119 stories by "Michael M. Landman-Karny"
A FIELD OF PUNS IN FULL BLOOM Corn puns are like tequila shots. A few will make you smile and loosen you up, but by the time you are ten or twelve deep you start to wonder how you got here a…
SHAKESPEARE, INTERRUPTED About five minutes into & Juliet, Juliet belts "…Baby One More Time" with such raw confusion you half-believe Britney's lyrics might hold the secrets of the un…
COMING HOME When Fiddler on the Roof opened on Broadway in 1964, it collected nine Tony Awards and captured the universality about families weathering change. But backstage, Zero Mostel a…
CRYSTAL PALACE: AWAKENING PERFECTS THE IMPERSONAL It opens with darkness. Then light fractures across a sixty-foot glass stage that shouldn't exist but does, spinning and splitting into impo…
VISIONARY OF STILLNESS AND LIGHT The line was always the thing. Before speech, before movement, there was line. Line as structure, line as breath, line as the actual measurement of time. In …
A VOICE THAT SPANNED CONTINENTS AND CENTURIES The trouble with singers who insist on being versatile is that they make everyone else look lazy. Dame Cleo Laine, who died on July 24th at her …
THEATRE TURNED ALL THE WAY UP There are moments in the theatre when everything converges: writing, performance, design, direction, and something indefinable that transforms craft into revela…
A CHRONICLER OF PRIVILEGED ANXIETY In the peculiar ecosystem of American theatre"where earnestness often trumps elegance and message supersedes craft"Richard Greenberg, who passed on July 4,…
BOURNE AGAIN: A MUSICAL RECLAMATION IN GLORIOUS MINOR KEY After a long absence from the West End, Oliver! has returned with the force of a Victorian street gang bursting through fog-shrouded…
WHAT THE FOREST KNOWS: TOTORO AND THE RADICAL ACT OF WONDER There's something profoundly radical about a piece of theatre that trusts its audience to believe in wonder. The Royal Shakespeare…
They Just Keep Moving The Line: Smash Cast Recording Crosses Into Broadway Gold The alchemy has finally occurred. After thirteen years, Smash has completed its metamorphosis from cult televi…
A GIANT PEACH OF AN ANTISEMITE There's something eerily familiar about the way John Lithgow adjusts his cardigan in Mark Rosenblatt's haunting new play Giant, now playing in the West End's H…
THE GYM TOOK OVER ARGENTINA AND NOBODY LOOKED BACK Jamie Lloyd's Evita comes at you like a SoulCycle class that got a state grant for performance art. It's sweaty, shiny, and occasionally sh…
In Praise of a Misjudged Misfit: Mark Brokaw and the Undeserved Fate of Cry-Baby In the wake of director Mark Brokaw's untimely passing at 65 yesterday, I find myself returning not to one of…
THE ODYSSEY, IN ASHES AND UPHOLSTERY The chair will not move. That is how we begin. In Anna Ziegler's The Janeiad, now in a quietly astonishing production at the Old Globe, which produced Zi…
STANDING OVATIONS, INNER DEMONS By the time Jeffrey Seller is having sex in a gym sauna"one of the more unfiltered anecdotes in Theater Kid"it's clear this isn't your typical Broadway memoir…
BROADWAY STARS UNDER THE STARS If you've ever wanted to hear Michael Feinstein conduct an orchestra while a pulchritude of peacocks prance in the background, you're in for one of LA's most d…
Synthwave Romance: The Wedding Singer Grooves on Camp, Chemistry, and Crimped Hair If you still belt out "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" in your car or secretly miss the days when big hair …
St. Clair's Swan Song: Pacific Symphony's Volcanic Verdi's Requiem Last night, the walls of the Segerstrom Concert Hall didn't merely vibrate. They braced. Verdi's Requiem opened not with re…
STERILE STAGING, FEROCIOUS VOICES: LA OPERA'S RIGOLETTO BLEEDS DESPITE ITSELF Let's be clear from the jump: this isn't your Nonna's Rigoletto. No 16th-century Italian costumes, no jester's h…
ECHO: A CUBE WITH BIG DREAMS IN A SHOW STILL FINDING ITS SHAPE It opens with a cube. Glowing, two stories tall, and unmistakably the star of the show, this bold architectural gesture doesn't…
Fractured Reflection: The Chinese Lady and the Cost of Being Seen She doesn't enter. She appears"still as a painting, but alive, watching. In Lloyd Suh's The Chinese Lady, now haunting the C…
Wilde at Heart: The Quiet Theatrics of A Man of No Importance Some musicals don't announce themselves. They drift in quietly, settle beside you, and before you know it, you're sitting there,…
MEMORY LOOPS AND ECHOES IN GARDNER'S THE STAIRCASE Rain doesn't fall in The Staircase. It lingers, heavy and waiting. Like a secret no one asked to hear. Like a mother halfway between a lull…
THE TRUTH IS RARELY PURE, AND NEVER SAFE, IN TASTY LITTLE RABBIT There is a tender brutality in the way Robert Mammana shatters a glass plate negative under his heel in Moving Arts' ac…
