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Los Angeles Theater Preview: GUYS & DOLLS (Oregon Shakespeare Festival at the Wallis in Beverly Hills)
ALL DOLLED UP AND READY TO GO, GUYS It’s a new tradition that I could get used to. The season of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is practically year-round. Performances begin in Ashland in February and last until late October or early November. That leaves two months for a “breather” before the company heads back into…
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Los Angeles / Regional Theater Preview: A CHRISTMAS CAROL (Rubicon in Ventura)
CREATING A NEW CAROL While Michigan-born illustrator Haddon Sundblom developed the popular image of Santa Claus for Coca Cola advertising in the 1930s, it was the Victorian era which introduced most of the Christmas customs still practiced worldwide, including the illuminated / decorated tree and holiday greeting cards. In 1843, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published,…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review : NEW YORK ANIMALS (Bedlam Theatre Company at the New Ohio Theater)
OUR ANIMAL FELLOWS The always energized and entertaining Bedlam theater company opens their current season with New York Animals, Steven Sater’s musical play about New York City life in the 1990s. Excellent lead vocalist Jo Lampert fills the room with lovely songs by Mr. Slater and Burt Bacharach, the musical interludes separating comic vignettes designed…
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Los Angeles Music & Dance Review: STRAVINSKY & BALANCHINE’S APOLLO (LA Phil at Disney Hall)
APOLLO EARTHBOUND; SHOSTAKOVICH SOARS Rollicking, mysterious, and adventurous may be attributes of Britten’s Young Apollo,but these adjectives also describe the outcome, respectively, of the three pieces that comprised the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s program last night. Britten’s 1939 10-minute work for piano, string quartet, and string orchestra, included a rip-roaring performance by Joanne Pearce Martin; Stravinsky’s 1928 ballet…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: NORA (Cherry Lane)
NEITHER NORA Nora, Ingmar Bergman’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, centers on its titular character, a beautiful young wife and mother, whose cozy life at her husband’s bosom is threatened when she is blackmailed over an indiscretion she committed years earlier to save his life. The play, performed in New York City for…
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Chicago Theater Review: A CHRISTMAS CAROL (Goodman Theatre)
DUMBING DOWN DICKENS It doesn’t matter that A Christmas Carol has drifted from Dickens: Goodman Theatre will never slaughter its sacred (cash) cow. For 38 years now, playing three venues and employing 10 directors, 32 Tiny Tims and 8 Ebenezer Scrooges (making 23,000 “Bah humbugs!”), Chicago’s biggest regional theater has doggedly transformed Charles Dickens’ 80-page 1843 parable…
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Los Angeles & San Diego Theater Reviews: RIO HONDO (Theatre of NOTE); INDECENT (La Jolla Playhouse)
SHOWS THAT TELL, SHOWS THAT SHOW A list of the most popular investigative themes for artistic works in 2015 would certainly include (1) art itself, particularly within the same medium, and (2) the relevance of identity politics to (1). With Indecent, which opened last week at the La Jolla Playhouse in a joint production with…
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Chicago Theater Review: ANGINA PECTORIS (ShPIeL–Performing Identity at Theater Wit)
QUIT WHILE YOU’RE BEHIND Some absurdities are just too stupid for satire. Transparently ridiculous, they automatically self-indict, hanging themselves on their own petard. Such is the object of scorn in Michal Aharoni’s world premiere Angina Pectoris (a title that sheds little light on its theme). Well-intended but heavy-handed, Aharoni’s political comedy centers on a flagrantly unscientific Israeli…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: Caryl Churchills’s LOVE AND INFORMATION (Son of Semele Ensemble)
TMI AOK I’m a librarian during the day, and one thing I remember from back in Library School (because you have to go to Library School to become a librarian, you know) is that there are many discussions about the nature of information. Oh, librarians are fascinated about information. To a specialist in such things,…
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Chicago Theater Review: NO MORE SAD THINGS (Sideshow Theatre Company at Victory Gardens)
