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Chicago Dance Review: GLOBAL VISIONARIES (Joffrey Ballet at the Auditorium Theatre)
THINK GLOBALLY, DANCE LOCALLY Leaps of faith meet jumps for joy. Closing its 2016-2017 season with a bold new offering by Alexander Ekman, Global Visionaries is a salute to the future and the world. Billed as an antidote to today’s pervasive uncertainty, Joffrey Ballet delivers three works’”a 20th-century classic, a returning favorite, and an astonishing…
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Film Review: PSYCHOPATHS (written & directed by Mickey Keating / World Premiere, Tribeca Film Festival)
PSYCHOSTYLE Writer/director Mickey Keating’s Psychopaths doesn’t have much of a plot. We don’t sympathize with the characters. There’s little drama, despite the dramatic subject matter’”torture, murder. Nobody changes. We don’t learn anything. There’s no arc. What there is is an abundance of style. Not disposable stylistics so often used by directors to mask a film’s…
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Film Review: AARDVARK (written and directed by Brian Shoaf / World Premiere at Tribeca Film Festival)
AARDVARK IS OK, AND SO IS AARDVARK In Brian Shoaf’s dramedy Aardvark, Josh (Zachary Quinto) engages Emily (Jenny Slate) to be his therapist, pays her in cash, and tells her that he has a brother named Craig who performs on a long-running TV show and is “one of the great talents of his generation.” Later, when…
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Chicago Theater Review: NOT ABOUT NIGHTINGALES (Raven Theatre)
BEFORE ANY GLASS MENAGERIE, A PRISON SWEATBOX It’s not the “odor of mendacity” that wafts through this Tennessee Williams play’”it’s more like the whiff of tear gas. The “kindness of strangers” that seldom surfaces in A Streetcar Named Desire is totally absent in its cruel cage. Not About Nightingales is just what the title implies:…
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Opera Review: THE PERFECT AMERICAN (Chicago Opera Theater at the Harris Theater)
PERFECT IMPERFECTIONS Growing up on a steady diet of animated and live-action Disney films and in the shadow of the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, which I visited every year until I was 16, the magic and imagination of Walt Disney permeated my childhood, as it did so many others. Disney imagined worlds where anything…
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Film Review: NOBODY’S WATCHING (NADIE NOS MIRA) (directed by Julia Solomonoff / World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival)
MANY WILL BE WATCHING In Julia Solomonoff’s latest film Nobody’s Watching (Nadie Nos Mira), Nico (a sympathetic Guillermo Pfening), an Argentine soap star who yearns to do serious work, comes to New York to play in an independent film. But with the production continually getting delayed he’s forced to work odd jobs’”babysitter, waiter, apartment cleaner’”to…
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Chicago Theater Review: 3C (A Red Orchid)
DISCO DESPAIR Now festering at Chicago’s A Red Orchid Theatre, 3C, David Adjmi’s 90-minute one-act, is perversely perky, as zany as a zombie. With rapid-fire non-sequiturs and six crazy/needy characters spouting stream-of-consciousness nonsense, it purports to subvert 70s’ sitcoms and “jiggle television” in general, skewering their excesses and, above all, denials. Perhaps the 70s sucked’”but…
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Los Angeles Concert Feature: IDOLS & ICONS (The 33rd [and final] S.T.A.G.E. at Saban Theatre)
COME SALUTE THE END OF AN ERA It’s a bit surreal, but the the theater community’s longest-running AIDS-related benefit is having its final fundraiser on Saturday May 13, 2017. The Southland Theatre Artists Goodwill Event (best known by its acronym S.T.A.G.E.) will present its 33rd cavalcade of stars at the snazzy Art Deco-styled 1930 Saban Theatre…
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Chicago Theater Review: SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (Chicago Shakespeare)
HAPPY HOAX OR LITERARY LARCENY? Can we really separate a creator from his art? Can our sense of Shakespeare feel more real to us than his characters do? These aren’t rhetorical questions: A 1998 screenplay by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, Shakespeare in Love takes more liberties than the Bill of Rights ever granted, utterly…
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Chicago Theater Review: QUEEN (Victory Gardens)
HIVE AGAINST HIVE Bees, it seems, are humming their last. In the future, honey could well be synthetic. Appropriately debuting on Earth Day weekend, this world premiere from Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater tackles many issues in 90 minutes: the fate of endangered honeybees around the world; the purity of scientific research; the moral dilemma of…
