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Chicago Theater Review: YOU GOT OLDER (Steppenwolf)
TASTING YOUR MORTALITY In the bleak midwinter ’” appropriately ’” comes this dour drama. A Chicago premiere from Steppenwolf Theatre Company, this 2014 Obie winner will not let you warm your hands by its fire. Like Raven Theatre’s current Nice Girl or Shattered Globe Theatre’s Five Mile Lake, Clare Barron’s You Got Older marinates in the failures of trapped characters. Their every…
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Chicago Dance Review: MODERN MASTERS (Joffrey Ballet at the Auditorium Theatre)
MOVEMENTS WITHOUT DEMANDS Modern masters indeed. A splendid showcase for steps and leaps, Joffrey Ballet’s annual winter engagement always brings fresh glory to the state of their art. Modern Masters, now enthralling the Auditorium Theatre through February 18, presents four works, only one on a return visit, that test the imagination of dance as much as the…
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Chicago Opera Review: I PURITANI (Lyric Opera)
BELLINI’S BEL CANTO BRITISH BALLAD After the questionable orientalism of Bizet’s Pearl Fishers and Puccini’s Turandot, Lyric audiences can now enjoy Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani (The Puritans), a cultural encounter of a different kind. It is an Italian opera composed for a French audience and set during the English Civil War. This is perhaps not…
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CD Review: HAMLISCH UNCOVERED (Various Artists on Broadway Records)
MARVIN’S GARDEN One of composer Marvin Hamlisch’s first gigs was that of rehearsal pianist and assistant vocal arranger for the original production of Funny Girl on Broadway in 1964, a job which he found through the aid of Liza Minnelli, who recorded one of Hamlisch’s early songs (“Travelin’ Man”) on her first album. It was…
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Book Review: MURDER IS FATAL (Barry Creyton)
NEO-NOIR NOVEL A FUNNY NOD TO CLASSIC FILM NOIR Author Barry Creyton has proven that film noir doesn’t die; it just goes from black-and-white to color. Part crime story and part love letter, the novel Murder is Fatal is a good-hearted epitome of all things film noir as well as an exaltation to its devotees….
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Chicago Theater Review: JEEVES IN BLOOM (ShawChicago at the Ruth Page Center)
SAVED BY YOUR SERVANT Like manna from the heavens, it comes when we’ve never needed to laugh more: The invaluable comic master P.G. Wodehouse returns from the Roaring Twenties to the rescue of the Troubled Teens: That delightfully co-dependent duo’”Jeeves and Bertie–are up to no boredom again: In ShawChicago’s delightful concert reading of Wodehouse’s Jeeves in…
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CD Review: MAD LIBS LIVE! (Original Cast Recording)
DRAWING A BLANK Coming direct from the Missed Opportunity Department is a semi-educational musical geared towards kids and prepubescent audiences which ends up as merely juvenile. Mad Libs Live! is an hour-long show about four high-school teens who, as a team, enter a singing group competition. The prize? The title of “Teen Superstars.” The modus…
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Chicago Theater Review: SKELETON CREW (Northlight)
THE DIS-ASSEMBLY LINE Some stories can’t stand on their own and for very good reason: They tell so many others. Much as The Wire dealt with Baltimore’s failing institutions and August Wilson chronicled the decades washing over Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Dominique Morisseau’s “Detroit Trilogy” pays tribute to the builders of a broken burg. In Chicago, TimeLine Theatre…
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Los Angeles Music Review: BERNSTEIN’S MASS (Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel)
A MASSIVE MASS FOR THE MASSES It’s a happening in Disney Hall. And there’s no better way to salute Leonard Bernstein in his hundredth year than a humongous and awesome presentation of his rarely produced Mass. How did a secular humanist Jewish composer come to write a a modernized interpretation of sacred Mass texts, including…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: BERLIN PHILHARMONIC WIND QUINTET WITH STEPHEN HOUGH (The Wallis)
HOUGH AND PUFF The glorious Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet is coming to The Wallis in Beverly Hills as part of a very short, nine-stop North American tour. As if having this prestigious ensemble on February 10 isn’t exciting enough, the great pianist Stephen Hough (pronounced “Huff”) will be playing with the Quintet here in Beverly…
