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Chicago Theatre Review: LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (Chicago Theatre Workshop)
NO TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL A broken, cash-challenged clan go on a road trip to California that somehow heals their hurt. It’s not the Joads, colorful Okies in a Ford pick-up, fleeing the dust storms in Depression-era 1939. No, here the vehicle of escape is a Volkswagen bus and the (temporary) migrants are the Albuquerque clan…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: INGING (Jeanine Durning at Automata in Chinatown)
GERUNDING Multiple monitors flash images of choreographer and performer Jeanine Durning’s face as she filters through emotions of delight, amusement and pensiveness in the small, private Automata Theater in L.A.’s Chinatown. After pacing endlessly around the studio, Durning’”maneuvering through narrow gaps between the audience’s scattered folding chairs’”starts talking about the building’s exit and entrance. After this…
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TV/DVD Feature and Interview: MHZ NETWORKS
A BOON TO AMERICAN AUDIENCES “To learn another language is to learn another culture; And to learn another’s culture is to be a world-citizen.” Anonymous For those who have been clamoring for foreign-language television shows without paying a small fortune on specialized cable, MHz Networks has been a major godsend (MHz does indeed stand for…
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Chicago Theater Review: BLACK PEARL: A TRIBUTE TO JOSEPHINE BAKER (Black Ensemble Theater)
C’EST SI BON! She was infamous for her 1927 “costume” in Un Vent de Folie’”a girdle of bananas. In 1934 she became the first African American woman to have a major role in a film. Acquiring four husbands and lovers from both sexes, she became the toast of Paris’”rather than remain in America, a second-class…
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Chicago Theater Review: TIME STANDS STILL (AstonRep Theatre Company)
FALLING WHILE RUNNING RISKS Domesticity and danger, it seems, don’t mix. The private and the public, small-scale versus big-issue matters, mingle uneasily in Time Stands Still, now in a persuasive Aston Rep revival staged by Georgette Verdin at Raven Theatre. (The play was first performed in Chicago in 2012 at Steppenwolf Theatre’s upstairs stage in a…
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CD Review: A BRONX TALE (Original Broadway Cast on Ghostlight Records)
CD GETS NEITHER BRONX CHEER NOR FUGGEDABOUDIT It began as a 1989 solo play written by and starring Chazz Palminteri. Robert DeNiro saw this coming-of-age saga and became the powerhouse behind the well-received 1993 film which he starred in and directed. The story concerns Calogero (or “C”), an Italian lad who had a brief flirt with organized crime…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: STATE FAIR (Musical Theatre Guild at the Alex Theatre in Glendale)
A GREAT STATE FAIR Corny? Completely! Simple and sentimental? Sure! Did I love it? You betcha! Rarely performed since its Broadway outing in 1996, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s frolicking farmyard musical will have you believing that happiness is just a thing called prize pig and perfect pickle (“She knows her way around a cucumber” is now…
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Chicago Dance Review: DANC(E)VOLVE (Hubbard Street Dance Chicago at MCA)
LOOKING BEFORE THEY LEAP It’s a night of dance discoveries. Four Chicago-based choreographers create a splendid showcase in danc(e)volve, two world premieres and two nearly new offerings at the appropriate Museum of Contemporary Art. Celebrating Hubbard Street’s 39th season, a quartet of well-motivated movements puts the young troupe through perilous paces. These works are often…
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San Diego Theater Preview: THE OLD MAN AND THE OLD MOON (The Old Globe)
OLD MAN, OLD MOON, OLD GLOBE Having seen PigPen Theatre Co.’s The Old Man and the Old Moon in Chicago, I can guarantee that gem of a theater experience will gently pluck at your heartstrings – just as it did with a successful run Off-Broadway’s Gym at Judson. Opening May 13 and running through June 18, 2017…
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Chicago Theater Review: OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR (Goodman Theatre)
CHOOSING BETWEEN FAMILY AND FUTURE In xenophobic times wracked by exclusionary panics, any immigrant’s odyssey speaks for millions of refugees, within as much as outside the U.S.. Truth-based and potent with ethical dilemmas, Objects in the Mirror (its title alluding to the fears that follow fugitives) is a Goodman Theatre world premiere that puts a…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: PURE CONFIDENCE (Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble at Sacred Fools)
PURE CONFIDENCE BY A NOSE Featuring a bright, pretty Tom Buderwitz set, Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble’s Pure Confidence is a chance to see something increasingly rare under Equity rules: a stageful of hot actors really close up, working hard and nailing it. From the front row (there are only three), William Salyers’ frightened eyes, Tamara…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: PERICLES (The Porters of Hellsgate in North Hollywood)
PRINCE ON FIRE Chronicling the lurid and lamentable swashbuckles of a permanent ingenue, Pericles is a Book of Job for the Age of Reason. If the play were self-aware enough to be cynical, with its outrageous slings and arrows it could be a grandfather to Voltaire’s Candide. But Pericles doesn’t enjoy the season-anchoring repute of…
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Chicago Theater Review: PARADISE BLUE (TimeLine)
BLOOD ON THE NOTES Jazz doesn’t just soothe’”it can bleed. Both acts happen throughout these 150 minutes, never more so than at the end. Paradise Blue brings the lyricism of Tennessee Williams, the glorious gab of August Wilson, and a hard-boiled, “film noir” tough love to an unrelenting tale of music, change, love, and death….
