111 stories by "Michael M. Landman-Karny"
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…