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Film Review: SUPER DARK TIMES (directed by Kevin Phillips / North American Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival)
SUPER DARK TIMES LOSES ITS WAY, BUT STAND BY DIRECTOR KEVIN PHILLIPS It’s the case nearly every time that if at the beginning of a movie a mistake is made, even one that seems trivial and is in and of itself completely forgivable, as the film progresses bigger and bigger flaws will reveal themselves until…
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Los Angeles Dance Preview: MATTHEW BOURNE’S EARLY ADVENTURES (The Wallis in Beverly Hills)
THE EARLY BIRD GETS TICKETS NOW Touring internationally for the first part of the year, Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures’”a program of the newly knighted choreographer’s first works’”will have one U.S. appearance. And it’s right here in Los Angeles for one weekend only, May 17-21, 2017, at the Wallis in Beverly Hills. One of the greatest…
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Theater Review: ALADDIN (North American Tour)
A WHOLE NEW WORLD FROM BROADWAY: A MUSICAL THAT TRULY SOARS “Open sesame” indeed! It’s “Abracadabra” times ten as the arrival of Aladdin in Chi-town feels as triumphant as Prince Ali’s magnificent entrance into Agrabah at the top of the second act. A theme park of a musical, Disney Theatrical Productions’ eye-popping transformation of the…
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Chicago Theater Review: MARRY ME A LITTLE (Porchlight Music Theatre at Stage 773)
SONDHEIM’S CARE PACKAGE FOR LOST LOVERS In a melodically and lyrically mediocre time like, for instance, 2017, even lesser songs by Stephen Sondheim beat half the musicals at large. In 1981 Craig Lucas and Norman Rene created a songbook musical Marry Me a Little that took its conditional title from a haunting ballad in Company….
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Los Angeles Cabaret Preview: DAVID BURNHAM (Carpenter Center)
BURNHAM, BABY, BURNHAM When you first espy David Burnham on stage, his dazzling smile and chiseled looks belie the fact that he has a golden voice and boffo acting chops, both dramatic and comedic. When I first saw him in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the long-haired golden-throated tenor with teeny-bopper idol charisma stole…
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DVD Review: SECRETS OF THE SIX WIVES (Wall to Wall Media/BBC on PBS Distribution)
TOO MUCH CHOPPED OFF One of the most famous kings of England and his scandalous six marriages have been hotly portrayed, over and over, over the years in film and on television. Now, PBS and Wall to Wall Media/BBC have made a documentary about the six women coupled to Tudor Court’s Henry VIII: Catherine of Aragon…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: FAILURE: A LOVE STORY (Coeurage Theatre Company at the Kirk Douglas Theatre)
THE LOVE CONTINUES [Editor’s Note: To celebrate the work being done on intimate stages in Los Angeles, the Center Theatre Group (CTG) is producing Block Party at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. CTG received 76 submissions from intimate theatre companies throughout the L.A. area. Each company was able to submit one production that opened between January…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE ORIGINALIST (Pasadena Playhouse)
AN ORIGINAL IDEA The late Antonin Scalia (1936-2016) was an important conservative voice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1986 until his death. He was a loud-voiced proponent of the intellectual ideal of “originalism,” meaning that interpreting the U.S. Constitution (b. 1789) lies directly with what the framers meant at that time and that no “newfangled”…
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Theater Feature: BRIDGE TO AFRICA! (B.R.I.D.G.E. Theatre Project in Kigali, Rwanda)
BRIDGE TO SOMEWHERE I once picked up a hitchhiker a half-mile from a state prison. It was dusk. He wore prison blues and carried a child’s backpack full of knives, cigarette lighters and Applebee’s gift cards. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t know what an Applebee’s was and could not pronounce the word. I failed to…
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DVD Review: MERCY STREET, Season 2 (PBS)
MERCY ON US ALL The second season of PBS’ Mercy Street is very much a continuation of the first season in that it explores the Civil War in regards to the hospital staff, both male doctors and female nurses, both pro-Union and pro-Confederate. The producers have successfully brought this part of the War alive, giving it meaning and…
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