AN ABORTED AFFAIR The “Maui Pipeline,” it seems, has run out of waves. This “co-world premiere” from Boise Contemporary Theater and Chicago’s Sideshow Theatre Company offers an unedifying look at a Hawaiian romance that was just a trick of the tropical light. Playwright Hansol Jung depicts proto-lovers who find themselves first in dreams. But in…
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Film Review: GOODNIGHT MOMMY (directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala)
I SEE, YOU SAW Goodnight Mommy, the creepy 2014 film from Austrian husband and wife team Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, takes over an hour to turn into an American horror movie. Before that, the story of adolescent twins trapped in a country house with their bandage-swathed mother sustains a nice tonal drive through territory…
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Chicago Opera Review: THE MERRY WIDOW (Lyric)
A MERRY WIDOW MAKES FOR A MERRY AUDIENCE After the unbearable ugliness of Berg’s Wozzeck, Lyric Opera’s beautiful production of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow (Die Lustige Witwe) comes as a breath of fresh air. Originally staged last season at the Metropolitan Opera, this production features a brand new English translation by Jeremy Sams of…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: DO I HEAR A WALTZ? (Musical Theatre Guild)
DO I FEAR A WALTZ? Musicals are generally “lost” for any one of a number of reasons: the libretto may be filled with once topical socio-political humor now meaningless to contemporary audiences; it’s too expensive to produce; the score may have gone out of fashion; or the show itself is like a machine whose parts don’t…
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Los Angeles Music Review: PETER NERO (Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge)
NERO MY HEART TO THEE I always have a peculiar mix of excitement and trepidation when seeing a favorite entertainer live for the first time, especially when they are well past retirement years. In the case of Peter Nero, I wondered if my memories of listening to this astounding pianist would be pushed aside by a…
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Los Angeles Opera Review: HOPSCOTCH (The Industry)
IF STORYTELLING’S YOUR THING, SKIP SCOTCH French poet and essayist Charles Pierre Péguy wrote, “It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.” Yuval Sharon, director and creator of Hopscotch, “the world’s first-ever opera to take place in cars,” is the essence of genius. Only a genius of this kind could…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME (Strawdog Theatre Company)
COALS IN EVERYONE’S STOCKINGS Sometimes an entire life can crystallize around a seminal recollection. It can freeze a moment of time into a measure of what did and didn’t come true, what might have been, and what could never be. In Brian Friel’s incandescent Dancing at Lughnasa it’s a family gathering that turns out to be their…
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Chicago Opera Review: AMADIGI DI GAULA (Haymarket Opera Company)
HURRAH FOR HAYMARKET’S HANDELIAN HERO Appropriately enough, Haymarket Opera Company (HOC) is kicking off its fifth season with a Handel opera that premiered on London’s Haymarket Street 300 years ago. The fifth of the German composer’s operas written in England, Amadigi di Gaula is a delightfully magical drama set in the exuberant baroque style that…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE LISBON TRAVIATA (Eclipse Theatre Company)
WHEN LIFE IMITATES OPERA Life imitates opera: Concluding Eclipse Theatre Company’s season-long retrospective of oeuvres by Terrence McNally (Lips Together, Teeth Apart and A Perfect Ganesh), The Lisbon Traviata is an artfully self-aware domestic tragedy from 1989. It cruelly conflates culture and crime. Indeed McNally’s wicked work plays as if the author made a bet: “I can write a…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: THE ART OF FALLING (Hubbard Street Dance Chicago + The Second City)
FALLING IN LOVE WITH LAUGHS AND LEAPS Sadly a review of record, but this experimental, eclectic mash-up from Chicago looks to have a life beyond its short runs in the cities of wind and angels; in fact, The Art of Falling returns next year to the Harris Theater in Chicago where it had its world…
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Tour Review: KRISTIN CHENOWETH: COMING HOME TOUR (Disney Hall)
THE WRONG HOME FOR HOME If you happened to catch Broadway diva Kristin Chenoweth’s 2014 PBS special, Coming Home, there wasn’t much reason to see her live yesterday at Disney Hall. I am an enormous fan of the Wicked star and Oklahoman ambassador (her special was taped live at the theater that bears her name…
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