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Los Angeles Music Review: THE PLANETS–”AN HD ODYSSEY / ERSKINE–”A TURNAGE U.S. PREMIERE (Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl)
THE UNIVERSAL AND THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE Holst’s The Planets and the U.S. premiere of English composer Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Erskine, a Concerto for Drumset & Orchestra: This very odd pairing arrived courtesy of the LA Phil on Tuesday, and while one was out of this world, the other was decidedly earthbound. The eponymous instrumentalist of Turnage’s four-movement…
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San Francisco Opera Review: SUSANNAH (SF Opera)
SUSANNAH SOARS IN SAN FRANCISCO Susannah may be a tragedy, but the San Francisco Opera production is worthy of a hoedown celebration. This near-perfect production is one of the best operas I’ve seen in the past decade. 88-year-old composer and librettist Carlisle Floyd was in attendance on opening night, so it was an emotional experience…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE LIFE AND SORT OF DEATH OF ERIC ARGYLE (Son of Semele Ensemble)
A SORT OF JUDGMENT The Life and Sort of Death of Eric Argyle, Ross Dungan’s 2013 play about fate-after-death, is pleasantly eloquent and several times touching in a comforting way, but it offers little structural or thematic originality. A quietly desperate nobody straight out of T.S. Eliot dies a bumbling death and has his life…
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Los Angeles Theater Preview: COCK (Rogue Machine)
THE PERFECT COCK Whether breeding chickens or designing your kitchen with rooster tchotchkes, it can be challenging to find the perfect cock. But if you’re looking to find it in the theater, your search is over. I refer to the play Cock, the Los Angeles premiere of which opens at Rogue Machine this week. The punning,…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: BAUER (59E59)
A BIO-DRAMA THAT WORKS “Of course I care (what she thinks), I hate her,” says a character in Lauren Gunderson’s Bauer, a San Francisco Playhouse production about the German artist Rudolf Bauer, who painted during the first half of the 20th century. It is one of many lines that pop in a play which, though…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: BURIED CHILD (Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks)
UNBURIED RED-HEADED STEPCHILD In the mid-1990s, Sam Shepard rewrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1978 play, Buried Child, for a new Steppenwolf production that director Gary Sinise dragged from Chicago to Broadway, where I saw and loathed it. It was a page-one, for-the-yokels rewrite, shrugging off the ambiguous Gothicism of the original to dress itself in frothy…
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Regional Theater Review: THE TEMPEST (South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa)
MAGICIANS OF THEATRICALITY Aaron Posner is on fire right now. His adaptations, My Name Is Asher Lev and Stupid Fucking Bird, are being produced all over the country, and his version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which he co- adapted and -directed with sleight-of-hand artist Teller in Las Vegas and Boston, now resides at South Coast Rep…
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Los Angeles Dance Interview: DANIEL EZRALOW (Ezralow Dance at the Ford Amphitheatre)
DANIEL EZRALOW: WHAT IS DANCE? To say that Daniel Ezralow is a busy man this week is an understatement. After making a worldwide name for himself as a dancemaker and aerial choreographer for theater, film, opera, concerts, and television, Ezralow is debuting his new Los Angeles-based company, Ezralow Dance, at the Ford Amphitheatre this Saturday,…
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: SMOKE (The Bats at The Flea Theatre)
SMOKIN’ The premise of Kim Davies’ new play Smoke, that two strangers, a young man and woman, who independently come to the kitchen to have a cigarette while a friendly S&M sex party is taking place in the rest of the apartment, and who wind up having a meaningful interaction, is like a minefield with…
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Chicago Theater Review: MIRACLES IN THE FALL (Polarity Ensemble Theatre at Greenhouse Theater)
PRAY FOR MIRACLES The “fall” in the title doesn’t mean the season. Miracles in the Fall refers to the expulsion from Paradise, the epic fall that supposedly created original sin. Pursuing the hope of redemption, Chuck O’Connor’s flawed 100-minute new work puts forgiveness over judgment as it depicts a fractured family trying to fix their…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: BASTARDS OF STRINDBERG (Scandinavian American Theater Company at The Lion Theatre)
