Let’s get this out of the way right up front: Crescent City is a difficult piece, and it’s not for everyone. It’s not being uncharitable to say it’s not even for most. That said, if you fancy yourself a connoisseur of the avant-garde, then this one’s for you! There is a snootful of ideas percolating [...]

With La Bohème, Puccini sought to write an opera in the fashionable verismo style that took as its subject everyday life and attempted to treat it in a realistic manner. While his opera dates from the mid-1890s, his source material was a series of stories written in the 1840s by Henri Murger, which depicted real [...]

There’s something mystical going on at the Masonic Lodge in Culver City, and it has to do with the letter ‘O.’ The Woman in the Wall is a new Opera, composed by O-Lan Jones, with music director/conductor David O. Is it a well-rounded piece of avant-garde performance art, an Opening to the infinite, or just [...]

Fair warning: You ought to disregard this review. Read it if you like, then forget it because it is likely to have little to do with “The Seagull” you may see at the Deaf West Theatre. That’s because director Andrew Traister has chosen to double cast each of the twelve characters (save one minor role) [...]

“Imagine a boot stamping upon a human face—forever.” Indeed, you won’t have to do too much imagining in the current run of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ by The Actors’ Gang in Culver City; the brutality, rage and paranoia seething within the claustrophobic totalitarian world of Oceania bubbles vigorously on the surface at the Ivy Substation [...]

It is said that history does not repeat itself, but it frequently rhymes. This adage is wonderfully demonstrated as you watch the events in Simon Boccanegra unfold. For composer Giuseppe Verdi, his 1857 opera dramatizing the struggle between the Guelphs and Ghibellines (warring factions in 14th-century Genoa) was undoubtedly also a commentary on the revolutionary [...]

Maybe somewhere out on the Tartar Steppe, there is a lonesome goatherd who has not yet heard of Cirque du Soleil, but virtually everywhere else this producer of theatrical extravaganzas is rapidly becoming a fixture of 21st-century world culture. Iris is the latest offering from the Montreal-based troupe, and is the first to have a [...]

For its final offering of the 2010/11 season. LA Opera presents “The Turn of the Screw,” a work that is puzzling and problematic on a number of levels. Let’s start with the puzzling: the opera is based on an 1898 ghost-story novella by Henry James — a tale so ambiguous that critics cannot agree whether [...]

Another bubbly bel canto bon bon is playing at LA Opera right now in the form of Il Turco in Italia, a lesser-known Rossini opera that deserves wider renown. Those seeking fresh opera fare should note that this is the debut performance of this work by the company, although this production by German director Christof [...]

I once took a friend who had never seen an opera before to a performance of Lohengrin, which was presented in a fashionably minimalist way. With its epic length, long recitatives and not much to look at, the opera made a less than favorable impression on her. As far as I know, she has never [...]