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Chicago Opera Review: LES TROYENS [THE TROJANS] (Lyric Opera of Chicago)
WHEN BIGGER ACTUALLY IS BETTER Everything about Les Troyens is big. Hector Berlioz’s massive opera boasts 5 acts, lasts nearly 5 hours even with numerous small cuts (and two 30-minute intermissions), has 22 named roles, and requires a vastly expanded chorus (about 100 singers) and 2 orchestras (the main one in the pit and another offstage) as well as…
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Film Commentary: BILLY WILDER’S OEUVRE TOTAL, PART VII
MEET “MEET CUTE” * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * [Editor’s Note: Oeuvre Total is a film-discussion series between producer Michael Holland and critic Jason Rohrer, begun at Bitter Lemons and continuing here at Stage and Cinema. The first ten-part Oeuvre Total exchange…
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Film Review: RULES DON’T APPLY (written and directed by Warren Beatty)
YOU BET I THINK THIS SONG IS ABOUT YOU Against other self-made Boomers like Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford, I’ll take Warren Beatty in a walk. Productions in which Beatty was the 800-lb gorilla are virtually all he has made for 50 years, and he has stayed political but mostly avoided being didactic (Reds notwithstanding)….
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Chicago Theater Review: I AM MY OWN WIFE (About Face Theatre at Theater Wit)
CLOCKS ARE COLD COMFORT Call it the ultimate disruption of sexual security/certainty, a double life lived, as La Cage put it, “at an angle.” As the title suggests, I Am My Own Wife is a subversive true-life tale of a human born Lothar Berfelde and dying as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who redefined more than himself….
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Theater Review: ANNIE (National Tour)
SO’”JUST EXACTLY WHEN WILL THE SUN COME UP? (HINT: 2020) The first Christmas special came early this year: another national tour of the industrial-strength 1977 heart-warmer, Annie. Resistance is futile to this cunning confection. Again we warm to the tale of the plucky, Depression-era orphan redhead with an equally scrappy dog who never finds her parents…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE (Musical Theatre West in Long Beach)
BOYS WILL BE BOYS Musical Theatre West’s (MTW) Reiner Reading Series begins its 2016-17 season with a musical from the beginning of the second decade of the Broadway Musical’s Golden Age. Some say this era began with Oklahoma! in 1943, but it’s also safe to say it began in 1927, the year that Showboat was born. The fully…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: DVOŘíK & SIBELIUS / ROUVALI & MOSER (Los Angeles Philharmonic)
DVOŘíK & SIBELIUS AT DISNEY HALL An LA Phil favorite, prizewinning German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser (pictured left) makes his return under the baton of exciting young Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali (pictured below) for a performance of Dvořák’s monumental and much-loved cello concerto. Also this Friday through Sunday (Nov. 11-13, 2016), Rouvali leads the acclaimed L.A. orchestra in…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: URINETOWN: THE MUSICAL (Coeurage Theatre in North Hollywood)
AGITPOOP When Urinetown opened up Off-Broadway in 2001, then splashed all over Broadway just after 9/11, the show was hailed as a Brechtian revamp of musical theater. About an overpopulated, under-hydrated world in which private toilets are outlawed, Urinetown is a simultaneous assault on fascist economics and on mindless revolution. It’s supposed to be a black…
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Chicago Theater Review: END OF THE RAINBOW (Porchlight Music Theatre at Stage 773)
THE LEGEND THAT GOT AWAY No, this show isn’t how fans want to remember Judy Garland at the bittersweet end. End of the Rainbow, Peter Quilter’s sardonic salute to a star on the skids, is a sometimes-sadistic portrait of an imploding diva. A festering Chicago premiere by Porchlight Music Theatre, Quilter’s retro take on “Little…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE LITTLE FLOWER OF EAST ORANGE (Eclipse Theatre Company)
A MOVING PORTRAIT OF A SMALLER SAINT A show doesn’t’”can’t’”get truer or richer than this current 140-minute gem at the Athenaeum Theatre. Perfectly concluding an all-Stephen Adly Guirgis season, Eclipse Theatre’s Chicago premiere The Little Flower of East Orange is powerfully personal, authentically intimate, and convincingly detailed’”a harrowing look at raw redemption. Solidly rooted in…
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Theater Review: HANSEL & GRETEL BLUEGRASS (24th Street Theatre)
