Fall Preview: Critics’ picks for L.A. theater, classical music

Mark your calendars and reserve your seats. As financially challenged as the arts world may be coming out of the pandemic, the fall slate of shows has our critics excited. The latest iteration of PST — more than 70 art exhibitions centered on a science theme — is dominating museum and gallery lineups, so we have made those picks in a separate guide and interactive map. What follows here is a roundup of stage projects and concerts on our radar, plus one non-PST art event for good measure.

THEATER

Sept. 4-29
“Cyrano de Bergerac,” Pasadena Playhouse
Mention “Cyrano de Bergerac,” Edmond Rostand’s 1897 French classic, and the first thing that might come to mind is an actor wearing a fake nose. Martin Crimp’s modern English version of the play reminds us that the monstrous schnoz isn’t really the point. This is a drama about the seduction of language. Bracingly metatheatrical, Crimp’s update turns romantic melodrama into something verbally thrilling. Chukwudi Iwuji, one of the stars of James Gunn’s international blockbuster film “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and an associate artist at the Royal Shakespeare Company, stars in this Pasadena Playhouse production directed by the reliably inventive Mike Donahue. — Charles McNulty

Sept. 20-Oct. 13
“Sugar Daddy,” Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
L.A.-based comic Sam Morrison found the man of his dreams in the gay mecca of Provincetown, but tragedy spoiled the happily-ever-after ending. In the midst of the pandemic, Morrison’s partner died from COVID, leaving the comic devastated with grief. Morrison turned to comedy as his means of survival. The Broadway-bound show, part stand-up, part solo performance work, is the fruit of his mourning. Oscar Wilde said, “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.” Recognizing, as he did, the profundity of humor, he might have said the same about death. — C.M.

Sept. 11-Oct. 21
“Clarkston,” Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre
Playwright Samuel D. Hunter’s best-known play, “The Whale,” was adapted into a Darren Aronofsky film starring Brendan Fraser in an Oscar-winning performance. Hunter, whose work is often set in his native Idaho, has been quietly building one of the most sensitive bodies of work of any American dramatist working today. “Clarkston,” one of his acclaimed recent plays, is a gay drama about two lost souls set in the titlular Washington state town located just across the Snake River from Lewiston, Idaho. Directed by Echo Theater Company artistic director Chris Fields, who has an instinct for offbeat work that links the personal to the political, the production is sure to draw out Hunter’s gifts for revealing connections between where we live and how we feel. — C.M.

Sept. 11-Nov. 3
“Kill Move Paradise,” Odyssey Theatre
The situation of this 2019 play by James Ijames, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Fat Ham,” suggests a combination of Sartre’s “No Exit” and Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Four Black men find themselves in a waiting room in the afterlife, struggling to make sense of the senselessness. It’s a subject that seems heaven-sent for Ijames, a writer who combines sharp social commentary with outrageous comedy, as anyone who saw the Geffen Playhouse production of “Fat Ham” can attest. Gregg T. Daniel, a dab hand with August Wilson’s ensemble dramas, directs this Southern California premiere at the Odyssey Theatre. — C.M.

Oct. 2-Nov. 10
“American Idiot,” Mark Taper Forum
The Mark Taper Forum reopens with a new production of “American Idiot,” the musical spun from Green Day’s multiplatinum 2004 concept album that made alternative rock with a pop-punk edge seem like the coolest sound on Broadway. Center Theatre Group artistic director Snehal Desai makes his Center Theatre Group directing debut in a collaboration with Deaf West Theatre, a company that has breathed new life into the musicals “Big River” and “Spring Awakening.” Set in the tumultuous period post-9/11, “American Idiot” galvanizes the youthful spirit of rebellion. What could be timelier as election season kicks into high gear than a musical that joyfully raises political consciousness? — C.M.

Oct. 9-Nov. 24
“I, Daniel Blake,” Fountain Theatre
Adapted by Dave Johns from Ken Loach’s 2016 award-winning film in which Johns starred, this stage version grapples with the dilemma of a widowed 59-year-old-carpenter from Newcastle, England, who after suffering a heart attack is forced to navigate systems of state assistance that seem utterly indifferent to his welfare. As Daniel comes to learn, he’s not the only one in a dire situation who is treated like a statistic. Although the play, directed by Simon Levy, is set in Britain, anyone from the U.S. who has run up against our own healthcare bureaucracy should be able to relate. — C.M.

