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…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 08:18AMSunday, 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” Terk…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 02:56PMTuesday, 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 agai…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 03:25PMThursday, July 28, 2016
A SCALED-DOWN GYPSY NONETHELESS GOES OFF THE SCALE Gypsy, the musical theater biography of striptease performer Gypsy Rose Lee, is really about Gypsy’s mother, Mama Rose, immortalized by …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 09:28PMSaturday, 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…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 08:08AMWednesday, 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 …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 01:41PMMonday, 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 …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 08:35PMSunday, 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…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 07:03PMA 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 litera…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 07:03PMTHE 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 jukeb…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 07:03PMIT’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 entertainmen…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 07:03PMTuesday, July 5, 2016
ABT’S FIREBIRD SWOOPS INTO THE CHANDLER Making a rare visit to Southern California, American Ballet Theatre returns after a three-year absence to Los Angeles’s Music Center …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 07:04AMSunday, July 3, 2016
A MANE EVENT Writer/performer Benjamin Scheuer’s one-man autobiographical song cycle, The Lion, has certainly caught fire since it premiered under a different name at the 2013 Edinburgh F…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 03:35PMTuesday, May 31, 2016
GOING UNDERGROUND A Critics’ Pick by both The New York Times and Backstage, the passionate docudrama Home/Sick explores how idealism turns to radicalism, as a handful of leaders from t…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 10:10PMTuesday, May 24, 2016
SCREWBALL MUSICAL HEAVEN When it opened on Broadway in 1978, On the Twentieth Century achieved the impossible. Cy Coleman’s clever score—a beautiful pastiche of turn-of-the-century opere…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 08:33AMSaturday, May 21, 2016
THE CITY COMES ALIVE The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts is about to begin a new era under the leadership of its new Artistic Director Paul Crewes. Right out of the gate is a…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 03:45PMWednesday, May 4, 2016
MAKE SOMEONE SOMEWHAT HAPPY At the risk of repeating myself — oh, wait — I am repeating myself, but it bears repeating. I wrote about the great Coco Peru when she appeared in Mis…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 12:26PMFriday, April 29, 2016
NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION For almost 40 years, The Groundlings has proved itself to be one of the premiere comedy troupes in the nation, creating more stars than the Big Bang (and creating …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 04:55PMTuesday, April 26, 2016
FINDING THE HEARTBEAT OF FIDDLER “To Life” indeed. There’s a ton of it, not to mention heartbreak and wisdom, in the 1964 Stein/Harnick/Bock musical triumph, Fiddler on the Roof, now r…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 12:16AMSunday, April 24, 2016
KISS OFF A backstage comedy with more personalities than Sybil, Sarah Ruhl’s preposterous — and in some ways pretentious — 2011 play was apparently given a boffo treatment…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 06:39PMThursday, April 21, 2016
INDEED I DUBIN He wrote the lyrics to the songs that kept the world singing through some of the darkest times in human history: The Great Depression and WWII. But as with most songwriters wh…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 10:15AMThursday, April 14, 2016
FRIENDSHIP AS A LIFE VEST For the lucky few who know confidence and fit in with no real problems, high school is a pleasant stepping stone from adolescence to adulthood. For many, the years…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 06:14AMMonday, April 11, 2016
FAR MORE EDENIC THAN I EXPECTED You would think that if Stephen Schwartz (composer/lyricist of Pippin and Wicked) wrote a musical with John Caird (adapter of Les Misérables and Candide),…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 04:36PMSunday, April 10, 2016
NUNBEARABLE Deloris, a pushy, smart-alecky, malopropism-spouting black woman, is disguised as a nun as she awaits a court date to squeal against her gangster boyfriend. Her background as …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 05:30PMThursday, March 31, 2016
NOT YOUR AVERAGE VIOLINIST; NOT YOUR AVERAGE TANGO Coming up on April 15 and 16, 2016, in Irvine and La Jolla, acclaimed violinist Augustin Hadelich will be joined by dazzling pianist Joyce …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 10:08PMMonday, March 28, 2016
KEEPING THE DREAM(GIRLS) ALIVE Dreamgirls opened on Broadway in 1981, won six Tony awards, and ran for nearly four years. Since then, the Michael Bennett musical has been revived, presented…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 07:25AMThursday, March 24, 2016
ALMOST 70 YEARS AFTER IT WAS WRITTEN, PREVIOUSLY UNHEARD VERNON DUKE MUSIC IS ORCHESTRATED AND RECORDED For over half a century, record companies have given the studio treatment to long-shu…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 10:44PMSunday, March 13, 2016
THERE WILL BE BUZZ ABOUT THIS PLAY, BUT IT’S ALL STING AND NO HONEY As honey bees gather pollen and nectar for their survival, they pollinate crops such as cranberries, melons and broc…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 06:10PMThursday, February 18, 2016
SOMEWHAT FORCED, WE STILL GET THE GLORY OF WEST SIDE STORY Strangely enough, West Side Story feels more dated than Romeo and Juliet, its 500-year-old inspiration. Compared to Shakespeare…
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 07:36AMTuesday, February 16, 2016
WRAP YOUR BRAIN AROUND A NEW A NEW BRAIN When A New Brain opened at Lincoln Center in 1998, I couldn’t understand why the reviews were so higgledy-piggledy. True, I hadn’t actually seen …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 04:13PMONE NERDY, ANAL AND SINGULAR SENSATION The first two weeks of June, 2001, was a very good time to attend Broadway shows. On one day alone, I saw The Producers at 2:00, The Rocky Horror Show …
Linked From Stage and Cinema at 04:13PM 
