Theater review: 'The Prince of Atlantis' at South Coast Repertory

There’s a by-the-numbers quality to Steven Drukman’s “The Prince of Atlantis,” a play that sets out to please audiences by giving them a theatrical variation of what they’ve experienced on TV.

A good percentage of Saturday’s matinee audience at South Coast Repertory, where the work is having its world premiere, seemed to eat it up. I found it contrived and tedious, but as dramedies (awful word) go, it hits all the requisite emotional marks while cracking just enough jokes to be labeled harmlessly diverting, at least by those who don’t have any problems with ethnic caricature.

The twist here is that the play’s stereotypical Italian American characters hail from the Greater Boston area neighborhood of Nonantum, a community in Newton that has a distinctive patois, in which “wonga” means “money” and “cuya moi” is how to tell someone to “shut up!” But beyond the way the men affectionately call each other “mush,” it’s the same bada-bing, bada-boom meatball hero subculture that never seems to go out of style in popular entertainment.

Music review: The Baltimore Symphony at Segerstrom Concert Hall

The Baltimore Symphony began its first West Coast tour in 24 long years at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall on Wednesday night. The last appearance had been at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and at the time, there were two unusual things about the orchestra. It had an American music director, David Zinman, who championed living American composers. And it had a woman associate conductor, Catherine Comet.

But that was then. Don’t call me a woman conductor, Comet defensively told The Times. And Zinman did not tour American music here.

The last quarter century has not been without progress. In her fifth season as Baltimore’s music director, Marin Alsop is a woman conductor, and she has broken the highest glass ceiling in the orchestral world thus far. She is popular and brings the Baltimore Symphony deserved attention. She is a proud champion of American composers, dead and alive. She also goes to bat for women composers. And she does not pretend otherwise.

An uncommon woman, Alsop began her program Wednesday by pairing Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” with Joan Tower’s cheeky “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman.” That was followed by Jennifer Higdon’s Percussion Concerto. It is, unfortunately, a commonplace concerto, but Alsop ended with a dynamic performance of Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5.

Pacific Symphony pops season: Gladys Knight, Kenny G, Jersey Boys

Gladys Knight, Amy Grant and Kenny G are the leading stars of the Pacific Symphony’s 2012-13 pops season in Costa Mesa, with four members of the original Broadway cast of “Jersey Boys” and two former witches from the “Wicked” franchise also in the mix.

The season at the Segerstrom Center’s Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, announced this week, also includes a multimedia tribute to George and Ira Gershwin, as well as a movie night (May 9-11, 2013) at which the orchestra will provide live accompaniment to Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds in a screening of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

“Wicked Divas – An Evening of Broadway Hits” (Nov. 15-17) stars the team of Alli Mauzey, who grew up in Anaheim Hills and went on to play Glinda in "Wicked" on Broadway, and Julia Murney, a former Elphaba from Broadway and touring companies of “Wicked.” They'll sing songs from hit musicals, among them both "Wicked" and “The Wizard of Oz.” Murney's credentials include surviving Broadway's critically pilloried “Lennon,” in which she was one of the nine actors who took turns playing John Lennon. Her reading of "Beautiful Boy" was one of the few moments that critics liked in the 2005 disaster.

Three of the “Jersey Boys” original Broadway cast veterans -- Christian Hoff, Daniel Reichard and J. Robert Spencer, who played Four Seasons Tommy DeVito, Bob Gaudio and Nick Massi, respectively -- perform June 13-15, 2013, as will Michael Longoria, who played several parts, including a young Joe Pesci, while understudying (and eventually succeeding) the original Frankie Valli, John Lloyd Young.

The Pacific Symphony’s announcement says that the show is “not a performance of, nor affiliated with the show 'Jersey Boys.'” Instead, the foursome, billed as the Midtown Men, will sing a repertoire of harmony-driven oldies, with the Beatles, Beach Boys, Temptations and Jackson 5 on the menu along with the Four Seasons.

