Areas We Cover
Categories
-
Los Angeles Music Preview: MURRAY PERAHIA IN RECITAL (Disney Hall)
MURRAY PERAHIA IN RECITAL AT DISNEY HALL Murray Perahia is the rare concert pianist so popular and profound that his performances cannot be confined to a standard recital hall. That’s to be expected of a pianist who has consistently engaged with music that’s greater than any one performer, and who combines a joyous, lucid virtuosity…
-
Chicago Theater Review: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM (Polarity Ensemble Theatre at Greenhouse)
A DOO-WOP DREAM He’s going strong for a guy who died 400 years ago today. This, of course, is easily William Shakespeare’s most popular comedy, if only because it delivers some magical goods: There’s an epiphany near the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream when the mixed-up quartet of wayward lovers who’ve been confoundedly mashed…
-
Los Angeles Music Review: BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV & EDO DE WAART (LA Phil at Disney Hall)
DO NOT MISS BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV AT DISNEY HALL THIS WEEKEND I am happy to say my instincts were correct: When pianist Behzod Abduraimov appeared in his Disney Hall debut as a last-minute replacement in 2014, I knew he was the real thing. They don’t appear often, these fresh-to-the-scene soloists who completely enrapture ’” those who combine the old-school…
-
Film Review: COURTED (L’HERMINE) (directed by Christian Vincent / North American Premiere at Tribeca Film Festival)
OUT OF COURTED Christian Vincent’s Courted tells of a separated judge, Michel Racine (Fabrice Luchini), presiding over a child murder trial, who discovers that one of the jurors is Ditte (Sidse Babett Knudsen), a nurse he fell in love with during a hospital stay years ago. On the one hand this movie, which Mr. Vincent…
-
Chicago Theater Review: THE PRODUCERS (Mercury Theater Chicago)
PRODUCES MORE LAUGHS PER MINUTE THAN ANY OTHER MUSICAL It’s always springtime for Mel Brooks, who really does write musicals the way they used to. Even before Young Frankenstein, his 2001 triumph The Producers (based on the sidesplitting 1968 film with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) reverts to the anything-for-a-laugh, neo-vaudevillian, politically incorrect musicals of its…
-
Film Review: BUGS (directed by Andreas Johnsen / World Premiere at Tribeca Film Festival)
EAT BUGS AND LIKE IT! By 2050 the world’s population will reach 9 billion people and food production will need to increase by 70% to feed them, we are informed by titles at the beginning of Andreas Johnsen’s breezy info-documentary Bugs. One plentiful and underexploited food source is insects. Will these be the key to…
-
Chicago Theater Review: EVITA (Marriott Theatre)
AND EVITA KEEPS ROLLING IN That great balcony scene is back. No, not R&J. It’s the one with Eva Duarte Perón’s valedictory aria “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.” As this princess of the pampas in a prom dress chokes, then belts out, the second-act opening of the 1978 musical, all the right buttons get pushed: The…
-
Los Angeles Theater Preview: I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU – THE LIFE AND LYRICS OF AL DUBIN (Ricardo Montalban Theatre in Hollywood)
INDEED I DUBIN He wrote the lyrics to the songs that kept the world singing through some of the darkest times in human history: The Great Depression and WWII. But as with most songwriters who aren’t named Gershwin, Porter, Berlin or Rodgers & Hammerstein, this man, who passed at the age of 53, has been forgotten…
-
Film Review: CHILDREN OF THE MOUNTAIN (director Priscilla Anany/World Premiere, Tribeca Film Festival)
YOUR MOUNTAIN IS WAITING Reading the synopsis of Children of the Mountain in the Tribeca Film Festival catalogue I fully expected the film to be a sentimental, agenda-driven disaster; the only reason I ended up watching it was because I was unable to watch the movie I had wanted to see. As it turned out, this…
-
Theater Review: BULLETS OVER BROADWAY (National Tour at PrivateBank Theatre in Chicago)
AS FUNNY AS A PUNCH ON THE JAW Call it a comic “war of the worlds.” It’s the tabloid-trashy tale of a Broadway show that is literally “under the gun.” As the title suggests, Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath’s 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway depicted a forced marriage between the Mob and Manhattan, specifically a…
-
Film Review: HERE ALONE (directed by Rod Blackhurst / World Premiere at Tribeca Film Festival)
