L.A. Times - Theater & Dance Reviews

For 33 years choreographer Heidi Duckler has staged dance performances at far-flung and unexpected locales, from an abandoned Studio City gas station to the Frank Gehry-designed Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro. Her next destination: a hospital campus in South L.A. Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre...

Others highlights include Los Angeles Opera's staging of "Crossing," Musco Center's annual Heartbeat of Mexico festival, Long Beach Ballet's "Coppelia," Santa Monica Symphony's Memorial Day weekend salute and "Noises Off" in Pasadena.

For many mornings, five-time Tony-winning choreographer and director Susan Stroman would turn on her phone to find a musical message from legendary composer John Kander, her friend and frequent collaborator. The content of the messages from Kander, of Kander & Ebb fame: waltzes. “They were called...

Donald Trump may go unmentioned in Stephen Greenblatt’s “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,” but our divisive, norm-trampling president haunts nearly every page of this slim and stirring, if understandably hurried, book. The work, the fruit of a discipline that might be described as applied Shakespeare,...

Perfection is not attainable in this earthly realm, but Audra McDonald came as close as humanly possible in her Los Angeles Opera concert Sunday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The six-time Tony winner, one of the marvels of the theatrical world, is on tour promoting her new live solo album,...

What inspires a play? For “Ripe Frenzy,” a new drama about a school shooting, the genesis included: The quintessentially American play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder; The manifestoes and other documentation that mass shooters have left behind; The memoir “A Mother’s Reckoning” by Sue Klebold, mother...

Momentum 2018 Orange County Ballet Theater’s showcase for emerging dancers includes two new contemporary works, plus a performance of the suite from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” featuring guest dancers from San Francisco Ballet, et al. Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Fri., 7:30...

The world loves winners. Losers, not so much. Red-hot playwright Lucas Hnath toys with this dispiriting but essential fact of life in his 2013 play “Red Speedo,” being given its Southern California premiere by the Road Theatre Company in North Hollywood. In his plays “The Christians” and “A Doll’s...

Racism, gun violence and rebellion are themes in the L.A. small-theater offerings "The Ballad of Bimini Baths," "Ripe Frenzy" and "Antigone, or We Are Rebels Asking for the Storm."

Rest assured you’ve never seen a musical like “Soft Power” before. The show, a collaboration between Tony-winning playwright David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly”) and Tony-winning composer Jeanine Tesori (“Fun Home”), doesn’t begin with traditional singing and dancing. The opening number is actually...

A funny thing happened after my disappointment over “Mean Girls” had me forswearing musicals in the middle of Times Square. I fell in love again with the art form through two rapturous revivals of golden age classics I had mistakenly assumed were past their expiration dates, “Carousel” and “My...

Taye Diggs has a thing for the Disney animated classic “Beauty and the Beast,” so he’s pleased as punch to sing along with the Oscar-winning score beside a cast that includes Zooey Deschanel, Rebel Wilson, Jane Krakowski, Anthony Evans and Kelsey Grammer at the Hollywood Bowl on May 25 and 26. ...

What to do this weekend? Among your options: "Hershey Felder: Beethoven," "The Carolyn Bryant Project" at REDCAT, Orchestra Santa Monica and "The Zarzuela Project" at Olvera Street.

Before he established himself with the Tony-nominated play “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife,” Charles Busch was the undisputed king of camp, best known for cheesy B-movie parodies starring himself as leading ladies on missions of salacious self-satisfaction and murder. That’s certainly the tenor...

For five midcareer pros working in film/video, dance, music, theater and visual art, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts is a remarkable prize: $75,000 to use at a time when work is often poised to go in exciting or even radical new directions. The Herb Alpert Foundation on Thursday announced the...