Toba SingerDanceLos Angeles,
In its December 2, two-performance appearance at The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Music Center in Los Angeles, the Cuban dance company Malpaso featured “Indomitable Waltz,” a 2016 work set on the company in Cuba by noted choreographer Aszure Barton. It was ...
Karen WeinsteinTheaterLos Angeles,
Sometimes a pot shot is just too easy. Sometimes it lands right on the bull’s eye. “Something Rotten,” the title of the new musical at the Ahmanson, offers a quiver full of justifications for a critic to lay into it. ...
Karen WeinsteinMusicLos Angeles,
Verdi’s “Nabucco” could be conceptualized as the protest opera for all seasons. It premiered in 1842, when Giuseppe Verdi was 28 years old, and Italy was a loose confederation of city states dominated by foreign powers, especially Austria in the ...
Karen WeinsteinMusicLos Angeles,
Why, you may ask yourself, have I not heard this opera before? Good question. George Bizet, the composer, is practically a household word, even though his only product you may be able bring to mind is “Carmen,” this season’s LA ...
Karen WeinsteinTheaterLos Angeles,
What on earth does “Head of Passes” mean? Let us clear that up quickly. It is the mouth of the Mississippi River, a desolate wetland where the river breaks into three branches as it empties into the Gulf of Mexico. ...
Karen WeinsteinDanceLos Angeles,
I have never felt that ballet was a very successful medium for telling a story. To convey emotion? It works. For the set up of a situation? Sure. But details that push the story forward become exaggerated pantomime. Therefore, I ...
Karen WeinsteinTheaterLos Angeles,
Say: Paul Rudnick. What do you think of? Most likely The New Yorker column, “Shouts and Murmurs,” to which he is a frequent contributor. So your expectation is lots of toss-off, funny one liners, right? Well, “Big Night” has many ...
Karen WeinsteinMusicLos Angeles,
The battle lines are drawn. On the one side there are the opera snobs who label “Carmen” as that “chestnut.” On the other, there are the thousands who fill halls when “Carmen” plays. The beautiful and melodic score, and the ...
Karen WeinsteinTheaterLos Angeles,
If “The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time” were not such terrific theater it would be worth going to see in order to understand what the world looks like through the eyes of an adolescent with Asperger’s, the ...
Karen WeinsteinTheaterLos Angeles,
“Bang. You’re dead.” It is June 28, 1914; Gavrilo Princip shoots the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. World War I is off to a flying start. Or that is the impression one gets from grammar school textbooks. Of course history ...
