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Los Angeles Theater Review: MR. BURNS, A POST-ELECTRIC PLAY (Sacred Fools Theatre Company)
LET THERE BE DARK A group of campers sits around the warm glow of campfire embers and tries to retell a favorite episode of The Simpsons. One man excitedly recalls and performs “Cape Feare” with entertaining accuracy. Others chime in with a few lines and impersonations, goading on his storytelling when he falters. No doubt some…
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Chicago Theater Review: SIGNIFICANT OTHER (About Face Theatre and Theater Wit)
PASSIONS OF A PITY PARTY We’re born alone. We die alone. But in between we need people’”for love or money. That’s searingly so for Jordan Berman. The gay anti-hero of Significant Other is a slightly overweight (and morbidly aware of it) advertising copywriter approaching 30. This New York survivor longs for a “significant other.” Love, not sex,…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: LOVE’S PASSIONS AND POTIONS (The Verdi Chorus in Santa Monica)
THE VERDI CHORUS IS A BEST BET The Verdi Chorus will present its Fall 2017 concert Love’s Passions and Potions for two performances only at the First United Methodist Church in Santa Monica on November 18 and 19, led by Founding Artistic Director Anne Marie Ketchum. As the only choral group in Southern California that…
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CD Review: UNDER THE STREETLIGHT (Boyz II Men on Sony Masterworks)
DOO-WOP NOT REINVENTED In the mid-80s, Boyz II Men original members Nathan Morris, Wanya Morris, Shawn Stockman, and Michael McCary began like the classic doo-wop singers of the 1950s: practicing on street corners and areas with great acoustics (McCary left the popular R&B quartet in 2003). So it’s fitting that the trio’s latest CD is a…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: L.A. DANCE PROJECT FALL PROGRAM (in residence at The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
IS THAT ALL THERE IS? For his intriguing but overlong new work Second Quartet, which received its U.S. premiere at The Wallis last weekend, young French choreographer Noé Soulier writes in the program about his 28-minute piece: “Without the spectator having to recognize the motivations behind these complete movements, they are intended to stimulate his…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: YOHEN (East West Players and Robey Theatre Company)
DAMAGED GOODS Playwright Phillip Kan Gotanda’s elegiac drama is a powerful piece that encompasses many themes in a surprisingly tight and concise package; it’s about aging, it’s about the complexity of marriage, and, above all, it’s about a divide between cultures that may or may not be reconciled through love. It’s a drama about the…
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: WOOLF PAPERS (NW Dance Project at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach)
WHO’S EXCITED ABOUT VIRGINIA WOOLF? Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, NW Dance Project’s Artistic Director Sarah Slipper’s Woolf Papers—a reinvention of the classic novel—is an outstanding model of contemporary dance, provocative, theatrical, and deeply moving. Now, this exciting new piece is coming to the Carpenter Center in Long Beach for one night only on…
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Chicago Music Review: REGRESAR/REVISIT: A DíA DE LOS MUERTOS CELEBRATION (Chicago Sinfonietta)
DEATH DANCES TO LIFE’S BEATS It took us from Mozart to Mexico. Now, alas, it’s over for another year—Chicago Sinfonietta’s much anticipated, annual A Día de los Muertos Celebration. Concluding at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall in Symphony Center, Regresar/Revisit was an unwasted opportunity to perpetuate the “Happy Halloween” of the Day of the Dead, which is celebrated on…
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Music Preview: BRUCKNER’S EIGHTH WITH CARL ST. CLAIR (Pacific Symphony at Segerstrom Concert Hall)
AN EXPERIENCE NOT TO BE MISSED On a website which attempts to list every Anton Bruckner orchestral recording offered to the public (abruckner.com), the discography collector and annotator John F. Berky states that the Austrian composer “expanded the concept of the symphonic form in ways that have never been witnessed before or since. When listening to a…
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Chicago Theater Review: J.B. (City Lit at Edgewater Presbyterian Church)
THE ULTIMATE ‘PROOF OF PAIN’ “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” He certainly doth in the Book of Job. In this brief but telling chronicle, a catalogue of catastrophes is visited on the title character. The faith of Job, a stalwart soul from the “land of Uz,” is tested and triumphs’”for better or…
