Music review: Terry Riley launches West Coast, Left Coast Festival

“IF THERE IS NO SEDUCTION, THERE IS NO MUSIC.”

The capitalized sentiment leapt off the page in Terry Riley’s program note for “Eureka!” the late-night opening event for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s West Coast, Left Coast festival Saturday night.

And thus -- after more than two hours of regimented warm-up from the Kronos Quartet, the electronic duo Matmos and guitarist and composer Michael Einziger -- did Riley commence the act of seduction, in the dictionary sense of leading a listener astray. As midnight neared, the godfather of Minimalism mounted the organ loft of Walt Disney Concert Hall and began his hourlong siren song.

A rainbow of organ colors poured forth. A shaman at work, Riley sometimes sang as he improvised channeling all that is mystical and magical in our glorious if dysfunctional state.

California, here we come.

Theater review: 'Love's Labour's Lost' at the Broad Stage

This scenically alluring touring production from England of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” which opened Friday at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, put me in mind of an Elizabethan greeting card — or at least one of those gift shop facsimiles that bring on a sudden overpowering urge for tea and scones with jam.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre of London, an outdoor venue on the south bank of the River Thames, strives to give its audience an imaginative approximation of the way Shakespeare’s plays were performed in their own time. The atmospheric productions at this popular tourist destination tend to be sparely appointed, the better to throw into relief the frolicsome period costumes. Music and dance lend a Renaissance conviviality. And the actors pull out all the stops to amuse the groundlings while endeavoring to impress the more poetic sensibilities of the grandees.

As a sprightly if somewhat superficial example of the house style, this “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” directed by Shakespeare’s Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, is broad, joshing and better at coloring in a picture than finely sketching its details. Yet the relentlessly lively, almost manic tempo is perhaps necessary when dealing with an antique theatrical work that’s really more of a verbal opera, composed in a lyrical dialect that isn’t always easy for contemporary theatergoers to decipher.

Lee Strasberg: The acting legacy lives on

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, the school founded in 1969 by the legendary acting guru, who died in 1982, and his wife, Anna Strasberg, who is still carrying the torch of Method training with her son David Lee Strasberg, the institute's chief executive and creative director.

For some, the Method is a relic, a throwback to a mid-20th century form of neurotic realism. Yet no one can deny the effect that Method actors have had on American theater, film and television. I can't say I became a theater critic because of such Strasberg-trained talents as Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Ellen Burstyn, and Robert De Niro, but the startling psychological reality they brought to their roles confirmed me in my admittedly odd choice of professions. Estelle Parsons, currently on tour in Tracy Letts' "August: Osage County," gives a pretty good indication of the way Strasberg encouraged his students not simply to express the feelings of their characters but to live through them, no matter how ferocious or painful.

For a feature in this Sunday's Arts & Books, I sat down with David Lee Strasberg to see whether the Method has evolved under this new generation of Strasberg leadership. I was particularly interested to hear how the Institute has addressed criticism of his father's pedagogy. And I was just as eager to find out how notable acting instructors from outside the institute assess the current place of the Method in 21st century acting training.

When it comes to the Method, everybody has a strong opinion, though respect clearly outweighed derision. Most experts are more familiar with Strasberg's long tenure as artistic director of the Actors Studio than they are with his still-flourishing school. Yet Los Angeles-based private instructor Sharon Chatten, who has taught at the institute and now operates out of the Sharon Chatten Studio, assures that the institute's faculty “know what they’re doing. It’s not just a name. They know the work.” 

-- Charles McNulty

Photo: Estelle Parsons. Credit: Joan Marcus / Center Theatre Group

Music review: Gustavo Dudamel and Gil Shaham play Mozart and Berg

The great 20th century conductor Bruno Walter claimed he wasn’t ready to conduct Mozart until he was 50. This refined, unfussy musician believed the heaven-sent symphonies of a young composer who died at 35 were wasted on the young, with their immature tendencies to romanticize, their childish swagger, their puppy love.

Gustavo Dudamel, 28, opened and closed a Los Angeles Philharmonic program in Walt Disney Concert Hall Thursday night with two late, major Mozart symphonies – the “Prague” and “Jupiter.”  In an act of great seriousness, he used these scores to make an Alban Berg sandwich. The filling was Berg’s elegiac 12-tone Violin Concerto, written in “memory to an angel,” and the wondrously affecting swan song of the Austrian composer who died at 50 in 1935. The violinist was the still youthful Gil Shaham, 10 years Dudamel’s senior.

