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Chicago Theater Review: HIR (Steppenwolf Theatre)
DOMESTIC DISRUPTION From the start, a classic curtained proscenium conceals the utter disorder that detonates on Steppenwolf Theatre’s sprawling mainstage. Hir, now in a Chicago premiere, is both the title and a gender-neutral pronoun combining “his” and “her” (and pronounced “heer”). Its relentlessly radicalized world is the creation of singer-songwriter/performance artist/playwright Taylor Mac (who prefers to…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: MARY POPPINS (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
MARY’S POPPIN’ OUT ALL OVER Not just the quintessentially “practically perfect” nanny, Mary Poppins is a kind of cosmic cure. Given the state of our disunion, we probably need to swallow helping and heaping spoonfuls of sugar. Courtesy of Musical Theatre West, Disney’s aggressively buoyant movie musicalization cavorts across the Carpenter Center stage, enchanted by director…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE ANDREWS BROTHERS (Glendale Centre Theatre)
BOOGIE WOOGIE BUGLE GIRLS OF THE U.S.O. Deanna Durbin is all but forgotten now, but there was a time when her movie musicals were so popular, they were said to have literally saved Universal from bankruptcy. In 1936, before Durbin became famous, MGM was choosing between two young singers under contract, and decided to drop…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE NANCE (Pride Films and Plays at the Pride Arts Center)
BIGOTRY AT THE BURLESQUE Some swan songs will never sound sweet. Take the fade-out of female impersonators in Elizabethan drama. Or the final white thespian to wear blackface. Or’”well, witness the demise of the “nance,” an effeminately nelly, stereotypically gay travesty (often a self-mocker like the African-American entertainers who “corked up” in minstrel shows). Every…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE CAKE (The Echo Theater Company in Atwater Village)
TRIPLE-LAYERED CAKE Thirty-something Jen (Shannon Lucio) is torn. She wants her deceased mother’s best friend, Della (Debra Jo Rupp), a talented but struggling baker, to create her wedding cake. So with her betrothed she returns from New York to her hometown in conservative North Carolina, and finds that Della is tickled pink to honor her wish’”until…
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Los Angeles Concert Review: PENTATONIX FOURTH OF JULY WITH FIREWORKS (The Hollywood Bowl)
A TONIX FOR WHAT AILS YOU The fireworks went off both on and above the Hollywood Bowl stage last weekend. After five short selections by American composers performed by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and the U.S. Air Force Band of the Golden West, the entrancing and loquacious conductor Thomas Wilkins took a back seat after…
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L.A. Concert Review: THE CLIFTON’S CANTEEN (Clifton’s)
A BOOGIE-WOOGIE BLAST A one-time good-time event that will surely return next year, this sense-surrounding salute to USO shows of the WWII era was a perfect way to spend a Fourth of July holiday. Taking place on all four floors of the newly refurbished Clifton’s Republic in downtown, Clifton’s Canteen contained contagious crooning, dynamic dancing,…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS (Odyssey)
JACQUES IN THE BOX I think if I had been alive and living in New York in 1968, I would have been beguiled by Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Eric Blau and Mort Shuman translated some 25 of the Belgian singer/songwriter’s lyric-driven French songs and created a four-person revue. Its…
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DVD Review: A FRENCH VILLAGE/UN VILLAGE FRANÇAIS (French Television Series on MHz Releasing)
HOPE FOR A FRENCH VILLAGE In season five of this extraordinary historical series, it’s 1944 and the Germans are losing the war and are beginning to leave occupied France. The collaborative Vichy Government, which semi-ruled the southern part of France (the zone libre) as well as the French colonies in North Africa, was’”until this season’”headquartered in the…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: LETTERS FROM A NUT BY TED. L NANCY (Geffen Playhouse in Westwood)
LETTER FROM A NUTTY CRITIC Dear Mr. Ted L. Nancy: You are a funny letter writer. In fact, you are the best letter writer who reads his own letters in a show with an actress reading replies to his letters and a mute clown waving a flag to national anthems that I have ever seen….