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Chicago Theater Review: NICE GIRL (Raven Theatre)
THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS “No one will ever love you as much as I do — so shut up and stop looking for more.” A harsher hope-killing “reassurance” should not be imagined. That’s the curse/challenge facing Josephine Rosen, the 37-year-old anti-heroine in Melissa Ross’s ironically titled Nice Girl, a tender-headed character study. This sweetly knowing,…
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Chicago Theater Review: BLIND DATE (Goodman)
REHABILITATING REAGAN Putting us backstage as history happens, Goodman Theatre’s world premiere Blind Date generously or doggedly tells audiences more than they knew (or perhaps want to) about a nearly forgotten meeting of the minds. Drawing heavily from the somewhat fictionalized memoirs of Edmund Morris, a Ronald Reagan biographer who had constant access to the Great Communicator,…
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San Diego Theater Review: THE LAST WIFE (Cygnet)
THE LAST WIFE GETS IT RIGHT Historical fiction can be a dicey game, let alone a modernization of historical figures. When the results are as captivating as Kate Hennig’s The Last Wife, be prepared for some stimulating theater while brushing up on your history lessons. When speaking of British History, Katherine Parr may not be…
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Concert Review: MEOW MEOW (with Pink Martini’s Thomas M. Lauderdale)
THE DIVINE MISS MM When you hear the words “performance art,” do you envision a motionless Marina Abramovic allowing a 10-foot boa constrictor to wrap itself around her head? And when you hear the term “cabaret,” do you think of tired patter, same-old showtunes, and folks who’re trying to jump-start their career? Well, prepare to…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE HOTHOUSE (Antaeus Theatre in Glendale)
A TRAGI-COMEDY OF VIOLENCE Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse is exactly the kind of play I hope to see at the Antaeus Theatre Company. It is a classic to some but not to others, and there’s a lot of leeway in the text for bold choices, its themes are relevant ’” some might say eerily so…
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Chicago Theater Review: WE THE PEOPLE: THE ANTI-TRUMP MUSICAL (Flying Elephant at Stage 773)
AMERICA’S COARSE ‘CORRECTION’ A huge reason that theater counts is that it can carry a club (or, as the situation warrants, a stiletto). Both an agitprop assault on the 45th President’s betrayal of America’s dreams and a pep rally for the resistance, WE THE PEOPLE: The Anti-Trump Musical is a world premiere from Flying Elephant Productions, a new…
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San Diego Theater Review: THE FULL MONTY (San Diego Musical Theatre)
THE FULL MONTY IS WORTH BARING IN MIND When the main factory in town shuts down and only menial work, far below previous pay grade, can be found, what’s a man supposed to do? For the two central men in The Full Monty, the answer is to create a one-night-only strip show to compete with…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: CANDIDE (LA Opera)
YES, WE CANDIDE There isn’t much I could say about the musical Candide that hasn’t been written about before. What I can say is never miss an opportunity to catch a production, especially when it’s a full-on spectacle like the one opening tonight with LA Opera. Leonard Bernstein created one of our greatest Broadway scores when he…
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CD Review: DARKEST HOUR (Soundtrack by Dario Marianelli)
A DARK HOUR FOR FILM SCORES There are film scores which multiply suspense, doing the job quite well for the film, but not transportive to someone merely listening. In the case of Darkest Hour — Joe Wright’s film about Winston Churchill and the early days of his Prime Ministership, when Hitler was closing in on Britain during…
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: ASTAIRE DANCES (American Contemporary Ballet)
I’LL TAKE ASTAIRE’S WAY TO PARADISE The great ballet choreographer George Balanchine compared Fred Astaire to Bach, and Baryshnikov claimed Astaire gave him an inferiority complex. Katharine Hepburn once said about his partnership with Ginger Rogers: “He gives her class, and she gives him sex.” Astaire himself said, “I don’t make love by kissing, I…
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