Music review: Pacific Symphony celebrates Iranian New Year

The Pacific Symphony was, Thursday night, the pacific Symphony, an orchestra serving the cause for peace.

The circumstance was the opening at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall of the orchestra’s 11th annual American Composers Festival. This year’s focus was Persian, partly in recognition of the large Iranian American community in Orange County.

The theme was innocuous on the surface, a celebration of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, which begins the first day of spring. It’s an occasion for Iranians of all religions and ethnicities to come together. On Nowruz, people who stopped talking to each other are encouraged to try again.

We don’t, however, live in an innocuous world, and the festival’s news was the premiere of Richard Danielpour’s portentous 51-minute “Toward a Season of Peace.” It got a unanimous standing ovation. Political observers overlook classical concerts as useful litmus tests for popular sentiment toward war and peace. But given the current Iranian situation and Orange County’s reputation for championing conservative causes, this instance perhaps merits noting.

Theater review: 'Sight Unseen' at South Coast Repertory

 

 Donald Margulies’ “Sight Unseen” returns to South Coast Repertory, where the play had its world premiere in 1991. And it’s safe to say that every new production of this critically acclaimed work is a unique experience.

This revival, directed by founding SCR artistic director David Emmes, is absorbing through and through, but it demonstrates the challenge of balancing the competing perspectives of the play. One side dominates here, making “Sight Unseen” seem ultimately more parochial than it should.

Depending on who’s playing Jonathan, a painter whose career has brought him fame, fortune and a New York Times Magazine cover, and Patricia, his ex-girlfriend living in England with her fellow archaeologist husband, the play’s balance of meaning will shift. This is of course true for all good dramas, but the situation in “Sight Unseen” is somewhat more pronounced as the play is a study of a character who bears quite a few similarities to his author.

Distinguished dancers and companies celebrate Donald McKayle

Matthew Rushing and Renee Robinson, stars of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, joined local students and a cast of other celebrated dancers in a concert Thursday night to pay tribute to the art and life of Donald McKayle.

Rushing and Robinson kicked off the UC Irvine-organized event at the Irvine Barclay Theatre with an excerpt from McKayle’s “Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder,” a seminal modern dance work about the wasted lives and crushed dreams of men on a chain gang.  McKayle, an active 81-year-old, was a distinguished professor in the UCI dance department for two decades. He still directs the university’s dance company, Etude Ensemble, which performed the premiere of his latest piece, “The Americas: North and South,” for the show.

PHOTOS: Donald McKayle, a dance career

In welcoming remarks, director Debbie Allen called McKayle “one of the great choreographers and delightful human beings.” McKayle was her teacher at the American Dance Festival, where he was, she said, “the tallest and most handsome man I’d ever met in a pair of tights. He wore us out … but he made us laugh.”

He later launched her career in “Raisin,” the Tony-winning musical that he choreographed and directed. Predating today's crossover choreographers, McKayle worked in musical theater, television and film, adding to his renown as a creator of significant modern dance pieces, such "Games."

Music review: Riccardo Muti, Chicago Symphony at Segerstrom Hall

The mighty Chicago Symphony Orchestra -– made great by Fritz Reiner and turbocharged by Georg Solti -– last visited Southern California 25 years ago this month, playing one concert in then-new Segerstrom Hall and three in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. 

Much has happened at the CSO since. The Daniel Barenboim era came and went. More than half of the personnel has changed over and it landed the much-coveted Riccardo Muti as its new music director. And with the convenient convergence of the San Francisco Symphony’s centennial and Segerstrom Center for the Arts’ 25th anniversary, the CSO was finally lured back Friday night -– this time in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall.   

