Los Angeles is misunderstood. Paraphrasing Woody Allen, it’s dismissed as having no culture except for yogurt, or simply dissed as La La Land, paparazzi paradise, a city without a center — and the list goes on.
In my view, it’s cause for rejoicing when a play is beautifully written and is performed by actors who are at least as brilliant as the writing. Mostly because it doesn’t happen all that often.
I’ve been a bit under the weather this week. Being bedridden gave me the excuse to dig into my overstocked bookshelves. Plowing through three books in three days, I want to commend the one that stopped me in my tracks, “A Million Nightingales,” by author Susan Straight, a Riverside, Calif.
I can’t rave enough to adequately convey my excitement and admiration for the new adaptation of “Cyrano de Bergerac” that opened recently at the Fountain Theatre.
They weren’t projecting, they were SHOUTING! And even if they were better actors, the play would still be a lot of frivolous twaddle. It’s “Early and Often,” a play by Barbara Wallace and Thomas R.
I use public transit in every city I’ve ever visited but seriously never expected to ride the rails around Los Angeles. I was incredibly excited to hop aboard the Expo Line on Sunday (free!) as it opened to the public, at the Jefferson/La Cienega boulevards station.
Just over a decade ago, a Westside venue for world-class performing arts was wishful thinking for Dale Franzen, a former opera singer whose ties to the world of the arts run deep.
Not since Mel Brooks’ outrageous “Springtime for Hitler” has there been a holocaust musical as ill-conceived and badly performed as “No Time to Weep,” now on-stage at L.
Unless you’re an aficionado of the ups and downs of the Russian revolution of the early 20th century, it’s very hard to keep track of the players without a scorecard.
Last week I went to the Broad Stage at the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center for the U.S. premiere of “In Paris,” a theatrical piece based on a story by Russian writer and Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin.
MAIN STREET — Santa Monica encourages bicycles for commuting, daily errands and fitness. Why not barhopping? That was Frank Congine’s thought when he caught his first glimpse of what he would later call the Beach Barcycle rolling its way down the streets of Minneapolis.