Obviously, we have no way of knowing whether Walter would have thought that Thursday’s performances had too much musical baby fat.

But I thought about this once-perfect Mozartean on Thursday. Dudamel uses a slightly smaller orchestra for the symphonies than was the custom in Walter’s day. And Dudamel upended the fast movements with rhythmically precise swift punches the way early musickers sometimes do with their flexible period instrument ensembles.

But, somehow, this Venezuelan, who has conducted the Vienna Philharmonic only a time or two (and most recently in Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky), excavated a long-lost Viennese character out of his new orchestra.

Opera review: Philip Glass' 'Kepler' has U.S. premiere at BAM

The starry sky is regular subject, spiritual circumstance or actual setting of Philip Glass’ work. His latest opera, “Kepler,” given its American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Wednesday night, is about the German astronomer who identified the elliptical orbits of our solar system. The composer couldn’t have been more at home.

Among Glass’ 23 operas are “Galileo Galilei” and two others based on Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's “Canopus in Argos” series of science-fiction novels. “The Voyage” opens with Stephen Hawking meditating on space-time and an alien spaceship crashing onto Earth; it ends with Columbus taking his final journey on his deathbed into outer space.

Astronauts in space ships, nebbishes having out-of-body experiences, pensive mystics pondering unknown realms, an ancient Egyptian king becoming one with the sun -- these are situations enhanced by Glass’ repetitive melodies, moody harmonies and propulsive rhythms.

But in “Kepler,” Glass’ yin-yang style gains new advances. More than ever before, the same kind of music can express going somewhere or nowhere, a physical or spiritual state, a secular and sacred condition.

Theater review: 'Equivocation' at Geffen Playhouse

Were William Shakespeare one of today’s bloviating Beltway pundits, would he rather appear on conservative Obama-bashing Fox News or liberal Obama-smooching MSNBC?

Inquiring academic minds have long tried to decipher the politics of a writer who had a way of simultaneously flattering and flouting the powers that be. And it’s to the credit of Bill Cain’s drama “Equivocation,” an ambitiously sprawling work of historical fiction starring the Bard himself, that we come to understand something about the poetic shell-game that artists are forced to play to protect their creative freedom along with their truth.

Shakespeare is a huge subject, as the cottage industry surrounding him attests. Critical studies of every imaginable theoretical flavor compete with speculative biography for the number of volumes produced each year. And this Geffen Playhouse production, which opened Wednesday under the somewhat too lenient direction of David Esbjornson, swells with erudition to both the play’s benefit and detriment. Replete with scholarly wit and a surplus of compelling ideas, the drama keeps wandering off its path to explore yet another facet of the man most of us consider the planet’s all-time greatest playwright.

Critic's Notebook: Despite 'Esther,' New York City Opera rises from the ashes

Reporting from New York.

Things are finally looking up for New York City Opera. The once-feisty alternative to its imposing Lincoln Center neighbor, the Metropolitan Opera, has an acoustically improved home, is selling tickets and getting very good reviews. None of that was true a year ago -- or anticipated.

In fact, bookmakers, had they cared about the state of opera, would surely have expected to make money off those betting against success after Gerard Mortier’s sudden resignation. The then-visionary head of the Paris Opera was set to take over City Opera with a more venturesome and newsworthy operatic agenda than any New York or the United States had seen.

But when his promised $60-million budget evaporated with the stock market crash, he decamped in frustration, leaving a mess. City Opera responded by dropping all of Mortier’s plans, including commissions from Philip Glass for an opera on Walt Disney’s late years and a lyric stage version of “Brokeback Mountain” by Charles Wuorinen. Last season was without a production, as the company awaited renovation of the oversized, sonically undernourished and generally unloved State Theater.

In what looked like desperation, the company hired George Steel, who had turned the Miller Theater uptown at Columbia University into a new music scene but who had had a very short and rocky period as head of Dallas Opera. Steel brought in as second-in-command Ed Yim, the former director of artistic planning for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the two of them, with impossibly little time and money, put together an imaginative, if abbreviated, season.

They also smartly appealed to New Yorkers’ inherent sympathy for the underdog. Old-time City Opera supporters, dubious about a European provocateur taking over what was once known as the People’s Opera, are now vocally rooting for Steel.