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DVD Review: THE VIETNAM WAR: A FILM BY KEN BURNS AND LYNN NOVICK (PBS Distribution)
I’VE LOOKED AT WAR FROM BOTH SIDES NOW As a producer/director, Ken Burns is an artist of such high value on so many levels that he cannot be over-praised. For the past thirty-six years he has produced extraordinary documentaries which have educated, enlightened and entertained. Beginning with Brooklyn Bridge (1981) Burns’s amazing array of films includes The…
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Los Angeles Theater and Music Review: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (Mendelssohn music and Shakespeare scenes with the LA Phil)
COME FOR MENDELSSOHN, STAY FOR Mí„LKKI There are three things to consider regarding LA Phil’s huge production of Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has music interlaced with scenes from one of Shakespeare’s most produced plays: the orchestra; the production; and the venue. Since this is, after all, the LA Phil, I’m happy to report…
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Theater Review: SCHOOL OF ROCK THE MUSICAL (National Tour at the Cadillac Palace Theatre in Chicago)
WEBBER RETURNS TO HIS ROCKIN’ ROOTS “Out of the guitars of babes”: The 2003 film was a four-star charmer: Jack Black, a screen actor with the chops to be richly ordinary, depicted a slob who saves himself by freeing others. He was, indelibly, Dewey: This substitute teacher rose, unexpectedly and magnificently, to an unearned occasion, liberating privileged…
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Chicago Theater Review: NEWSIES (Marriott Theatre)
START THE PRESSES! Imagine the Hardy Boys times ten or Nancy Drew’s crew times five and you’re still not close to Newsies, perpetual motion in a blast from the past. Never before witnessed “in the round,” the Tony-winning screen-to-stage sensation is currently rampaging through 2017 at Lincolnshire’s Marriott Theatre. Its unstoppable energy is both barely and…
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CD Review: NEW WORLDS (Bill Murray, Jan Vogler and Friends on Decca Gold)
WORLDS APART This is easily one of the most jaw-dropping CDs to come my way in a while. Not just in some of its amazing selections, but in the disparity between tracks: most cuts are revelational (Bill Murray’s interpretation of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest readings I have ever…
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Chicago Theater Review: YASMINA’S NECKLACE (Goodman Theatre)
HOME HEALING FOR BROKEN DREAMERS How much “home” can first-generation Americans abandon in order to make a new one? Acculturation, assimilation, adjustment’”they’re not necessary evils but they carry a cost. Over two centuries American plays have served as imaginative experiments to calibrate the challenges and sacrifices that Irish, Italian, African-American, Hispanic, LBGT and poverty-stricken families…
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San Diego Theater Review: HAND TO GOD (San Diego Repertory Theatre at the Lyceum Stage)
EVIL RIGHT AT HAND What could go wrong when a newly widowed mom leads three teens in a wholesome, Lutheran, extra-curricular church class tasked with creating a Christian puppet show? Thankfully for us, plenty, in this gripping, darkly-comic drama by Robert Askins which premiered off-Broadway in 2011. Trying to fill her empty life with something…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE RIDICULOUS DARKNESS (Son of Semele Ensemble)
THE RIDICULOUSNESS OF IT ALL I had a college film-course assignment: Read Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella The Heart of Darkness and then watch Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film adaptation, Apocalypse Now. In the novella, a British ivory transporter named Marlow develops a concentrated curiosity about an ivory-procurement agent named Kurtz while journeying up the Congo…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES (Antaeus Theatre in Glendale)
THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF SAVAGES Who would have imagined that a 30-year-old stage adaptation (by Christopher Hampton) of a 1782 novel (by Choderlos de Laclos) would be so devastatingly of the moment. In a time when sexual harassment, abuse, and assault are at the center of a national conversation many hope will bring about overdue…
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Chicago Theater Review: DREAM FREAKS FALL FROM SPACE (The Second City’s 106th Revue)
FREAK OUT Comedy writers have complained about the challenge of writing jokes during the Trump administration. There’s too much material. And the breakneck pace of news, scandals and crises coming out of Washington make a joke written in the morning likely to be no longer timely by the evening. The Second City refreshes its scripts…
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