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CD Review: IRVING BERLIN’S HOLIDAY INN (Original Broadway Cast on Ghostlight Records)
REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE OK, let’s get the confusion out of the way. If you’re not at all familiar with the Paramount films Holiday Inn and White Christmas, listening to the just-released Original Broadway Cast album Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn (which had a short stint on Broadway in 2016) could be a pleasant enough experience first time…
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DVD Review: AGENT HAMILTON (MHz Releasing)
MOVE OVER BOND AND BOURNE; HAMILTON’S IN TOWN These two hard-hitting spy thrillers, filmed in 2012, are based on well-known novels by the French-Swedish journalist, Jan Guillou (b. 1944), who wrote ten novels in all. There are other adaptations since 1989, starring among others, Stellan Skarsgí¥rd and Stefan Sauk, but these are the only two…
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Theater Review: THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME (North American Tour)
DETECTING LOVE A 15-year-old math whiz, Christopher is an only child with Asperger’s Syndrome. The anomaly is enough to push adolescence way beyond awkward. His autism manifests in manic multi-tasking, an inability to focus (or to lie), attention deficits, a maddening literal-mindedness, and a disarming directness that both shames and irritates adults with secrets. Afraid…
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Chicago Theater Review: HAIR: THE AMERICAN TRIBAL LOVE-ROCK MUSICAL (Mercury Theater)
WHEN LOVE SEEMED ALL A half century can wreak a ton of change, especially when it takes us from 1967’s Summer of Love to 2017’s Winter of Trump. It’s impossible to imagine two more different destinies for the same nation’”antiwar protests mellowed by free love and diverse drugs versus hardline xenophobia, race hate and jingoism…
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San Diego Theater Preview: KEN LUDWIG’S ROBIN HOOD! (The Old Globe)
THE GLOBE GOES BACK INTO THE WOODS Ken Ludwig is arguably the leading comic dramatist in the American theater, and with Robin Hood! he has fashioned an extraordinary new take on the legend, commissioned by The Old Globe in San Diesgo. The story remains popular because at its core its a moving tale of a young man’s…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: AS YOU LIKE IT (Antaeus Theatre Company in Glendale)
AS YOU MAY OR MAY NOT LIKE IT At its new home in Glendale, Antaeus Theatre’s second play, As You Like It, is an odd duck of a production. As is its norm, Antaeus “partner-casts” each production, so patrons may go twice to see a completely different cast, both of which rehearsed at the same…
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Chicago Theater Review: LAST DANCER STANDING (MORE THAN HIP-HOP) (Black Ensemble Theater)
DRIVEN DANCES FOR JOY AND JUSTICE Their “dance card” is filled to bursting. Departing from Black Ensemble Theater’s usual blast-from-the-past musical reclamations (Nicholas Brothers, Josephine Baker, Ella Fitzgerald), Last Dancer Standing (More than Hip Hop) is a character-driven jubilee that makes all the right moves. It faithfully mimics an imaginary “reality-TV” dance competition. With a prize of…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: SHOUT SISTER SHOUT! (Pasadena Playhouse)
THE ORIGINAL SISTER ACT This new bio-musical of the legendary gospel/rock crossover star Sister Rosetta Tharpe is at its best when focusing on its three powerhouse female stars. Tracy Nicole Chapman as Tharpe, and Yvette Cason and Angela Teek Hitchman, both in multiple roles, are veteran performers with awe-inspiring voices that take a song and…
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DVD Review: DETECTIVE MONTALBANO (IL COMMISSARIO MONTALBANO), Episodes 29 & 30 (MHz Releasing)
A SERIES YOU CAN’T REFUSE The Italian TV series Detective Montalbano  (Il commissario Montalbano) has lasted eighteen blessed years. Since 1999, Detective/Commissario Salvo Montalbano (Luca Zingaretti)’â€56, stocky, well-built, and handsome’â€has loved, of all things, solving local crimes, mostly murder, and not all committed by the Mafia. Beautifully shot, the show glamorizes Sicily, not generally a showcase…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: MAMMA MIA! (Hollywood Bowl)
SUPER TROUPERS BURN BRIGHTLY UNDER THE STARS I’ve always thought Benny Andersson and Björn Kristian Ulvaeus of ABBA, along with Mamma Mia! book writer Catherine Johnson, were incredibly smart to fashion a narrative around characters the same age as the people who likely most fondly remember ABBA: Baby Boomers and Older Gen-Xers. The young woman…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: BALLETNOW (The Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
