On opening night for “The Woman in Black” at the Pasadena Playhouse, a full house was laughing out loud, especially early on. Later, they were jumping in their seats, gasping and screaming. The play, which entertained more than 8 million people over 28 years (making it London’s second longest-running West End play), has come to [...]

LA Opera opened its 2018-19 season in grand style with Don Carlo, Verdi’s most ambitious opera. A complex drama about conflict among family, nations and religions with forbidden love at its center, Don Carlo, as Music Director James Conlon has said, “claims its place as perhaps the greatest and most enduring grand opéra of them [...]

Three-time Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn will make her only LA appearance this year in Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s season-opening concert. And equally big news: College students can see the concert for the equivalent of a dollar when they buy an All Access Pass.
Hilary Hahn
Hahn will perform Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins and Violin Concerto in [...]

I had just read Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects” and watched John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place,” and I had the appetite for something equally dark and intense. I got it with the Echo Theater Company’s production of Daniel Talbott’s “What Happened When,” directed by Chris Fields.
I arrived at the Atwater Village Theatre early. It’s in a [...]

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills presents the Bristol Old Vic’s award-winning production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” directed by Sir Richard Eyre and starring Oscar winner Jeremy Irons (“Brideshead Revisited,” “Reversal of Fortune,” “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice”) opposite Olivier winner Lesley Manville (“Another Year,” “Harlots,” and “Phantom [...]

W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, stated that “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” And in few instances is that line more dramatically drawn than in Native Son, Richard Wright’s harrowing 1940 novel about the plight of a young black man [...]

On April 15, Mick Berry ended the one-month run at the Hudson Theatre in Hollywood of his one-man show, “Keith Moon: The Real Me.” The show resumes for three nights only at the Dragon Theatre in Redwood City on April 20.
Keith Moon, like so many rock stars, was a light that burned brightly and briefly, [...]

Stewart Copeland’s “The Invention of Morel” at Long Beach Opera is the second opera premiere I’ve seen this month. The first was Andrew Norman’s “A Trip to the Moon” at the LA Phil [see our review]. Both blew me away. Each was very different, but both were accessible, imaginative and entertaining. And, oddly enough, both [...]

Long Beach Opera (LBO) presents the co-world premiere of “The Invention of Morel,” by Stewart Copeland, co-founder and drummer of The Police, and the London-based actor, director and playwright Jonathan Moore, who also directs the production, on March 17 at the Beverly O’Neill Theater in Long Beach. LBO Artistic and General Director Andreas Mitisek conducts the opera. The opera is a [...]

On Sunday night, while Hollywood celebrities were celebrating their accomplishments in film and many Angelenos were watching the Academy Awards, an almost packed house at Walt Disney Concert Hall was witnessing one of the truly great musical events of the season, if not of the decade.
A power trio of superstars — pianist Emanuel Ax, violinist [...]