WHIMSY WASHOUT Adapting a film or play into a musical is a dicey proposition. There’s no perfect formula, but theater’s great librettists"Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, et a…
TAKING NOTES TO THE NEXT LEVEL Los Angeles native Stew, born Mark Stewart, is one of today’s most fascinating songwriters. He has released both solo albums and with his band, The Negro…
I'M DREAMING OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS WITH A BETTER SCRIPT I suppose it’s possible that Irving Berlin's White Christmas might succeed with audiences. Possible, that is, if they are w…
EVERYBODY LOVES SHE LOVES ME I'll be the first to admit that it may be impossible to create a bad production of the 1963 jewel-box musical She Loves Me. This perfect show, based on the 1937 …
BEYOND COMPARE In the past five years, I have encountered only a handful of fresh-to-the-scene classical soloists who completely enraptured"those who combine the old-school magnetic quality …
BOYS WILL BE BOYS Musical Theatre West's (MTW) Reiner Reading Series begins its 2016-17 season with a musical from the beginning of the second decade of the Broadway Musical's Golden A…
THE WINNER BY AN INCH Not long into its original run at Jane Street Theatre Off-Broadway in 1998, a cult following had already been firmly entrenched for Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It was th…
MEMPHIS SOARS The most entertaining musical of the year is not a great musical. Here is a show with a predictable, synthetic feeling book and 19 songs which only emulate the m…
BRING ON THE TEARS Orlande de Lassus, Europe's most famous musician during his lifetime, created nothing finer than the Lagrime di San Pietro, (Tears of St. Peter) a collection of twenty spi…
STILL SEARCHING Is there life after Lily Tomlin? Producer Jon Imparato is attempting to find out: under his auspice, the Los Angeles LGBT Center is reviving The Search for Signs of Intellige…
O’HARA SALON Broadway icon Kelli O'Hara ventured far west of the Great White Way Friday night to perform Broadway favorites and a few originals to a well-sold house at V…
DEFICIENT DRAMA DILUTES DELUSION In 2011, writer/director Jon Braver created Delusion, a new kind of haunted house. In the ensuing years (except last year, 2015, which was dark), with a diff…
REVEALING THE SOURCE There’s so much buzz about The Source, which opens at REDCAT next week, that an extra performance has been added (the show runs Oct.19-23, 2016). The most fasci…
DUDAMEL AND BELL MORE THAN WELL Drop your plans this weekend and get to Disney Hall to witness conductor Gustavo Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic in an astoundingly satisfy…
WHAT A WORLD 1969. The final year in what was one of the most turbulent decades in American history. The battle between counterculture dissidents and the corporate establishment could melt l…
DAISEY’S TRUMPETRY The virtues of monologist Mike Daisey are many. He’s gifted at societal critique; he creates awesome mental pictures; and he’s a wiz at diagnosing and di…
MOSTÂ OF THE WAY Sick of politics? Miss the days when strongarm politicians got things done with blackmail, threats, and tit-for-tat backroom deals? Well, politics are exciting and inspiri…
TO SIR MA’AM WITH LOVE It's an irresistible setting seen in many successful films and plays: When an underdog teacher shapes her troubled teenaged students, she is rewarded by bucking …
DIAMOND LI’L Musical Theatre West's Reiner Reading Series wraps up its amazing season with a musical from smack dab in the middle of Broadway's golden age. Given the terrific score …
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…
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" Terkel a…
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 against …
A SCALED-DOWN GYPSY NONETHELESS GOESÂ OFF THE SCALE Gypsy, the musical theater biography of striptease performer Gypsy Rose Lee, is really about Gypsy's mother, Mama Rose, immortalized by …
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…
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 genius…