Oct. 13-Nov. 10
“The Piano Lesson,” A Noise Within
Director Gregg T. Daniel, who has been working his way through August Wilson’s 20th century cycle, has repeatedly found ensemble magic in his A Noise Within productions. Last spring, he revealed the majesty of “King Hedley II,” one of Wilson’s harder works to pull off. Now Daniel tackles one of the pillars of the Wilson canon. Set in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, “The Piano Lesson” revolves around a dispute between a brother and sister over a piano, a family heirloom that holds secrets of the past and possibly the keys to a more empowered future. — C.M.

Oct. 15-Nov. 3
“Kimberly Akimbo,” Hollywood Pantages Theatre
The 2023 Tony winner for best musical, based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s play of the same title, revolves around a teenage girl named Kimberly Levaco, who has a condition that rapidly accelerates the aging process. Before she has had a chance to venture forth into the world as an adult, she finds herself turning into an old woman. Her story, unfolding like a dark fairy tale, is as whimsical as it is piercing. Yet the effect is powerfully life-affirming in the way it reminds audiences of the preciousness of time. Full of quirky humor and pointed satire on grown-up immaturity, the musical features a score by Jeanine Tesori (music) and Lindsay-Abaire (lyrics) that will leave you both grinning and deeply touched. — C.M.

Oct. 18-23
“Symphony of Rats,” REDCAT
Two titans of the theatrical avant-garde come together in this Wooster Group deconstruction of a Richard Foreman play. Directed by Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk, this surreal production reimagines the work of a playwright who developed a trademark aesthetic that’s every bit as daringly unconventional as the Wooster Group’s own. The story centers on a U.S. president who receives strange messages that he doesn’t know whether to trust. The setting, a spaceship-museum gallery, might explain the presence of preternatural beings, including a giant rat. Operating in a realm uncurtailed by everyday rationalism, Foreman and the Wooster Group are the experimental theater love-match we’ve been waiting for. — C.M.

Oct. 26-Dec. 16
“Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” Rogue Machine Theatre at the Matrix
One of the theatrical highlights of 2023 was Rogue Machine’s production of Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning.” Guillermo Cienfuegos directed a pitch-perfect cast in a play about young Catholic conservatives that shined a light on the ideological fault lines emerging from the emboldened Christian nationalist movement. (If “Heroes,” which premiered in 2019, didn’t predict Jan. 6, it sure raised awareness of the dangers that were brewing.) In “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing,” Arbery turns his focus to a subject of even greater catastrophic proportions, the existential climate crisis. Cienfuegos directs a cast that includes Kaia Gerber and Hugo Armstrong in a production that deepens the relationship between one of the city’s indispensable intimate theaters and one of the country’s most prescient and provocative playwrights. — C.M.

Nov. 6-Dec. 15
“Waiting for Godot,” Geffen Playhouse’s Gil Cates Theater
Rainn Wilson (NBC’s “The Office”) and Aasif Mandvi (a former correspondent on “The Daily show”) will no doubt infuse some contemporary drollery into this revival of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic, famously described as a play in which “nothing happens, twice.” On the level of plot that may be true, but on the level of meaning everything changes for theatergoers who watch Vladimir and Estragon passing the time as they wait for the mysterious no-show Godot. Judy Hegarty Lovett directs a cast that include her husband, Beckett veteran Conor Lovett, in this collaboration with Gare St Lazare Ireland, the company that the Lovetts founded to bring Beckett’s plays and prose writings to stages around the world. — C.M.

Nov. 7-Dec. 1
“Pacific Overtures,” David Henry Hwang Theater
East West Players has an impressive track record with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, including several productions of “Pacific Overtures.” With a book by John Weidman, the show chronicles a period of Japanese history after American warships under the command of Commodore Matthew C. Perry entered Japanese waters in 1853 to force the isolationist nation to open up trade. This dauntingly ambitious work is exceedingly difficult to pull off, but East West Players has the know-how to do it. — C.M.

Nov. 12-Dec. 15
“La Cage aux Folles,” Pasadena Playhouse
With all the stress, political and otherwise, of these turbulent times, we could use the compassionate uplift that this Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein musical never fails to bring. Based on the play by Jean Poiret, the show invites theatergoers to join Albin, the musical’s drag-queen hero, in belting out the anthem “I Am What I Am.” Directed by Sam Pinkleton, who staged Cole Escola’s current Broadway drag comedy hit “Oh, Mary!,” this revival, which stars Cheyenne Jackson and Tony nominee Kevin Cahoon, is poised to usher in “La Cage” for a new generation. — C.M.