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Los Angeles Cabaret Review: HELLO AGAIN! THE SONGS OF ALLAN SHERMAN (Linden Waddell at the Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre)
MY DAUGHTER, THE CABARET SINGER This year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival has given me new hope for the art of cabaret: Black and White in Paris offered standards dripping in style; Psychosical deliciously revived oft-heard songs by casting singers as denizens of a loony bin; and now comes Hello Again!, Linden Waddell’s spot-on salute to arguably America’s greatest song…
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San Diego Theater Review: AIDA (Moonlight Stage Productions in Vista)
AIDA GETS THE AID IT NEEDS There are two beautiful reincarnations with Moonlight’s production of Aida, a 2000 Disney outing that never would have seen the light of day were it not for the celebrity and history of both composer Elton John and lyricist Tim Rice. The first is part of the musical’s plot: The…
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Los Angeles Event Review: SING-A-LONG SOUND OF MUSIC (Hollywood Bowl)
THE HOLLYWOOD HILLS ARE ALIVE What do you get when you cross one of the most popular movies of all time with 17,000 Angelenos dressed up as nuns, telegram delivery boys, cuckoo clocks, and brown paper packages tied up with string–all of whom set off party poppers, wave fake edelweiss, and sing along with a…
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Chicago Theater Review: AH, WILDERNESS! (Goodman)
HAPPY DAY’S JOURNEY INTO LOVE It’s a dramatic “one-off”: The same Connecticut domicile supplies the site of two enormously different plays by the same author. If Eugene O’Neill imagined a darker youth than his actual childhood in Long Day’s Journey into Night (a tragicomedy the playwright never meant to be seen), he doles out nostalgia for a…
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Broadway Theater Preview: FALSETTOS (Screening in movie theaters nationwide beginning July 12, 2017)
FALSETTOS ON THE BIG SCREEN FROM BROADWAY: EVEN UP CLOSE, THERE’S NOT A FALSE NOTE The musical masterpiece Falsettos follows Marvin, who struggles to create a tightknit family out of his eclectic array of core relationships (including his ex-wife, his new boyfriend, his adolescent son, his psychiatrist, and his neighbors (“who are lesbians from next door”)….
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Chicago Theater Review: JOHNNY JOHNSON (Chicago Folks Operetta)
A KURT WEILL COMEBACK Here’s another triumph worth the wait. Recently revived, City Lit’s London Assurance took 120 years to return’”hilariously’”to a Chicago stage. Even more inexplicably absent and a much more recent treasure, Kurt Weill’s 1936 anti-war musical Johnny Johnson has never played the town till now. With libretto and lyrics by Paul Green,…
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Dance Review: TCHAIKOVSKY (Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg at the Music Center)
UNDERSTANDING TCHAIKOVSKY Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg’s production of Tchaikovsky. PRO et CONTRA explores duality, loneliness and the price of fame in an emotional and technically brilliant production that takes storytelling to new heights. Artistic director Boris Eifman’s portrayal of the composer’s life through first person perspective and a doppelganger that is at his side at…
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Chicago Theater Review: LONDON ASSURANCE (City Lit at Edgewater Presbyterian Church)
REST ASSURED: THE LIES LOVE LIVES ON You can’t keep a good comedy down. Wildly popular in its time, Dion Boucicault’s 1841 London Assurance is a mating romp that, inexplicably, has not been performed in Chicago for 120 years. Thanks to City Lit, the city’s amazing patience since 1897 is now richly rewarded. An Irish…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: DOG SEES GOD: CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE BLOCKHEAD (Worst First Kiss Productions at the McCadden Place Theatre)
A VERY GOOD GRIEF This funny but disturbing update of Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip first arrived at the Blank Theatre, after which Worst First Kiss Productions wisely utilized the Hollywood Fringe Festival to create a six-performance extension. I certainly hope there are more performances to come, for Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead contained…
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Chicago Theater Review: LATE COMPANY (Cor Theater)
IT GETS WORSE TOO Teenage suicide due to cyberbullying deserves its storytelling: In just 70 minutes, Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill’s Late Company seems to cover the bases in a gamut of reactions. Like the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, it probes self-murder from all sides, inevitably making for a very painful play. Rich or rancid with survivor…
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