symphonies conducted live by Rémy Ballot is of the Fifth. If you haven’t yet heard the previous four – the Third, Eighth, Ninth, and Sixth – get ready for a shock. Recorded in August 2017 at St….
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Music Review: SEMYON BYCHKOV, LABÉQUE SISTERS, & THE LA PHIL (Ravel, Bruch and Dvořák)
LABÉQUE TO THE DRAWING BOARD Forty years since they made their U.S. debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, French sisters  Katia & Marielle Labèque returned for a program that seriously needed to rethink its programming. After the duo’s take on Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite for four hands (1908), the French pianists — led by Marielle’s husband,…
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Chicago Theater Review: HAVING OUR SAY (Goodman)
OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF CENTENARIANS “Life is short. It’s up to you to make it sweet.” No cliché in Emily Mann’s moving 1993 play, this is one of many hard-earned pearls of wisdom in her generous portrait of centenarian sisters. Based on the oral history provided by Sadie and Bessie Delany before their much-protracted…
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San Diego Theater Review: SOUTH PACIFIC (San Diego Musical Theatre)
SOME ENCHANTED EVENING, INDEED Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 Broadway hit South Pacific is so full of familiar, classic numbers that it almost feels like a Broadway review in itself − what a coup to have song after song that we recognize beyond its most familiar piece, Some Enchanted Evening. Overall, characters are likable and the…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: DIE, MOMMIE, DIE! (Celebration Theatre at the Kirk Douglas in Culver City)
“I’M NOT ALONE ANYMORE, I HAVE ME!” Charles Busch once said he thought of himself as the Loretta Young of drag, specializing in creatures of artifice, vanity, and soulful, often unrequited longing. Even as far back as playing the ingénue haunted by a terrible secret in Psycho Beach Party, you could see the leading lady…
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Chicago Theater Review: A NEW ATTITUDE (Black Ensemble Theater)
PATTI QUAKES, PATTI SHAKES. PATTI GETS HER CAKES You can only listen and love: The former Patricia Louise Holt-Edwards oozes energy on stage. She kicks off her shoes in sheer delight. Loving jazz from the outside in, she sets style standards with each new wardrobe. An entrepreneur, she sells her own “Fancy Cakes” on the…
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Chicago Theater Review: PROMETHEUS BOUND (City Lit at Edgewater Presbyterian Church)
PROMETHEUS SETS THE STAGE AFIRE Imagination sometimes seems abstract. It’s a term you can’t always savor — until you see it blossom before you. It’s in full force in City Lit’s revival of Prometheus Bound, the surviving drama from Aeschylus’s trilogy dating back to the fifth century BC. A labor of love spanning 20 years, this eye-popping,…
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Theater Review: FOREVER BOUND (Atwater Village Theater in Los Angeles)
WHEN METAPHORS BECOME MONSTERS Art thrives when it dances on the edge of a razor — flaunting itself and teasing us — fully embracing the risk of toppling over at any moment and smashing itself to smithereens. In Forever Bound, a world premiere at the Atwater Village Theatre, playwright Steve Apostolina, director Anne Hearn Tobolowsky,…
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Chicago Theater Review: FLIES! THE MUSICAL! (Pride Films and Plays at the Pride Arts Center)
YOUR FLIES! IS OPEN The running joke behind this unauthorized musical based on a 1954 novel and a 1963 film is how it hides its homage: To avoid copyright infringement, we never hear “Flies” and “Lord” in the same sentence. Critics, happily, needn’t be so coy: A world premiere from Pride Films & Plays, Flies! The…
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Theater Review: THE IMMIGRANT (Sierra Madre Playhouse in Los Angeles)
BLENDING BANANAS AND BORSCHT Mark Harelik’s 1985 play The Immigrant is based on the story of his grandparents, Haskell and Leah Gorehlik, immigrants from Russia who settled in the tiny central-Texas town of Hamilton in 1909, and were the only Jews there. Haskell has arrived in America to escape the pogroms; now, he must gather…
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Theater Review: BELLEVILLE (Pasadena Playhouse)
SPLITSVILLE Five years after its world premiere, L.A. is just now getting Amy Herzog’s disturbing domestic thriller. Both praised and not, the controversy with this one-act has been more over the playwright’s construction — Herzog writes herself into a corner — than the subject matter. Was it worth the wait? For the first hour and a…
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Los Vegas Concert Review: AUDRA MCDONALD IN CONCERT (The Smith Center for the Performing Arts)
MCDONALD’S CHARM The last time I saw the captivating singer and actress Audra McDonald in concert, she sang the Bernstein/Comden/Green tune “I’m a Little Bit in Love” from Wonderful Town: “Mm–mmm! / It’s so nice to be alive / When you find someone who bewitches you.” And when you see her upcoming concert at the Smith…
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Chicago Theater Review: SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER (Raven Theatre)
NOT A TENNESSEE WALTZ The strangest thing about Suddenly Last Summer is that the main character is never seen. But, talked about for 90 minutes by two dangerously partisan women, he’s fully felt. So is the play’s dark discovery: “We all use each other –and that’s what we think of as love.” Jason Gerace’s taut Raven Theatre…
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Theater Review: THE BABY DANCE: MIXED (Rubicon Theatre Company in Ventura)
AN UPDATED BABY IS STILL CAPTIVATING THEATER For all its melodrama, Jane Anderson’s The Baby Dance has always been one of my favorite plays since I first saw it at Pasadena Playhouse in 1990. Revisiting the show again at Actors Co-op years later only cemented my sentiments. A poor couple living in a Louisiana trailer…
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Theater Review: HONEYMOON IN VEGAS (Musical Theatre Guild in Los Angeles)
A HONEYMOON IN GLENDALE More fun than walking away a few bucks ahead from a black jack table, this pell-mell, silly-sweet, old-fashioned musical comedy (ya know, gangsters, lovers, Elvis impersonators, a curse) just couldn’t find an audience when it landed on Broadway in 2015. But that’s why we have Musical Theatre Guild, which takes rarely…
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