All articles by Michael M. Landman-Karny
GREASE STILL HAS ITS GROOVE Altadena Music Theatre returns after devastating loss with Rydell High, right on schedule The year is 1959. Rock and roll is reshaping American culture, the Sexua…
ALL ABOUT EVE… WITH JAZZ HANDS Bruce Kimmel’s affectionate revival proves that a sturdy backstage classic and a committed cast can still earn plenty of applause, even when there are rese…
A PILL THAT’S HARD TO SWALLOW Chance Theater’s committed cast sells the songs in this jukebox musical, but can’t overcome a sprawling script When Alanis Morissette released Jagged Litt…
SEXY, SINCERE… AND SLIGHT Outstanding chemistry can’t quite compensate for an opera that compresses too much Andy Acosta has sung Timothy Laughlin enough that the role has started to fee…
NO STRINGS ATTACHED? THINK AGAIN Erik Patterson’s provocative world premiere boasts superb performances but mistakes repetition for depth In F**king Strangers, receiving its world premiere…
WHAT THE MUSIC BOX REMEMBERS A lavish production overcomes a book that never fully solves its own mystery A music box opens. A grandmother sings a lullaby to a five-year-old girl who will sp…
BALANCHINE IN A BOX ACB proves intimacy can be both an asset and a liability George Balanchine said he needed nothing but a stage, some light, and dancers. He also had the New York City Ball…
PEOPLE WHO NEED PEOPLE (TO MIND THE STORE) Michael Mullen shines in Jonathan Tolins’ affectionate backstage fantasy Jonathan Tolins built his 2013 solo play around one of the stranger fact…
CONLON’S LAST SPELL A beloved production returns as James Conlon brings his remarkable LA Opera tenure to a close James Conlon walked to the podium last Saturday night and the house was on…
LONG-DISTANCE DAMAGE Samuel D. Hunter finds devastating intimacy across thousands of miles Sam Shepard built True West on a kitchen and two brothers who could not stay out of each other’s …
A COUNTERTENOR WHO KNOWS WHERE THE POWER LIVES Key’mon Murrah and Les Talens Lyriques turn familiar Handel into something freshly urgent The program announced the obvious: nine arias from …
EMPIRE STATE OF MIND A rare jukebox musical that finds fresh life by letting the songs tell the story A jukebox musical is an inheritance. Someone else wrote the songs, lived the life, banke…
SLIGHTLY TOO BIG FOR HIS WORLD Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer-winning drama offers comfort, compassion, and just enough unease beneath the surface A bell rings before the lights come up. Out of th…
THE JOINT IS JUMPIN’, IT’S REALLY JUMPIN’ Ebony Rep finds the joy, sorrow, and swing hidden inside Fats Waller’s enduring revue Ain’t Misbehavin’ does not tell the story of Fats …
PULLED OUT OF MYTH AND INTO THE HEADLINES Kenneth Cavander relocates Thebes to a near-future America, and something is lost in the move I first read Antigone in a basement college classroom …
LORCA IN DRAG, WITH HIS CLAWS INTACT Rodrigo García and Ugho Badú reimagine a Spanish classic without dulling its edge Lorca wrote for women’s voices and then watched the world go silent…
BRIGADOON EARNS ITS MIRACLE Pasadena Playhouse’s revelatory new production treats Lerner and Loewe’s fable not as nostalgia, but as a question of faith, sacrifice, and survival Dormancy …
The Salon at the End of the Century: The Cardinal Assumption of Dark Library H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, The Island of Doctor Moreau in 1896, The Invisible Man in 1897, an…
THE COST OF STAYING A rigorously observed production that grips in silence, even as the play leans toward explanation There is a language people invent when citizenship can vanish with a kno…
THE HOUSE THAT BUILT YOU A sweeping, structurally ambitious play that grips in the moment even as it searches for its final form There is a moment near the end of the first act of Fremont Av…
DON’T BLAME MILLENNIALS: MILLENNIALS ARE KILLING MUSICALS IS KILLING MUSICALS (OR, WHEN SATIRE EATS ITSELF) An exhausting, vulgar, and unfocused musical that mistakes noise for insight and…
CRITICISM VS CONFESSION When analysis starts to look like refusal Editor’s note: Jesse Green was reassigned from his role as chief theatre critic at The New York Times in 2025 and now serv…
A HUNGER THAT DOESN’T QUITE NAME ITSELF A sharp new play still discovering its center Lewis Carroll understood that eating is never just eating. When Alice stands before the small cake and…
THE LAST FOOL A master’s final shrug lands with surprising weight Verdi was seventy-nine when Falstaff premiered at La Scala in 1893. He had not written a comic opera since Un giorno di re…
A HELL OF A MOUTHFUL A play where grief, faith, and ambition collide —and silence carries the weight Jacobson knows that the domestic and the exalted do not occupy different rooms. Hell Mo…