Yet our ears have changed too. I remember when the CSO blew through town and turned heads with its staggering precision and ability to get a big sound out of recalcitrant halls like the Chandler and old Segerstrom. Now, with the upgrade in technical standards here and elsewhere, the CSO no longer seems so startling.  And in newer Segerstrom, the still-brawny Chicago brasses worked too hard, which they didn’t have to in this space, where the adjustable setting was much too reverberant. 

There was only one concert this trip, but it was a bold one -– loaded with future-shock pieces past and present and one oldie that has dropped off the radar, Franck’s Symphony in D minor.  At 70, Muti looks exactly the same and conducts with the same vigor and expressiveness as he did in his last visits with the Philadelphia in the 1980s.

Dance review: Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo's 'Cinderella' in O.C.

Jean-Christophe Maillot’s three-act “Cinderella” for Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, seen Thursday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, just might be the only ballet of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale with a barefoot heroine. 

Who needs a glass slipper when you’ve got lovely high arches that sparkle like gold, as did the evening’s gracious and warm Cinderella, Anja Behrend? Maillot has no use for a fireplace or ashes, either (though he makes fun of all that in a ballet-within-the-ballet). While other “Cinderellas” exist as an excuse to open the trapdoor and rev up the theatrical machinery, Maillot focuses on underlying allegories. Take notice of the Sisters’ rotted black toes. 

This is not a children’s ballet, though the little princesses seated near me grinned contentedly. Maillot crafts steps with cold precision, using a contemporary dance language of whip-fast classicism, scooped torsos, oversized gestures and exaggerated pantomime. He saves the flowing, exultant pas de deux for Behrend and her quite charming Prince, Asier Uriagereka, for the ball, in the night’s most rewarding apotheosis. 

PHOTOS: "Cinderella" in O.C.

Theater review: 'Elemeno Pea' at South Coast Repertory

 The old upstairs-downstairs distinction (all the rage again with “Downton Abbey”) is given a brief holiday in “Elemeno Pea,” a comedy by Molly Smith Metzler, in which the hired help has more or less taken over a lavish Martha’s Vineyard estate at the end of the summer season. Time, in other words, to break the good stuff out of the liquor cabinet.

The play, now receiving its West Coast premiere at South Coast Repertory, was originally produced at the 2011 Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. SCR artistic director Marc Masterson, who was still the head of ATL when “Elemeno Pea” had its world premiere, makes his Southern California directorial debut with this often amusing morality tale about the compromising consequences of money’s seductive power.

Masterson’s production isn’t quite able to mask the unsettledness of Metzler’s mix of broad caricature and genuine human concern. The playwright wants to have her sitcom high jinks and her psychological interest too. But the staging finds pockets of sympathy amid all the exaggerated mockery, and it’s always a nice surprise when the least likable character turns out to be more than just a villainous twit.

Pacific Symphony season to star Lang Lang and honor Ellington

Guest pianists Lang Lang and Andre Watts will highlight the Pacific Symphony’s 2012-13 season at the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, and the music of another renowned pianist, Duke Ellington, will be in the spotlight as the focus of the orchestra’s annual American Composers Festival.

The season announced Thursday is light on living composers. Saxophonist Daniel Schnyder, who straddles jazz and classical music, will be part of the May 16-18, 2013, American Composers Festival program that also features the Duke Ellington Orchestra and soloists Kenny Drew (piano) and Dave Taylor (trombone). Pieces by contemporary composers from China –- Chinese Canadian An-Lun Huang, and the team of Chen Gang and He Zhanhao -- will be performed along with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (April 4-6, 2013), led by guest conductor Mei-Ann Chen, music director of the Memphis Symphony.

The Pacific Symphony’s music director, Carl St.Clair, will continue to keep the torch burning for opera in Orange County, with a semi-staged performance of “Tosca” (Feb. 21-26, 2013), with singers to be announced. The current season includes another Puccini work, “La Boheme” (April 19-24), which was programmed partly in reaction to the near-absence of opera in Orange County since the Segerstrom Center’s resident company, Opera Pacific, folded in fall 2008.