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Los Angeles Music Review: THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE (Valley Performing Arts Center)
A MUSICAL TRAVELOGUE Silk Road Ensemble’s violinist Colin Jacobsen introduced his “Atashgah” to an attentive crowd at the gorgeous Valley Performing Arts Center with a simple, “I wrote this piece.” Yet magically, it didn’t appear written at all. The consistent soul-searching and yearning that emanated from the 11-piece ensemble rendered the work seemingly improvisational. The…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: A STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF BEES (Raven Playhouse)
A STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF ACTING Last August, Time’s cover story, “A World Without Bees,” brought to light a frightening occurrence: In recent years, there have been mass deaths of honeybees around the globe, known as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” Scientists are surmising the reasons – agricultural pesticides, parasitic mites, bacterial and HIV-like diseases – but they’ve…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: KISS ME, KATE (Cabrillo Music Theatre in Thousand Oaks)
A CLOSED-MOUTH KISS There are so many sexual allusions and situations in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate that it is remarkable the musical came out in 1948. I surmise the reason that Porter got away with such startling and blatant innuendos was his ability to wrap them up in sophisticated, witty lyrics. The musical is…
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: DEAR MR. ROSAN (777 Theatre)
DEPRESSING DEPRESSION ERA DRAMA What a time! Folks standing on line for charity handouts, companies closing down, destitution and despair all around. Surprise, though, we’re not talking about nowadays – we’re talking about the Great Depression of the 1930s, the subject of playwright Danielle M. Velkoff’s well-intentioned but clumsy period drama. It’s an interesting idea…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: INVISIBLE CITIES (The Industry and L.A. Dance Project at Union Station)
SEEING WHAT’S INVISIBLE In describing Invisible Cities, allow me to paraphrase Gore Vidal’s critique of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel of the same name on which this production is based: Of all tasks in reviewing director Yuval Sharon’s marvelously inventive theater event in Union Station, recounting Christopher Cerrone’s opera is the most difficult and perfectly irrelevant….
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Documentary Film Review: BIRTH OF THE LIVING DEAD (directed by Rob Kuhns)
DEATH OF AN ERA, BIRTH OF A GENRE Rob Kuhns’ Birth of the Living Dead is in part a making-of documentary, and a good one, about the revolutionary 1968 zombie picture Night of the Living Dead. It’s also a sharp essay celebrating the original George Romero film in historical political context. It only plays through…
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Off-Broadway Review: THE OTHER MOZART (Cherry Lane Theatre)
MOZART’S SISTER: POSSIBLY MORE TALENTED, DEFINITELY BETTER LEGS In many one person shows that are biographies of historical personages, there’s the risk of Wikipedia syndrome, in which the performer essentially just narrates the events of her character’s life, as though they’ve just been dictated straight from some website chronology. Fortunately, writer-performer Sylvia Milo’s luscious depiction…
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Los Angeles Concert Preview: AUDRA MCDONALD: ONE NIGHT ONLY (Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
I’M A LITTLE BIT IN LOVE The captivating singer and actress Audra McDonald performed last September at the SF Symphony gala opening, sharing the program with two orchestral works. At one point, she sang the Bernstein/Comden/Green tune “I’m a Little Bit in Love” from Wonderful Town: “Mm–mmm! / It’s so nice to be alive /…
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Chicago Theater Review: WE WILL ROCK YOU (National Tour at Cadillac Palace Theatre)
REINVENTING ROCK A huge West End hit for over a decade, this compilation jukebox musical does for Queen what Mamma Mia! did for ABBA, Buddy for Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and Jersey Boys for Frankie V. and the Four Seasons. But it’s much closer to the first example, if only because the plot is…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: EAGER TO LOSE (Ars Nova)
EAGER FOR MORE A farcical, semi-interactive burlesque fairytale – complete with girls in g-strings and tassels, a pun-spewing, corny joke-telling MC, a Jazz combo, and a working bar inside the house – Eager to Lose is a delight from beginning to end. And did I mention that most of the dialogue is in Shakespearian-esque verse?…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: CREDITORS (Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles)
