154 stories by "Mark Swed"
The idea of reviving a 32-year-old collaboration between composer John Adams, choreographer Lucinda Childs and architect Frank Gehry that had been commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary …
Could “Anna” come home to America? I would like to think that with the example of John Adams and Peter Sellars, Americans might object to the opera's lack of a woman’s poin…
John Zorn is a defiant, protean musician, inescapable on the American scene everywhere it would seem except Los Angeles. But after a 25-year absence, he was back this weekend to proteate.
The myth that opera was born of a miracle dies hard. Musicologists no longer insist that what has proved to be a uniquely innovative art form for four centuries was the exclusive product of …
From the day it opened, Lincoln Center, one of the world's grandest arts complexes, has struggled to get it right. That first night in 1962 in Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall and so…
Claire Chase, a flutist and MacArthur "genius," on Saturday afternoon did what only a brilliant flutist and MacArthur "genius" could do: She turned UCLA's Schoenberg Hall into a giant lung.
"We live in unsettled times," the president sings at the beginning of John Adams' opera "Nixon in China." He has just arrived in Peking (now Beijing) for his 1972 meeting with Chairman Mao, …
I have not seen so happy an audience at Los Angeles Opera this season as the crowd in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday night. The company revived its slapstick 2009 production of Ro…
Opera as an art form about investigation might seem a radical idea in a modern world where so much about contemporary arts and entertainment is defined by conventional narrative. But such wa…
In Tchaikovsky's last opera, "Iolanta," a blind princess who knows nothing of sight learns to embrace threatening light. In Bartók's early opera, "Bluebeard's Castle," a young bride seeki…
Tobias Picker, whose "Thérèse Raquin" was revived by Long Beach Opera on Saturday night at the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro, is a New Yorker with a melodramatic style that seems to su…
Four cautious years after staging Achim Freyer's cutting-edge but coffer-draining "Ring" cycle, Los Angeles Opera has once more sharpened its edge, and dangerously so. On Saturday night, it …
The Metropolitan Opera had a mess on its hands.
Los Angeles Opera is almost back.
Cav and Pag. Coming to the Hollywood Bowl as they did Sunday night, these might have sounded like the names of a pair of sitcom slackers. And there they were, generating laughs from a good-s…
Wilfried Souly, Rosanna Gamson and O-Lan Jones' Overtone Industries launch the 2014 New Original Works Festival with dance and musical theater that evoke a sense of dislocation.Wilfried Soul…
Long Beach Opera's most memorable production of the past three years was David Lang's "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field." It is about little more than a plantation owner in 1854 walking ac…
I don't know to what extent this city practices religious tolerance. But the two noble and awe-inspiring architectural landmarks in the tony, leafy, popular Central West End are the beautifu…
The fact that modern dance was born in Los Angeles is well known, and it is not. Dance texts are not uncertain on the subject. In 1915, the pioneer Ruth St. Denis -- who took inspiration fro…
Thaïs, the sexiest woman in Alexandria during the Byzantine era, and Blanche DuBois, the steamy Southern belle slipping past her prime in Tennessee Williams' "Streetcar Named Desire," may…
Movement mimics activity in the 'Acis and Galatea' score as the love story of a shepherd and a nymph is made into a lively, unpredictable hybrid of opera and dance. BERKELEY — Acis, a …
Frederica von Stade compellingly stars as a wealthy and remorseful Texas widow in Ricky Ian Gordon's opera 'A Coffin in Egypt' at the Wallis in Beverly Hills.As an art form with a specialty …
Critic's Notebook: Is irony getting old? It may feel that way in a look at two dances that deal with brotherly ties: 'Rocco' at REDCAT and 'Pavement' at UCSB.Bar business wasn't so hot at RE…
Death in Peter Brook’s elusive, essential production of “The Suit,” which closes this weekend at UCLA, is not losing your balance. Falling and picking yourself up again mea…
