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Los Angeles Music Review: NICHOLAS MCGEGAN & UMI GARRETT (Pasadena Symphony)
TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE STAR When Umi Garrett played Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star with her hands behind her back on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2009, what first appeared as cutesy fun-and-games suddenly turned into a recital to be remembered: The 8-year-old budding piano prodigy stunned the world executing a section from Franz Liszt’s technically formidable…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: NIGHTMARES (Zombie Joe’s Underground Theatre Group)
THAT AIN’T THE WAY TO HAVE FUN, SON One of the most exciting events to come out of Los Angeles theater in the last few years was Zombie Joe’s Urban Death, a naturalistic horror show in the style of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. I stated in my review that his creepy one-hour compilation of original, jocular,…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE CLEARING (Theatre at St. Clement’s)
BROTHERS’ BOND Josh Hecht does an outstanding job directing Jake Jeppson’s effective new play The Clearing, about two brothers who suffer from a dark secret they’ve shared for the past 17 years. Chris Ellis is an emotional man-child in his late twenties; he is burly, excitable, prone to acting out, and unable to deal with…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE STRANGE UNDOING OF PRUDENCIA HART (Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
GO DRUNK OR DON’T GO AT ALL The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, David Greig’s ghostly, song-filled tale of a mousy academic in search of artful Scottish balladry, is running at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica. The National Theatre of Scotland creates a night in Kelso as central character Prudencia faces her demons in…
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Los Angeles Music Review: ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET (Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills)
A WHITE BREAD SANDWICH Beverly Hills’ newest and best-looking addition, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, debuted its classical music series with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, a very promising choice given the quartet’s previous accolades: Ensemble in Residence at Stanford, winners of the Banff International String Quartet competition, and even a good line…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills)
A TRIP Your average 4 to 12 year old carries enough infectious optimism and joie de vivre to put even a theater critic in a good mood. But childless people who like children notice things about them that parents can’t, for reasons of familiarity and self-preservation. Everybody knows there’s a biological reward for being around…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: PENNY PLAIN (Ronnie Burkett Theatre of Marionettes at UCLA)
STRINGS ATTACHED A worldwide pandemic has already claimed the lives of hundreds of millions of humans and the apocalypse is near. An intriguing plot line to be sure but hardly one you would associate with a puppet show. Rest assured, Penny Plain, currently stringing audiences along at UCLA’s Little Theater, is no ordinary puppet show….
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Chicago Theater Review: MR. SHAW GOES TO HOLLYWOOD (MadKap Productions at Greenhouse)
A BARD OUT OF WATER Here’s what we know for sure is the background for MadKap Production’s Midwest premiere: In 1933 Nobel laureate and, in his own estimation, the greatest writer in the world George Bernard Shaw and his dutiful wife Charlotte Townsend Shaw embarked on a self-declared “world tour” that took in Hollywood’”that is, after a…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: KING LEAR (Harvey Lichtenstein Theater at BAM)
LEAR, BECAUSE IT’S THERE A friend commented to me once that as hard to take as Orthodox Jews might seem to us secular ones, it is largely thanks to them and their stubborn adherence to the old ways that the Jewish religion is still around today. Something similar can be said of the practitioners of…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: I AM THE WIND (59E59)
A WIND OF DISAPPOINTMENT Having seen some months ago Paul Takacs’s outstanding staging of a two-character play called Tender Napalm, I was very much looking forward to watching his imagining of Jon Fosse’s enigmatic two-character play I Am the Wind (adapted into English by Simon Stephens). Unfortunately, as tight and inspired as his direction of…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: AN ILIAD (Broad Stage in Santa Monica)
YOU SEE A poet out of time, an ancient soul yet our contemporary, has come to sing to us of quarrel. He comes shabby from the road, dusty and reluctant. It is a killing effort for this gifted creature to tell us all we know of the love that causes rage. His story is the…
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Los Angeles Opera Review: THE TURN OF THE SCREW (Pacific Opera Project)
A TURN FOR THE BETTER A Henry James novella first published in 1898, The Turn of the Screw tells one of the most ambiguous ghost stories ever written. It involves a brother and sister (Flora and Miles), a housekeeper (Mrs. Grose), an unnamed governess, and two ghosts (Peter Quint and Miss Jessel). Not a lot…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: RX (Lost Studio)
A SHOW THAT’S BETTER THAN PROZAC Been to the drugstore lately? Sick of taking semi-useless pills three times a day every day? You’ve got your Losartan and your Lisinopril. You’ve got your yummy Sarafem and your delicious Celexa. There’s Venlafaxine and Mirtazapine. Zoloft and Paxil. To paraphrase the line from the movie The President’s Analyst,…
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Los Angeles Music Review: EDO DE WAART & AUGUSTIN HADELICH (LA Phil at Disney Hall)
EVERYTHING IS NEW AGAIN It was quite a blow when it was announced that both Christoph Eschenbach and Christian Tetzlaff’”due to illness’”canceled their engagement with the LA Phil at Disney Hall last weekend. While I wish them both a speedy recovery, their withdrawal resulted in one of the most exciting evenings with the LA Phil…
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Chicago Theater Review: SOLSTICE (A Red Orchid)
ANOTHER BRIDGE TOO FAR Solstice offers a disturbing look at a chaotic class-ridden conflict, and British playwright Zinnie Harris delivers some ugly goods: She imagines’”and A Red Orchid Theatre pictures it all potently’”a violent neighborhood poisoned by a contaminated river and hemmed in by a barrier bridge upon which some obscure atrocity has occurred. The…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: THE LAKE HOUSE PROJECT (Hudson Guild Theatre in Hollywood)
FEAR THE HYPHENATE If a person is lucky enough, they will discover their passion in life and be able to fine tune and truly excel at that skill. Others flounder about, trying a bit if this and a bit of that, becoming a jack of all trades but master of none. They’re called “hyphenates.” In…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: I’LL GO ON (Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City)
AND HE DOES In the 1980s, Barry McGovern and Gerry Dukes collaborated to cut three novels by Samuel Beckett (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) into a few monologues, divided by lighting cues (James McConnell) and set changes (Robert Ballagh) and an intermission, called I’ll Go On. Though spoken by different characters in their original form,…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE MANDRAKE (Commedia Beauregard at the Raven Theatre Complex)
DISREGARD BEAUREGARD Much in the spirit of Ben Jonson’s salacious Volpone and Giovanni Boccaccio’s same-titled lascivious tale of irrepressible lust, Niccolí² Machiavelli’s own political bombshell, his only surviving farce The Mandrake, is a devastating diatribe. Fueled by the same “the end justifies the means” mentality as his more famous The Prince, The Mandrake‘s almost too-easy target is the all-too-human hypocrisies that deny nature its due (of course, meaning sex). The…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE SURRENDER (Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row)
DIARY OF A PRETENTIOUS NITWIT The Woman in the one-woman show The Surrender, adapted for the stage by Isabelle Stoffel and Toni Bentley from Ms. Bentley’s book The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir, tells of how she finds God while receiving her first anal sex, and continues to find Him 297 more times until her dalliance…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: TAKE ME OUT (Plus One Productions at the Flight Theatre)
A SWING AND A MISS Theater, like baseball, is a team sport. To reign triumphant and put a tick in the “W” box, all the players must be at the top of their game. When everyone hits a home run its magic, but even if a few players are having an off day, check the…
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