MISS JULIE’S OFFSPRING In 2012 the Scandinavian American Theater Company commissioned four playwrights to each write a sort of riff on Strindberg’s Miss Julie. The result is the four short plays that make up Bastards of Strindberg, a show so full of vitality and charisma that it often overcomes its failings. Strindberg’s Miss Julie begins on…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TRYING (International City Theatre in Long Beach)
NOT AS TRYING AS IT COULD HAVE BEEN A slight bio-drama is given heft by larger-than-life performances in this latest outing from International City Theatre in Long Beach. Trying is based on playwright Joanna McClelland Glass’s own experiences as a 25-year-old woman from Saskatoon working as a secretary for the great, cantankerous Francis Biddle’”attorney general…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE WHALESHIP ESSEX (Shattered Globe Theatre at Theater Wit)
THE BACK STORY BEHIND MOBY DICK A thrilling feat that reclaims the past, The Whaleship Essex is sailor-playwright Joe Forbrich’s detailed and driving reimagining of an 1820 tragedy that, 30 years later, inspired Herman Meville to write Moby Dick. A superb achievement by the 15-member ensemble, Shattered Globe Theatre’s Midwest premiere is a richly textured…
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Theater Review: ONE IN THE CHAMBER (Lounge Theater)
ONE IN A MILLION Rabid theatergoers who often attend plays are akin to miners panning for gold: The drudgery and disappointment from months of discovering rocks is dissipated when a precious nugget arrives. One in the Chamber is one such gem. Writer/director Marja-Lewis Ryan has crafted a harrowing account of a normal American family torn…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE WESTERN UNSCRIPTED (Impro Theatre at the Falcon in Burbank)
FORD INTO PECKINPAH VIA THE CHICKEN HYMN I’m a big fan of John Ford and Howard Hawks; My Darling Clementine and Red River are apex achievements in Hollywood studio storytelling. But Ford and Hawks were limited in ways that Impro Theatre is not. When Impro addresses the American Western as a system of philosophy and…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE GAME’S AFOOT (Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace)
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, MY DEAR WATSON A cardinal rule gets broken here: You can be funny or you can be scary–but try to be both and you’re neither. You’ll be this show. Deft at farce in Lend Me a Tenor, inept at plotting in Moon Over Buffalo, apt at gags in Crazy for You, Ken Ludwig…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE COWARD (Stage Left Theatre at Theater Wit)
DUEL NATURE In Trevor, recently produced by A Red Orchid Theatre, playwright Nick Jones delivered a sardonic and heavy-handed attack on dangerous animals kept as domestic pets. He wastes no more subtlety on Stage Left Theatre’s suitably stylized Midwest premiere of his 2010 offering The Coward. Set in 1790, this precious and overly insistent two-hour…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: PERSIANS (SITI Company at The Getty Villa)
FIRST PERSIAN PLURAL To see the oldest extant Greek tragedy performed sort-of as it was 2500 years ago, but excluding masks and including Anne Bogart’s affection for fabric and yoga positions, you may now attend Aeschylus’s Persians in a lovely amphitheater up in the Malibu hills. Essentially an after-the-fact ode to the Greek fighting spirit, delivered by a…
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Chicago Theater Review: REASONS TO BE HAPPY (Profiles Theatre)
REASONS TO BE CRITICAL Neil LaBute seems to have a penchant for ironic titles. His 2002 play The Mercy Seat was anything but merciful; LaBute described it as a “kind of emotional terrorism.” His newest play, Reasons to Be Happy (2013), concerns two pairs of best friends who are both sleeping with each other’s exes….
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE UNFRYABLE MEATNESS OF BEING (Pacific Resident Theatre)
MORE MEAT If you are one of the many theatergoers who caught Pacific Resident Theatre’s production of Out There on Fried Meat Ridge Road (and possibly the special Christmas follow-up) during its unprecedented 6-month run, then you’ll likely be anticipating the third installment, The Unfryable Meatness of Being. If you missed Out There you might…
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