TWO VOICES, ONE VOLTAGE An evening of operatic power finds its charge in connection, not just scale BroadStage does not often present evenings of this ambition: a sold-out house, a freelance…
EVERYTHING'S COMING UP JULE Broadway's golden-age hits return in a world premiere revue that treats them as living drama Jule Styne's name tends to arrive attached to titles that feel immova…
DELIBES TAKES THE LEAD In ABT's return of Ashton's Sylvia, the best performance at Segerstrom wasn't onstage Frederic Ashton's Sylvia arrives at Segerstrom Center for the Arts after nine yea…
THE RAIN IN SPAIN, UNRESTRAINED At full symphonic scale, My Fair Lady finally sounds the way it was written to be heard George Bernard Shaw got what he deserved. He spent decades refusing to…
THE DREAM ON CREDIT A clear-eyed, unsentimental staging that lets Miller's argument land with full force Arthur Miller finished Act I of Death of a Salesman in a single day and the rest in s…
THREE MEN IN A BOAT, WAITING FOR A FISH At Laguna Playhouse, the making of a blockbuster becomes a chamber piece about ego, craft, and survival Gildart Jackson, Will Block, and Adam Poole Th…
INTIMACY AND ENORMITY: MOZART AND MAHLER IN COSTA MESA Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major, K. 488, is a peculiar piece to a classical program. It omits oboes entirely, replacing them …
STILL THE PHARAOH-EST OF THEM ALL, AKHNATEN STUNS AT LA OPERA An intellectually rigorous, visually arresting production that embraces the opera's challenges rather than disguising them There…
OPERA RETURNS TO RIVERSIDE, AND IT'S BRINGING A 54-PIECE ORCHESTRA The Riverside Lyric Opera's gala concert on March 7 marks a rare moment for the Inland Empire: a full-scale operatic event …
THREE SYLVIAS, ZERO THRILLS Beth Hyland's world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse arrives with the kind of literary bait that makes theater people clasp their reusable water bottles in deligh…
PATRON SAINT OF THE SECOND-RATE A rigorously intelligent and theatrically thrilling revival that restores Shaffer's parable to full force Schopenhauer once drew a distinction between talent,…
TWO MONOLOGUES IN SEARCH OF A DIALOGUE Justin Tanner has spent decades making chaos look easy. Those early Cast Theatre productions like Pot Mom and Zombie Attack trafficked in a particular …
THE ACTRESS WHO MADE THE RIDICULOUS PROFOUND Catherine O'Hara, who has died aged 71, could make you laugh and break your heart in the same scene. Most performers pick a lane; she moved betwe…
Three Couples, Zero Accumulation With a score that forgets to remember, The Notebook drowns in its own mawkish bathwater There's a musical version of The Notebook that might actually work. A…
THE PLAYWRIGHT WHO CHOSE RADIO OVER JAWS Steven Spielberg had asked Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay for Jaws, and Tom said he couldn't as he was writing a play for the BBC. Spielberg sa…
A Night with a Gentleman Thief: Pacific Opera Project's Delightful Fra Diavolo Daniel Auber's Fra Diavolo amassed over 900 performances at the Opéra Comique during the 19th century before b…
AMAZING THEATER HERE AND NOW Kai A. Ealy stands in a doorway wearing a coat that looks like it weighs forty pounds. Maybe it does. His Herald Loomis has just walked off seven years of forced…
WHEN GRIEF MEETS THE ALGORITHM The terrible beauty of grief is that it makes us do irrational things with the most rational tools. In Lauren Gunderson's anthropology, now in its North Americ…
When creation becomes choreography in Frankenstein, the laboratory turns into a stage of desire Mary Shelley's creation continues to haunt not only literature but the stage, where movement a…
HUZZAH AND HO-HUM The curtain speech at Huzzah! " which opened Thursday at The Old Globe " comes with bassoon and tambourine: silence thy phones, feed not ye actors. This bit of business tel…
A Town, a Tragedy, and the Triumph of Kindness The musical Come From Away " with book, music and lyrics by married couple Irene Sankoff and David Hein " tells the remarkable true st…
MURDER NEVER SOUNDED SO SWEET The gentleman killer returns to Southern California with a smile that could polish the silver. In a joint run between Laguna Playhouse and North Coast Repertory…
OUTBREAK OF MANNERS: WHEN POLITENESS TURNS CONTAGIOUS The play begins with a picture of composure. Five parents sit at a polished library table in a progressive private school in Berkeley. T…
THEATRICAL ARRHYTHMIA La Jolla Playhouse has always been fairly adventurous in its programming, but its latest premiere chooses a subject that feels less like theatrical fodder than a medica…
OPERA WITHOUT WALLS: VERISMO IN THE PARK Pacific Opera Project opened Pagliacci into the open air of Heritage Square Park last night, and the result was a strangely festive collision of carn…