FAIRY TALE THEATER Debbie Devine and Jay McAdams are a theater couple. They’ve been putting up shows for a long time. If you and your love dream of having your own space and staging your own stuff, you’d do well to study 24th Street Theatre. One of the first things you’ll notice is that it’s…
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Film Review: THE DRAMA CLUB (written and directed by Joe McClean)
THE MELODRAMA CLUB How much joy you derive from writer/director Joe McClean’s trudging ensemble dramedy depends on how much patience you have for yet another serving of the hoary old tale of school pals reuniting after a number of years. Emotionally involving and nostalgic, The Big Chill (1983) was one of the better efforts of this oft-visited rites-of-passage genre. But…
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Chicago Opera Review: THE FAIRY QUEEN (Chicago Opera Theater at the Studebaker Theater)
BAROQUE AND BURLESQUE’”A TOXIC MIX What happens when a so-called revival needs resuscitation? That’s the D.O.A. problem with this perverse collaboration between Chicago Opera Theater and Culture Clash, an “iconic” California-based performance troupe who live down to their name. Billed as a “Restoration spectacular,” Henry Purcell’s 17th-century gem The Fairy-Queen, performed three years before the…
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Film Review: ALL GOVERNMENTS LIE: TRUTH, DECEPTION AND THE SPIRIT OF I.F. STONE (directed by Fred Peabody)
SOME TITLES LIE All Governments Lie is a strident and incompetent piece of activism that collates talking-head journalists with shots of the Capitol Mall, statues of Jefferson, and clips of George W. Bush and Colin Powell telling lies. The subtitle (Truth, Deception and the Spirit of I.F. Stone) promises a biography, an investigation, at least…
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Los Angeles Opera Preview: AKHNATEN (LA Opera)
THE PHARAOH-EST OF THEM ALL Egyptian Pharaoh Akhnaten was not just provocative in his lifetime. Today, over three millennia after his reign, Egyptologists still debate theories about his life and relative importance. After his death, succeeding Pharaohs did their best to erase every trace of the man who had dared to displace the many gods…
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Theater Review: FUN HOME (National Tour)
LEARNING TO LOVE FROM WHAT DAD DIDN’T DO Dedicated memory-mongering, the 2013 chamber musical Fun Home–based on Alison Bechdel’s 2006 semiautobiographical graphic novel–is a worthy coming-out. We get the inside portrait of a lesbian daughter who learns more than she wanted from her gay dad. With serviceable songs by Jeanine Tesori and persuasive lyrics and…
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Theater Review: HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (National Tour)
THE WINNER BY AN INCH Not long into its original run at Jane Street Theatre Off-Broadway in 1998, a cult following had already been firmly entrenched for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It was the West Village’s answer to Rent (1996), which gave a musical voice to gays, AIDS, homelessness, and a disaffected generation. Hedwig…
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Chicago Theater Review: SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire)
PERFECT PRECIPITATION Of all the legendary Oscar-winning films destined to become stage musicals (42nd Street, Grand Hotel, Fame), Singin’ in the Rain, the 1952 MGM movie musical starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor, seems the most inevitable. It always had too much energy not to seem to burst from the screen. A tribute…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: UNBOUND (IAMA Theater Company at the Hudson Theatre)
UNBOUND FOR GLORY It takes talent to juggle political activism, sexual tension, and a highly suspenseful thriller plot, but playwright D.G. Watson has done it. His compelling drama hits an almost astonishing number of dynamic points with a deceptive ease that belies nuances of philosophy and morality. Unbound charts how idealism quickly rots into corruption–and how…
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Chicago Music Review: DíA DE LOS MUERTOS: THE DANCE OF LIFE AND DEATH (Chicago Sinfonietta)
ADDING DEATH TO LIFE, CHICAGO SINFONIETTA CREATES A GREATER WHOLE Halloween night at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall: This year it meant alternately sinister or soaring sounds worthy of its title Día de los Muertos: The Dance of Life and Death. Yes, there was a costume contest, won by a lady in a spooktacular headdress. Yes, the…
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