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Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE GOLDEN BRIDE (National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene)
A MAIL-ORDER BRIDE I guess it’s my own fault, but when I read about The Golden Bride, a Yiddish operetta from 1923 that was lost in the 40s, found in the 80s, and is now enjoying its first off-Broadway run at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, I envisioned something covered with the thick patina of history…
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Chicago Theater Review: DYNAMITE DIVAS, A TRIBUTE TO WOMEN OF SOUL (Black Ensemble)
A SOUL STORM SUNG TO THE SKIES A tribute to women of soul, Dynamite Divas, despite the title, is not about terrorists with tonsils. A remake and update of a 2001 hit at the Black Ensemble Theater, it’s a very generous showcase for a ton of talent. There’s everything to enjoy in producer/playwright Jackie Taylor’s earnest…
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Film and Los Angeles Music Review: HEART OF A DOG & CONCERT FOR DOGS (directed by Laurie Anderson)
HEART OF DOGNESS In the middle of two hundred people and sixty dogs in the Silent Movie Theatre, in that low, dark room, some of the heads silhouetted against the screen ahead are those of standard poodles. There’s a barky collie and a St Bernard. There’s a scattering of smaller dogs, like Tango the mellow…
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Los Angeles Music Review: DAVID BENOIT TRIBUTE TO CHARLIE BROWN (Carpenter Center in Long Beach)
GREAT GOOD GRIEF It’s clear that jazz pianist David Benoit has more than an affection for all things Charlie Brown. The pensive character from Charles Schultz’ strip, Peanuts, has certainly inspired many–from filmmakers and musicians to the “Average Joe” who contemplates the enormity of just existing–but Benoit presented his charming Christmas concert with a childlike persona that was…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE CHRISTIANS (Center Theatre Group at the Mark Taper Forum)
CROSSFIRE Between religious zealots, especially those who use the word of God to control the populace rather than to create peace, and the liberation of a new world’”gay marriage, Roe v. Wade’”more and more people are leaving organized religion. Especially in America. A recent study indicated that millennials are leaving the church in droves. Some…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: CLEVER LITTLE LIES (Westside Theatre)
NO ONE ELSE IS THAT GIRL Marlo Thomas may not have the iconic stature of one of those luminous performers like, say, Meryl Streep or Cher or Judy Garland, but akin to these illustrious ladies of culture, you can do a pretty good job of placing your generation chronologically by which version of Ms. Thomas you know best….
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE LATINA CHRISTMAS SPECIAL (Los Angeles Theatre Center)
ME SO FELIZ A friend mentioned that three comediennes–a Cuban American from Miami, a Mexican American from Texas, and the daughter of an “over-dedicated Mexican mother and a compliant Lithuanian father” from Sun Valley, CA–are putting on a show in which they indulge in reminiscences about their childhood Navidades (Christmases). He invited me, but I declined, telling my friend…
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Chicago Theater Review: BARITONES UNBOUND (Royal George Theatre)
A VOICE GETS ITS OWN SHOW Despite the name, Baritones UnBound is no comedy about musical kinkiness. A kind of theatrical rebuttal to The Three Tenors (and its many spinoffs), it offers equal time and retributive justice to the middle voice in the repertory of male vocalists. The baritone register, occupying a strategic place between the heroic and heavenly…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: ALL-RACHMANINOFF (Cristian Măcelaru and Kirill Gerstein with the LA Phil)
GET YOUR RACHS OFF I can think of nothing better to do this holiday season then something that has nothing to do with the holidays. It’s not easy to find, but in the midst of the Messiah morass, the Los Angeles Philharmonic is offering an All-Rachmaninoff program this weekend that is sure to bring you…
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Chicago Theater Review: DOMESTICATED (Steppenwolf Theatre Company)
A POUND OF LOVE EXPLODES INTO A TON OF HATE Short of screaming “Fire!” in the theatrical darkness, you can’t imagine a more polemical provocation than Domesticated. As with Grand Concourse and Good People, Steppenwolf Theatre Company delivers another gadfly masterpiece with this Chicago premiere. There’s toxic irony in the title of Domesticated, a demure euphemism for some less pleasant…
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Tour Theater Review: IF/THEN (National Tour)
