Friday, January 6, 2017
‘TWAS BRILLIG, AND THE SLITHY TOVEY The witty, charming raconteur and conductor Bramwell Tovey has never failed to have the audience in the palm of his baton-filled hand. As ener…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:43PM[SHARE]Monday, December 19, 2016
WHIMSY WASHOUT Adapting a film or play into a musical is a dicey proposition. There’s no perfect formula, but theater’s great librettists"Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, et a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:10PM[SHARE]Wednesday, December 14, 2016
TAKING NOTES TO THE NEXT LEVEL Los Angeles native Stew, born Mark Stewart, is one of today’s most fascinating songwriters. He has released both solo albums and with his band, The Negro…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:55PM[SHARE]Wednesday, November 30, 2016
I'M DREAMING OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS WITH A BETTER SCRIPT I suppose it’s possible that Irving Berlin's White Christmas might succeed with audiences. Possible, that is, if they are w…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:33PM[SHARE]Saturday, November 19, 2016
EVERYBODY LOVES SHE LOVES ME I'll be the first to admit that it may be impossible to create a bad production of the 1963 jewel-box musical She Loves Me. This perfect show, based on the 1937 …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:04PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 17, 2016
BEYOND COMPARE In the past five years, I have encountered only a handful of fresh-to-the-scene classical soloists who completely enraptured"those who combine the old-school magnetic quality …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:02PM[SHARE]Thursday, November 10, 2016
BOYS WILL BE BOYS Musical Theatre West's (MTW) Reiner Reading Series begins its 2016-17 season with a musical from the beginning of the second decade of the Broadway Musical's Golden A…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:03AM[SHARE]Thursday, November 3, 2016
THE WINNER BY AN INCH Not long into its original run at Jane Street Theatre Off-Broadway in 1998, a cult following had already been firmly entrenched for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It was th…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 10:14PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 27, 2016
MEMPHIS SOARS The most entertaining musical of the year is not a great musical. Here is a show with a predictable, synthetic feeling book and 19 songs which only emulate the m…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59AM[SHARE]BRING ON THE TEARS Orlande de Lassus, Europe's most famous musician during his lifetime, created nothing finer than the Lagrime di San Pietro, (Tears of St. Peter) a collection of twenty spi…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:10AM[SHARE]Friday, October 21, 2016
STILL SEARCHING Is there life after Lily Tomlin? Producer Jon Imparato is attempting to find out: under his auspice, the Los Angeles LGBT Center is reviving The Search for Signs of Intellige…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:59AM[SHARE]O’HARA SALON Broadway icon Kelli O'Hara ventured far west of the Great White Way Friday night to perform Broadway favorites and a few originals to a well-sold house at V…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:06AM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 19, 2016
DEFICIENT DRAMA DILUTES DELUSION In 2011, writer/director Jon Braver created Delusion, a new kind of haunted house. In the ensuing years (except last year, 2015, which was dark), with a diff…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:26AM[SHARE]Saturday, October 15, 2016
REVEALING THE SOURCE There’s so much buzz about The Source, which opens at REDCAT next week, that an extra performance has been added (the show runs Oct.19-23, 2016). The most fasci…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 06:20PM[SHARE]Friday, October 14, 2016
DUDAMEL AND BELL MORE THAN WELL Drop your plans this weekend and get to Disney Hall to witness conductor Gustavo Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in an astoundingly satisfy…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:46PM[SHARE]Thursday, October 6, 2016
WHAT A WORLD 1969. The final year in what was one of the most turbulent decades in American history. The battle between counterculture dissidents and the corporate establishment could melt l…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:40PM[SHARE]Wednesday, October 5, 2016
DAISEY’S TRUMPETRY The virtues of monologist Mike Daisey are many. He’s gifted at societal critique; he creates awesome mental pictures; and he’s a wiz at diagnosing and di…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 12:40PM[SHARE]Monday, September 12, 2016
MOSTÂ OF THE WAY Sick of politics? Miss the days when strongarm politicians got things done with blackmail, threats, and tit-for-tat backroom deals? Well, politics are exciting and inspiri…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:04PM[SHARE]Sunday, September 11, 2016
TO SIR MA’AM WITH LOVE It's an irresistible setting seen in many successful films and plays: When an underdog teacher shapes her troubled teenaged students, she is rewarded by bucking …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:47PM[SHARE]Wednesday, August 24, 2016
DIAMOND LI’L Musical Theatre West's Reiner Reading Series wraps up its amazing season with a musical from smack dab in the middle of Broadway's golden age. Given the terrific score …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:33AM[SHARE]Sunday, August 14, 2016
BRINGING BERNSTEIN TO LIFE Older spectators will remember Leonard Bernstein not just as a conductor, composer, and pianist, but as one of the most vivid personalities and astonishingly effec…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:18AM[SHARE]Sunday, August 7, 2016
NEW BALLET PREMIERES IN L.A. It is said that American novelist James T. Farrell regretted writing the Studs Lonigan trilogy, novels that were so iconic that fellow Chicagoan "Studs" Terkel a…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 02:56PM[SHARE]Tuesday, August 2, 2016
SHAKESPEARE UNDER ATTACK A comedy's brewing up in Santa Monica. Soon, winds will whip, distressed voices will call out and a ship's timbers will be shivering, cracking, and smashing against …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 03:25PM[SHARE]Thursday, July 28, 2016
A SCALED-DOWN GYPSY NONETHELESS GOESÂ OFF THE SCALE Gypsy, the musical theater biography of striptease performer Gypsy Rose Lee, is really about Gypsy's mother, Mama Rose, immortalized by …
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 09:28PM[SHARE]Saturday, July 23, 2016
HERE’S A PLACE FOR US When I first heard West Side Story, it was the original Broadway cast recording on my parents’ mono Magnavox console. Without the Jerome Robbins’ dire…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:08AM[SHARE]Wednesday, July 13, 2016
IN HARLEM’S WAY "One never knows, do one?" That's the favorite catchphrase of Fats Waller (1904-1943), an irrepressible master of music. The 285-pound, cherubic-cheeked jokester genius…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 01:41PM[SHARE]Monday, July 11, 2016
IT’S TIME TO PARTNER UP Pageant of the Masters, now in its 82nd year, is a singularly unique entertainment that has perfected the art of tableaux vivants ("living pictures"). With worl…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 08:35PM[SHARE]Sunday, July 10, 2016
A FIRE SPARKLING IN HOLLYWOOD Opening a play or musical is always a risk. Plenty of hard work (and sometimes a lot of money) goes into a show, and producers just have to keep their fingers c…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:03PM[SHARE]A MORE CASUAL CRUELTY Richard III, the final play of eight of Shakespeare's histories, has also been an ever-popular play. It offers one of the most coldblooded characters in all of literatu…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:03PM[SHARE]THE MUSICAL WITH LEGS A Chorus Line remains as fresh as the day it appeared just over forty years ago, when the standard Broadway musical was already fading away, making room for the j…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:03PM[SHARE]IT’S YOUR DREAM NIGHT, GIRLS After nearly two years of renovations, I caught an early glimpse of the historic John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, one of Los Angeles’s top entertainm…
SOURCE: Stage and Cinema at 07:03PM[SHARE]Loading more stories…
