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San Diego Theater Review: THIS RANDOM WORLD (North Coast Rep)
WELL-PLANNED IRONIES Facebook and LinkedIn have illuminated the error in the supposed six degrees of separation theory, which asserts that all living things and everything else in the world are six or fewer steps away from each other; in our interconnected world, the correct number is probably closer to three. In This Random World, the…
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Dance Review: ROMEO AND JULIET (Joffrey Ballet)
SUCH SWEET SORROW FOR THE WRONG REASONS It’s as if choreographer Krzysztof Pastor, director of the Polish National Ballet, gave Prokofiev the opportunity to protest Stalin’s tyranny that he never had in 1940. Pastor’s two-act treatment of the Russian’s celebrated three-act ballet carries no Renaissance finery, just real-world immediacy. Premiered by the Scottish Ballet in…
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Los Angeles Opera Review: ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE / ORPHÉE ET EURYDICE (LA Opera)
DON’T MYTH OUT, OR DANCING THAT’S ORPH THE CHARTS LA Opera’s gorgeous production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice (Orphée et Eurydice), featuring a welcome collaboration with the Staatsoper Hamburg and Chicago’s Lyric Opera (with the Hamburg and Joffrey Ballets), lives up to the hype, hope, and expectation it has generated since its announcement….
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Chicago Theater Review: THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (City Lit)
DIFFICULT TO PICTURE The Picture of Dorian Gray is its author’s self-portrait — perversely paradoxical, sardonically aesthetic, and (necessarily) obsessed with concealment. First published in 1890, ten years before the author’s death in exile, Oscar Wilde’s only novel is a curiously ambivalent embrace of and attack on decadence and depravity. Yes, it’s inevitably Victorian in its…
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Chicago Theater Review: CYRANO (BoHo Theatre)
WHO NOSE BEST? Edmond Rostand’s timeless love story celebrates the one-sided love between the famous 17th-century swordsman and poet — disfigured with a humongous schnoz — and his beautiful cousin, Roxane, who is infatuated with Christian, a hot-blooded, handsome and bashfully inarticulate Gascon warrior, a suitor who can’t win her without Cyrano’s hidden eloquence. In…
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Music Review: JOHN BEASLEY’S MONK’ESTRA & GERI ALLEN’S ERROL GARNER PROJECT (Disney Hall)
THE MAGICAL MONK LEFT HIS MARK Just when I thought nothing could touch Jason Moran’s recreation of Thelonious Monk’s 1959 Town Hall recording last November, along comes the great John Beasley with his take on the great jazz inventor. Beasley wasn’t trying to recreate Monk at Disney Hall last night; instead, he has come up with themes…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: SELL/BUY/DATE (Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Renberg Theatre in Hollywood)
SEX WORK/#METOO/FUTURE TENSE Sarah Jones is a prescient writer and an actor of rare gifts and remarkable range. It’s no wonder that an early patron and supporter was Meryl Streep, for like Streep, Jones goes in and out of accents and physical characterizations with precision in a way that appears effortless. In her engrossing new…
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Theater Interview: PAT KINEVANE (starring in three plays at The Odyssey Theatre)
THE LUCK OF THE IRISH AMBASSADOR Pat Kinevane, 51, is a native of rural Ireland — specifically County Cork — now living and working in Dublin, the capitol of Eire. A qualified spokesperson on Irish culture, he is on a month-long visit to Los Angeles with his three one-person shows which have garnered him a…
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CD Review: A SONG FOR YOU (Steve Tyrell)
A HOMOGENIZED SONG FOR YOU Look, it’s a matter of taste. Steve Tyrell began his career in the ’60s as a music supervisor for Scepter Records in the 1960s where his mentors were Burt Bacharach and Hal David (Tyrell even tagged fellow Texan B.J. Thomas to sing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” for Butch Cassidy…
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CD Review: ERNEST SHACKLETON LOVES ME (Original Cast Recording)
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST I’m actually happy I didn’t see this musical live on stage. It makes for a wonderful original cast recording, but what seems like a giant heart on this CD, out recently from Broadway Records, seems like it would get awfully silly on stage (bookwriter Joe DiPietro can get like that)….