WHAT/EVER Saved from total disregard by a libretto that occasionally manages to engage with humor and knowingness, this brave attempt to examine the subject of fate versus choice utterly fails to cohere into a moving experience. Composer/lyricist Brian Yorkey and composer Tom Kitt, the creators of Next to Normal, use parallel time-lines to explore the…
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Chicago Dance Review: HUBBARD STREET DANCE CHICAGO (Season 38 Winter Series at the Harris)
LEAPING TO THE SOLSTICE Between now and Sunday, four innovative female choreographers offer an evening of motion quests. The Harris Theatre is the backdrop for themes of not-so-close encounters contrasted with sometimes cloying connections. It makes sense: What can show the mutability of desire better than dance, where what might have been and what must…
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Theater Review: THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (U.S. National Tour)
HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR BRIDGES? Given Marsha Norman’s awkward and dispiriting adaptations for The Secret Garden (1991) and The Color Purple (2005), the most surprising, but not the best, element of the musicalized version of The Bridges of Madison County is her libretto. Neither is Jason Robert Brown’s score the greatest thing on stage at the Ahmanson Theatre, where this short-lived…
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: TAKE CARE (The Bats at the Flea Theater)
HARD TO CARE First of all, I think it’s important to state that I adore The Flea, the fiercely creative performance and theater collective down in Soho. More often than not, they do amazing, compelling work. For instance, their two-night, epic presentation of The Mysteries last year, in which the Biblical story of creation through Armageddon…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE HEIR APPARENT (Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
HILARITY HAMMERED HOME, OR AN HEIR TO MISFORTUNE The tone is set from the start: The Heir Apparent begins with a chamber pot being emptied from a balcony window. It answers a question not worth posing: Can David (Venus in Fur) Ives stoop to conquer? (A patently rhetorical question for this gentleman’s guide to lust and torpor.)…
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Chicago Opera Review: BEL CANTO (Lyric Opera)
DISAPPOINTING DEBUT DELIVERS DAMAGED GOODS Lyric Opera’s world premiere production of Bel Canto fails to live up to its name (translation: beautiful singing). While first-time opera composer Jimmy López expressly does not attempt to write in the bel canto style, neither does he write beautiful vocal lines’”at least not very many, or enough, of them….
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: A WILDER CHRISTMAS (Peccadillo Theater Company at Theatre at St. Clement’s)
OUR CHRISTMAS TOWN Under Dan Wackerman’s superb direction, Peccadillo Theater Company’s A Wilder Christmas, comprised of two Thornton Wilder one-acts’”The Long Christmas Dinner and Pullman Car Hiawatha’”is a gem. Mr. Wackerman’s unobtrusive style compliments the material; with unsentimental precision and a light touch he illuminates all the subtle little details of Wilder’s works until they…
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Los Angeles Music Preview: DEAR MR. SINATRA, A SWINGING CENTENNIAL (John Pizzarelli, Cheyenne Jackson and Monica Mancini at Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge)
THE BEST IS YET TO COME ON SINATRA’S BIRTHDAY Frank Sinatra was not only one of the most popular entertainers of the 20th century, but he was arguably the greatest singer as well, recording more than 1,500 songs. His extraordinary interpretative genius and the way he could rescue some songs from obscurity and extend the…
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Chicago Dance Review: THE NUTCRACKER (Joffrey)
LAST CALL FOR BOB’S CLARA After 28 years the Joffrey Ballet is ending Robert Joffrey’s The Nutcracker. All good things, it seems, must come to an end. Next year Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s beloved ballet will be reinterpreted in a spanking new staging by Tony winner Christopher Wheeldon (who last season reimagined Swan Lake as a fantasy within a…
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Film Review: THE REVENANT (directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu)
IÑÁRRITU IN THE WILDERNESS Frontiersman Hugh Glass was attacked by a bear in 1823, deep in the Dakota Territory. Given his broken leg and exposed ribs, Glass’s friends didn’t think he’d make it. Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald took his rifle and left him for dead, spooked that scalp-hunting Arikara warriors were on their trail….
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