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Chicago Theater Review: DYLAN BRODY’S DRIVING HOLLYWOOD (Apollo Theater)
LACERATING LA-LA LAND It’s a crash course in one man’s life-long damage control: Up close, personal, and, therapeutically playful, Dylan Brody’s Driving Hollywood is a liberal-minded California humorist’s cri de coeur. Forthrightly and plaintively, Dylan Brody contemplates “a history of disappointment in self-expression.” Now playing Chicago’s Apollo Theater studio, his free-form, 80-minute confessional is rich…
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Chicago Theater Review: SHE LOVES ME (Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire)
LITTLE SHOP OF HAPPINESS Who can’t love She Loves Me? This utterly unpretentious, easily adored chamber musical delivers the first word in entertainment and the last word in love. Completely captivating, Marriott Theatre’s welcome revival of Harnick and Bock’s 1963 masterpiece’”arguably Broadway’s most intelligent and warm-hearted musical’”gets it right, over and over. Perfectly propelled by…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: THE NAKED SOULS OF KINGS AND QUEENS (American Contemporary Ballet)
ACB’S BEGUILING ABC’S OF BALLET On the 32nd floor of The BLOC building in downtown LA, a small gathering looks out at a twinkling cityscape through large windows, admiring the scene until a wavering note from a lute draws us back into the room. Three musicians tune Renaissance instruments’”lute, long tabor, and double-reeded curtal (or dulcian)’”as audience members…
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Theater Review: THE BODYGUARD (U.S. Tour at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre)
REQUIEM FOR WHITNEY Even if you’ve never seen the 1992 film that gave birth to the musical in 2012 in London’s West End, the story is familiar: A pop superstar falls in love with her bodyguard. He takes a bullet for her. Though they can never be together, their love lingers on in her music….
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Chicago Theater Review: MY FAIR LADY (Lyric Opera)
STILL THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL This reviewer has a confession to make: I don’t particularly like musicals. I’ll happily laugh at the jokes and delight in the dancing, but the style of music isn’t my favorite. That’s why I prefer opera. But something about My Fair Lady grabbed me from the get-go: its language. The musical is chock-full of…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE LIAR (Promethean Theatre Ensemble at Athenaeum Theatre)
PUNCTURING PREVARICATIONS We’ve seen a lot of lying lately’”enough to make Pierre Corneille’s 1644 comedy The Liar cruelly contemporary. An uncharacteristic farce from a famously tragic dramatist, it’s even more zany in David Ives’ “translaptation,” now on exhibit by the Promethean Theatre Ensemble at Chicago’s Athenaeum Theatre. Ives, who has similarly updated (for better or…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: WEST SIDE STORY (La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts)
A SUBURBAN WEST SIDE STORY Sadly, hate conquers all in West Side Story, but the love we see and feel can hold its own. Though over a half-century old, the Bernstein/Laurents/Sondheim/Robbins tour-de-force is, like its Shakespearean source, young as first love. You don’t revive it, you detonate it, as happens repeatedly in La Mirada’s mixed…
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