CUT TO THE CHASE When we meet Ann (Lucy Walters) in Rod Blackhurst’s zombie horror thriller Here Alone she’s been surviving in the woods of upstate New York for about six months, ever since a virus turned most of the population into flesh-eating crazies. We learn from flashbacks that when the virus hit she had…
-
Chicago Theater Review: DON’T MAKE ME OVER (IN TRIBUTE TO DIONNE WARWICK) (Black Ensemble)
DON’T WALK ON BY THIS SHOW “You won’t get a career from singing: Singing will give you a career.” That was all the encouragement that Dionne Warwick needed to make it big over 54 years. Reprising artistic director Jackie Taylor’s 2006 hit as it celebrates the Black Ensemble Theater’s 40th anniversary (“The Season of Greatest…
-
Los Angeles Music Review: AMERICAN CHAMBER MUSIC / JOSEFOWICZ PLAYS ADAMS (LA Phil)
NOISE WILL BE NOISE Two vastly different programs offered by LA Phil this week confirm that “contemporary” music doesn’t sound modern — that is, “new.” For me, both Brad Lubman’s Tangents and John Adams’s Scheherezade.2 fall squarely into “noise,” and I’ve heard it all before. As a reviewer, I have tried to create a critical and…
-
Chicago Theater Review: DREAMGIRLS (Porchlight Music Theatre at Stage 773)
AND I AM TELLING YOU — YOU ARE GOING I never saw the two touring revivals of the Tony-honored Dreamgirls that played Chicago’s old Shubert Theatre. But, like Marriott Theatre’s riveting 2012 production, they couldn’t have supplied more soul-stirring passion than this homegrown revival by Porchlight Music Theatre. Even lacking the original pyrotechnics and Las…
-
Chicago Theater Review: OTHELLO: THE REMIX 2016 (Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
A GREEN-EYED RAP ROMP ADDS MOOR TO THE MIX Before Othello: The Remix it was only Shakespeare’s comedies that received the Q brothers’ trademark, rap-happy revision’”Funk It Up About Nothin’ and The Bomb-itty of Errors. Who would have thought a tragedy could take this “ad-rap-tation”? It can. Boldly applying a hip (as in hop) transformation to Shakespeare…
-
Tour Theater Review: KINKY BOOTS (National Tour at Pantages Hollywood)
BOOTS GOT MY KINKS OUT Another bus-and-truck tour of Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper’s Tony Award-festooned musical has “sashayed and shanted” its way back into Los Angeles at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, and it may just be the tonic you need after a rough day. Oh, yes, one can look at the show with the jaundiced old…
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: DRY LAND (Echo Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre)
FRIENDSHIP AS A LIFE VEST For the lucky few who know confidence and fit in with no real problems, high school is a pleasant stepping stone from adolescence to adulthood. For many, the years leading to college are filled with loathing. Sometimes its as simple as hating the bitchy popular girls who seemingly skate through life….
-
Chicago Theater Review: CARLYLE (Goodman Theatre)
A STUDY IN SPITE BECOMES A PUERILE HISSY FIT The joke’s on us in Thomas Bradshaw’s 75-minute Carlyle. Goodman Theatre’s premiere is agit-prop theater, a trifle that contains more guts and nerve than wit or heart. Purportedly a kick-off rally for the title character’s bid to be a Republican senator from Illinois, it opens with a…
-
Chicago Theater Review: A NUMBER (Runcible Theatre Company at The Royal George Theatre)
CAN A CLONE HAVE AN IDENTITY CRISIS? We share 99% of our genetic material with every other human, 90% with each chimpanzee, and 30% with any bunch of lettuce. (Talk about “six degrees of separation.”) Now playing the Royal George Gallery Theatre, Caryl Churchill’s two-person drama A Number wonders whether that’s too close for comfort….
-
Los Angeles Theater Review: CHILDREN OF EDEN (Cabrillo Music Theatre in Thousand Oaks)
FAR MORE EDENIC THAN I EXPECTED You would think that if Stephen Schwartz (composer/lyricist of Pippin and Wicked) wrote a musical with John Caird (adapter of Les Misérables and Candide), we would have seen a production of it — or at least heard of it. But shows that haven’t played Broadway rarely make it into the public consciousness….
Search Articles
Please help keep
Stage and Cinema going!
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦
Find beautiful trendy gowns for girls' special events.
Need to order an essay? Hire our top writers to complete the most challenging papers at an affordable rate.
For professional writing support, hire essay writers at Edubirdie for high-quality help.
Discover top-rated Australian online casinos with fair games, fast payouts, and generous bonuses for every type of player.
Explore the best paying pokies Australia games with high RTP and clear bonus terms