BALLETNOW AND FOREVER New York City Ballet (NYCB) principal dancer Tiler Peck’s curation of BalletNOW was an elegant and enticing mash-up of well-known excerpts that would satisfy both first-timers and connoisseurs expecting excellence from ballet’s best performers. Three days of shows at L.A.’s Music Center featured a varied repertoire of fast- and slow–paced dances with…
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San Diego Theater Preview: PIPPIN (San Diego Junior Theatre at the Casa del Prado Theatre)
DON’T BE SKIPPIN’ PIPPIN Here’s a can’t-miss opportunity: San Diego Junior Theatre is presenting the perky but dark 1972 musical, Pippin. Don’t be fooled by the moniker “Junior Theatre,” for these shows are just as slick as one with adult performers. For a small ticket price, head over to the beautiful Casa del Prado Theatre…
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Theater Review: AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (National Tour reviewed in Chicago)
PARIS AS A PAS DE DEUX The opening image’”a baby grand piano under the Arc de Triomphe’”suggests the rest. The hopeful harbinger of a new normality, the beloved 1951 film An American in Paris employed George and Ira Gershwin’s gorgeous songs and supple lyrics to celebrate a postwar romance that healed, well, whatever wounds musicals can fix….
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Theater Review: PARADE (Chance Theater)
SEE IT BEFORE THIS PARADE PASSES YOU BY The emotionally pile-driving Parade by bookwriter Alfred Uhry and composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown reprises an ugly and evergreen tragedy. Their driven musical chronicles the reflexive racism that, a century ago, doomed a suspect stranger, Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born Jew in 1914 Atlanta. Here the bigotry is anti-Semitism, a xenophobia…
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Los Angeles Theater/Music Review: SONDHEIM ON SONDHEIM (Hollywood Bowl)
A GOOD THING GOING; GOING, GOING… Sondheim on Sondheim, which had a short run on Broadway in 2010, offers both songs and personal musings from one of Broadway’s greatest composer/lyricists. Roundabout Theater Company’s inside look is rich with the stories behind the songs, new arrangements for old favorites, a few medleys, and some obscure tunes….
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DVD Review: PRIME SUSPECT: TENNISON (MASTERPIECE on PBS Distribution)
NOT SO PRIME For the few who don’t know, Prime Suspect is the well-loved cop-show game-changer from MASTERPIECE on PBS. The series, which ran from 1991-2006 starring a glorious Helen Mirren, now has a prequel. Series creator Lynda La Plante’s 2015 novel Tennison is the basis for this newest six-part television mini-series, but she abandoned the adaptation, which…
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San Diego Theater Review: AVENUE Q (OB Playhouse)
IT MAY SUCK TO LIVE ON AVENUE Q, BUT NOT TO SEE IT In the right setting, irreverence is so jovial. Our era of thought-police and political correctness has made it delicious to pervert that which seems simple and pure solely for the sake of entertainment (The Producers and The Book of Mormon are still…
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DVD Review: MASTERPIECE: KING CHARLES III (PBS)
A ROYAL PERFORMANCE When British actor Tim Pigott-Smith died this past spring a month shy of his 71st birthday, the Community of Actors lost a legend. He came to fame three decades ago in The Jewel in the Crown, the dazzling series about the end of British rule in India. A consistently working actor, his last role…
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CD Review: WAR PAINT (Original Broadway Cast on Ghostlight Records)
STAR POWER MEETS GIRL POWER The new Broadway musical War Paint centers on historical personages and rags-to-riches rivals Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, cosmetic moguls who are not incidentally female and, even less accidentally, played by Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole. Their half-century squabble, fueled by polar temperaments, marketing competition, even the men they stole from each other,…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: THE BRIAN SETZER ORCHESTRA – 25th ANNIVERSARY SHOW! (Hollywood Bowl)
SWINGIN’ AND ROCKIN’ THE BLUES AWAY AT THE BOWL Wait a minute. Hold on. If the Brian Setzer Orchestra’”which pumps joy into the blood of both rabid fans and newcomers thirsty for a good time’”is celebrating its 25th anniversary at the Hollywood Bowl next week (August 2, 2017 at 8), then that means Setzer has…
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