I’m rooting for him too, although only if the company comes up with offerings a lot less dispiriting than a revival of Hugo Weisgall’s “Esther,” which I saw Tuesday night. This biblical opera, which the company premiered in 1993, is running in repertory with an updated new production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” that appears to be exactly what City Opera should be all about. It is directed by Christopher Alden, whom Angelenos might remember from his imaginative productions for Long Beach Opera a couple of decades ago, and it stars emerging singers.

Opera review: Esa-Pekka Salonen makes Met debut in New York

From the house of the dead -- as I’ve heard the Metropolitan Opera grumpily described from time to time -- comes a great “From the House of the Dead.”  OK, that’s a cheap shot, but a company generally eager to please has finally tackled Janácek’s last and least ingratiating opera, with the acclaimed French theater, film and sometimes opera director Patrice Chéreau and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen making their Met debuts.

The result is an unusually uncompromising artistic triumph for the Met, and a surprising hit. For 90 transfixing minutes Monday night, at the second of seven performances (running through Dec. 5), an audience of nearly 4,000 sat in remarkable, stunned silence.

“From the House of the Dead,” which is based on Dostoevski’s 1862 exposé of a Siberian prison camp, may not be anyone’s idea of an evening’s entertainment, especially in a weak economy. The opera offers no big starring roles, little conventional plot, unrelentingly intense music and a principally male cast of hardened criminals and cruel guards. But last week's opening night reviews were raves, and shortly before Monday’s curtain, scalpers were circling the new Las Vegas-style dancing fountain in Lincoln Center plaza.

Theater review: 'Mary Poppins' at the Ahmanson Theatre

 
Mary Poppins wafted into the Ahmanson Theatre on her magic umbrella Sunday evening, and even those who think they’ve outgrown her carpetbag of enchantment will have to admit that her timing is, to use one of her pet phrases, “practically perfect.”

The show, while not intended as a holiday entertainment, takes on a special glow as the days get dark early and merriment is placed on family to-do lists. (Sure, Mary can be a bit of a martinet, but wouldn’t you rather jump into a painting with her than clock more overtime with Scrooge?) More surprising is the tale’s recessionary relevance. Live-in nannies may be a thing of the past, but the story of a cold, uptight banker who discovers his humanity at home after his career falls off the hinges is like some kind of post-Lehman Brothers-WaMu fairy tale.

This musical adaptation of P.L. Travers’ classic invention, a co-production of Disney and Cameron Mackintosh, tries to reconcile the sharp edges of the original stories with the cheerier Walt Disney film starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke (the latter of whom made a surprise appearance at the curtain call on opening night, looking impossibly young and dapper). The high-flying spectacle, running on the rocket fuel of such memorable movie numbers as “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” can't help being delightful. But the contrasting tones between Travers and Disney aren’t any more blendable than oil and water.

Theater review: 'Baby It's You!' at Pasadena Playhouse

If the Shirelles can’t quite do for “Baby It’s You!” what Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons did for “Jersey Boys,” please don’t blame the music. The sound of this path-breaking girl group, which skyrocketed up the charts in the early ’60s with such hits as "Dedicated to the One I Love" and 'Soldier Boy," still has an infectious charm. But these singers deserve a better-written vehicle for the roller coaster of fame than this patchwork musical, which opened Friday at Pasadena Playhouse.

The show’s authors, Floyd Mutrux (who also directed) and Colin Escott, have actually focused the drama on the person who discovered the Shirelles, Florence Greenberg (Meeghan Holaway), a  housewife from Passaic, N.J., who went on to build a leading independent record company. She’s a fascinating figure, a Jewish woman who crossed racial and gender lines on her way to establishing a rhythm and blues dynasty, but her trailblazing tale isn’t told with much subtlety or depth, and the group that ignited her success ends up looking like a quartet of well-coiffed ciphers.

Greenberg’s personal and professional struggles seem as if they’re being sign-posted with stick figure drawings (Holaway has a pungent presence, but she can’t breathe life into moribund lines), while the historical themes of the character's journey are bullet-pointed as though for an intermediate-school quiz. We encounter the character early on arguing with her husband, Bernie (Barry Pearl), about wanting to find work in New York. “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and think I coulda done something,” she tells him after singing a few lines from the song that will one day be one of her company's big sellers, “Mama Said.”