COMPRESSED CRUELTY IN A SMALL STRINDBERG SHOCKER August Strindberg, the “father of modern psychological drama,” told his publisher that Creditors, a drama that he prized as much as he did his masterpiece Miss Julie (also written in 1888) was “humorous, loveable, all of its characters sympathetic.” Nothing could be further from the truth – as…
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Regional Theater Review: THE TALLEST TREE IN THE FOREST (La Jolla Playhouse)
A NOURISHING TREE While lacking in emotional engagement, Daniel Beaty’s solo outing exploring the life of actor/singer/activist Paul Robeson undoubtedly entertains, educates, inspires, and leaves the audience with a great deal to talk about. With an international following of his music, stage performances and cinema work, Paul Robeson was one of the best-known black men…
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Los Angeles Music Review: SALONEN CONDUCTS DEBUSSY & BARTÒK (LA Phil at Disney Hall)
A LASTING IMPRESSION Fab Fin Esa-Pekka Salonen returned to the hall where he established the reputation of LA Phil, educated audiences to challenging new music, and garnered adulation for his graceful manner and acute interpretation of various works, classical and contemporary. The program this past weekend set the stage for Salonen to do as he…
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Broadway Theater Review: A TIME TO KILL (John Golden Theatre)
VERDICT: WEAK ADAPTATION There’s something innately suspenseful about a courtroom drama. Perhaps it’s the fact that real life courtrooms are themselves theaters and a criminal trial is essentially one long play – either a tragedy or a melodrama, depending on the result. The prosecutor puffs, the defense attorney huffs, and the defendant squirms and tries…
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Chicago Theater Review: LORD OF THE FLIES (Steppenwolf)
BOYS WILL BE MONSTERS William Golding’s 1954 cautionary thriller depicts a world on the edge of nuclear war. But when a plane crashes, a tiny portion of humanity is given a do-over. Tragically, reduced to feral bipeds, they succumb to our worst instincts. Lord of the Flies imagines a deserted tropical island’”a kind of modern…
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Los Angeles Dance Review: NEDERLANDS DANS THEATER 1 (Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
PUTTING THE THEATER IN DANCE Living up to its name, Nederlands Dans Theater 1 bounded into Los Angeles last night, showing off the reasons why The Hague-based contemporary dance outfit is known for defying convention. With a mixture of acting, multi-media, unique choreography and bravado inventiveness, this world-class company offered three works in a program…
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Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE PLAY’S THE THING (Storm Theatre Company)
NOT ONLY THE PLAY, BUT THE PLAY-WITHIN-THE-PLAY’S THE THING The Storm Theater presents the first offering of its Ferenc Molnár festival with this gem, adapted by P.G. Wodehouse from Molnár’s original The Play at the Castle. Molnár was a Hungarian playwright of the Golden Age of Fluffy Theater, and in his latter years he was…
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Chicago Theater Review: THE TABLE (Blind Summit at Chicago Shakespeare Theater)
A PUPPET IN THE WILDERNESS In The Table, a curious creation now on its first U.S. tour, three members of the U.K.’s Blind Summit puppet theater depict a garrulous Bunraku-style hand puppet, a vibrant invention who impersonates no less than the 120-year-old Moses on his dying day on the plains of Moab. The puppet, a…
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Off-Off-Broadway Theater Review: THE LEARNED LADIES (Cake Productions / New Ateh Theater Group)
FRANCE: WHERE THE WOMEN ARE WOMEN (AND THE MEN ARE WOMEN, TOO) Director Paul Urcioli’s delightful production of Moliere’s classic skewering of female emancipation is given an additional dimension of gender politics by the intriguing notion of having all the roles, both men and women, played by female performers who portray the men in drag. …
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Chicago Dance Review: LA BAYADÈRE: THE TEMPLE DANCER (Joffrey Ballet)
INDIAN NIGHTS Earlier this fall the Joffrey Ballet revisited the uneasy birth of modern dance with a kinetic revival of Stravinsky’s still-shocking, century-old Sacre du Printemps in all its primitive vitality. As if to balance the ledger, the Auditorium Theatre is now filled with the gorgeous melodies of a late-blooming classical ballet from 1877. With…
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