Before Paul Simon got his first guitar, his instrument of choice was the baseball bat. One of his happiest moments was making a headline in a local paper that read “Simon Steals Home.” Though his father was a musician, the young Simon never expressed an interest in music — until he turned on the radio [...]
Quick — name three opéras fantastiques. That’s a tough one. About the only one that comes to mind is The Tales of Hoffmann. LA Opera’s enchanting production — playing through April 15 — offers a delightful mix of lilting romantic music, beautiful sets and eye-catching costumes. It is also an unusual family collaboration, celebrating [...]
How do you boil down the 10,000 lines of verse in Paradise Lost to absolutely nothing and still have it be meaningful? Simple: give it to Jones (Welsh) Talmadge of the Not Man Apart Physical Theater Ensemble and have him do a movement-only adaptation. John Milton’s epic 17th-century poem expanded upon the biblical story of [...]
Call me a reactionary, but I love Donizetti operas. While he composed nearly 70 operas in a variety of genres, he is best known for his comic operas. In this genre, both in music and story, it seems his only aim is to entertain. He mixes lighthearted banter with broad comic bravado and just a [...]
When Wolfgang Mozart was born in 1756, there would still have been many old-timers who remembered the great siege of Vienna by Ottoman Turkish hordes in 1683. While the threat of Muslim aggression grew ever less worrisome with succeeding years, Mozart, like most Europeans, remained fascinated by the strange, impenetrable world of the sultans in [...]
When I was a kid, they sometimes played on TV a movie that made an indelible impression on my young imagination: a Howard Hawks-directed film from 1955 called Land of the Pharaohs. I remember it less for the young Joan Collins as Princess Nellifer (“Her treachery stained every stone of the Pyramid” screamed the ads) [...]
How perfect that LA Opera programmed “Macbeth” during the Halloween season. (I say season because we all know that Halloween is not relegated to just one day in Los Angeles; it’s an event on the scale of Christmas.) Shakespeare and Verdi gave us the witches and ghosts, and LA Opera added devilish beasts to the [...]
On Oct. 5, the former music director and conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic was in town to conduct his current orchestra, London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. But they didn’t perform at Salonen’s old home, Walt Disney Concert Hall. They performed in the beautiful Valley Performing Arts Center on the campus of California State University, Northridge.
And [...]
Does it seem too early to think about Halloween, Day of the Dead and other such seasonal spookiness? Not if you’re Wicked Lit, which has just launched their annual salute to the supernatural. As in the past seven seasons, they have commandeered the Mountain View Mausoleum and Cemetery in Altadena, a majestic yet eerie venue [...]
I am always eager to see the work of young, emerging playwrights. What are they thinking about? What are their influences? Will they succeed in offering something fresh? Many viewers may indeed judge Mary Laws’ Blueberry Toast as fresh and tasty, while others may push the plate away in horror, but there’s little likelihood that [...]