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Chicago Theater Review: TIME IS ON OUR SIDE (About Face Theatre)
UNLOCKING WHAT WAS NEVER HIDDEN At least Time Is On Our Side is more sex-affirmative and upbeat than Significant Other, About Face Theatre’s last offering. A Midwest premiere devotedly staged by artistic director Megan Carney, this overlong 140-minute drama by R. Eric Thomas is, like Lookingglass Theatre’s equally unfortunate Plantation!, beautifully meant and (more) mature. Billed as a “gleeful…
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CD Review: ESCHER STRING QUARTET (Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Borodin)
AMERICAN QUARTET; AMERICAN ENSEMBLE: OH, BEAUTIFUL! Dvořák’s American Quartet is one of the most famous and loved string quartets, mostly because of the memorable pentatonic melodies (five note per octave scales, which are often found in American folk music) that invoke the wide open prairies of the undeveloped heartland of the country for which it’s…
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CD Review: WORKING: A MUSICAL (Original London Cast Recording on Ghostlight Records)
THE MUSICAL THAT KEEPS ON WORKING Was 2017 really the European premiere of this oft-produced musical? Yep. 40 years since the Broadway opening of Working, and we’re just getting the Original London Cast recording. Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso’s 1978 musical — adapted from Studs Terkel’s 1974 nonfiction book about working-class Americans – moves between monologues…
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Chicago Opera Review: FAUST (Lyric Opera)
A FAUSTIAN BARGAIN OF SORTS Bold, eclectic and experimental, Lyric Opera’s new production (co-produced with Portland Opera) of Gounod’s Faust comes across as rather jumbled, a mishmash, a hodgepodge — even a farrago. Thought it might not be entirely coherent, the result is surprisingly enjoyable, thanks above all to Gounod’s searing and sumptuous score, an…
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CD Review: LISZT — The Two Piano Concertos; 12 Transcendental Études (Alessandro Ambrosoli)
ANOTHER ÉTUDES TO ADD TO YOUR LISZT … COLLECTION, THAT IS Dynamic Records has just released an album of Liszt starring Italian pianist Alessandro Ambrosoli (b. 1969). Disc 1 is all 12 Études d’exécution transcendante; disc 2 are Liszt’s two piano concertos. Independent Italian record company Dynamic often releases live recordings, but that only applies to…
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CD Review: ONCE ON THIS ISLAND (New Broadway Cast Recording)
ONCE AGAIN A lot of hoopla attended the 1990 Off-Broadway surprise of a small musical called Once on This Island. Loosely based on Rosa Guy’s Caribbean-flavored novel, My Love, My Love, which in turn is loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, it was part of a late spring festival of new work…
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Chicago Theater Review: PLANTATION! (Lookingglass Theatre Company)
RIDICULOUS REVENGE It’s so well-intentioned that the results are doubly deplorable. Lookingglass Theatre Company’s Plantation!, a world premiere by ensemble member Kevin Douglas staged by their own David Schwimmer, might have mattered. That’s the saddest thing about this clumsy comedy. Its goal is golden — to explore the painful payback of retroactive justice. Its worthy…
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Chicago Dance Review: 8TH ANNUAL WINNING WORKS (Joffrey Academy of Dance and MCA, Chicago)
LITERAL LEAPS INTO THE FUTURE It’s all over — but this review of record is as much a promissory note as a remembrance. Worth noting as much as seeing, Winning Works, the Joffrey Ballet’s debut of four trail-blazing works at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, carried a train load of future reference. Both encouragement to cutting-edge…
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Los Angeles Music Review: A TRIP TO THE MOON & THE PLANETS (Teddy Abrams and the LA Phil)
WHAT A TRIP Close on the heels of LA Phil’s behemoth production of Bernstein’s Mass comes another large-scale work with mind-boggling logistics. Co-commissioned with the London Symphony, A Trip to the Moon is Andrew Norman’s fanciful musical about a fin de siècle voyage to the Moon, whose inhabitants have trouble communicating with the Edwardian/Victorian astronomers…
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Chicago Theater Review: MARY STUART (Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
A ROYAL CATFIGHT GETS A ROYAL PRODUCTION Coulda, woulda, shoulda: It’s the greatest confrontation between rival monarchs that never happened — the 1586 face-off between the “Virgin” Queen Elizabeth and the younger, thrice-wed Mary Queen of Scots (whose son, ironically, would inherit the disputed throne). In hindsight it seems a no-brainer: The cousins should have had a…
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