Nov. 21-24
“Life and Times of Michael K,” Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
A collaboration between Handspring Puppet Company (“War Horse”) and Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre and Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, this adaptation translates writer J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel into a purely theatrical language. Directed by Lara Foot, who adapted the work with Basil J.R. Jones and Adrian P. Kohler, the production aims for multimedia splendor. Anyone who has ever been dazzled by Handspring’s brand of simple yet astonishing enchantment will be eager to see the company work its magic on this modern fable about a humble man and his relationship to his South African homeland. — C.M.

Dec. 10-Jan. 5
“Once Upon a Mattress,” Ahmanson Theatre
Direct from Broadway, this revival of the 1959 musical comedy that helped launch the career of Carol Burnett stars two-time Tony winner Sutton Foster — reason enough to grab a ticket. Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Gilmore Girls,” has given a much-needed update to this tale inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea.” Lear deBessonet, who staged the magnificent revival of “Into the Woods” that came to the Ahmanson last year, directs a production that similarly attempts to rediscover the vital essence of an old theatrical favorite. — C.M.

CLASSICAL

Sept. 14
“Three Voices,” the Resonance Collective at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
Morton Feldman’s “Three Voices” is a mesmerizing hommage to a friend, the late painter Philip Guston. Written in 1982 for soprano Joan La Barbara, the piece is meant to be sung live along with two other parts prerecorded by the singer. There is but little text, taken from the poetry of another late Feldman friend, writer Frank O’Hara. La Barbara is a one-of-a-kind singer with extended vocal techniques. This tour de force contains an hour’s worth of haunting, intertwining phrases that feel like a combination of Requiem and Kaddish. Several singers have attempted it, and the latest will be Laurel Irene, a master of repetition, endurance and trance-inducing resonance — a promising start to the Resonance Collective’s new season. — Mark Swed

Sept 21-Oct. 13
“Madama Butterfly,” Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
It’s not surprising that the company opens its season with a 2002 production from Teatro Real de Madrid that updates the drama to a 1930 Hollywood soundstage. A filming of Puccini’s opera is meant to add yet another layer of context to the issues of racial artificiality in opera. Korean soprano Karah Son, who has sung the role of Cio-Cio-San more than 300 times, and the emerging Chilean American tenor Jonathan Tetelman as B.F. Pinkerton, will make their L.A. Opera debuts. Beginning his penultimate season as music director, James Conlon conducts. — M.S.

Sept. 28 and Oct. 4-6
San Diego Symphony gala and Mahler’s Second Symphony, Jacobs Music Center
This orchestra has been going places under its exciting Venezuelan music director and rising-star conductor, Rafael Payare. The problem was that it needed a place to go. The orchestra’s home has been the Jacobs Music Center, a renovated movie palace with lousy acoustics in a dispiriting bank building. But the Jacobs has finally gotten an acoustical renovation, and its opening gala at the end of this month will be followed by a mighty test of orchestra, conductor and hall: Mahler’s Second Symphony (“Resurrection”), the very work that Esa-Pekka Salonen chose to prove the greatness of Walt Disney Concert Hall 21 years earlier. — M.S.

Oct. 1 and 4
“Harawi,” the Wallis and UC San Diego
Julia Bullock, who is among today’s most compelling singers, has been obsessed by Olivier Messiaen’s “Harawi” for the last decade. Written in 1946 by a young French composer released from a Nazi prison camp, the hourlong song cycle for very dramatic soprano and piano reimagines Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde as exotic Peruvian lovers. Messiaen here began his development of a spectacular new musical language for a picture of ecstatic love that transcends death. For a staging to transcend conventional song recital, Bullock enlists adventurous try-anything fellow members of AMOC*, the American Modern Opera Company. The Oct. 1 performance at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills will be followed by an Oct. 4 show at UCSD’s Campbell Hall. — M.S.

Oct. 10, 11 and 12
London Philharmonic at the Soraya, Segerstrom and Granada theaters
When the orchestra visits the West Coast for the first time with Edward Gardner as music director, two programs will feature radically different violin soloists. On Oct. 10 at the Soraya in Northridge, eloquent young American violinist Randall Goosby turns to the nostalgically romantic American violin concerto by Samuel Barber written in 1939, just before World War II. The next nights, at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa and at the Granada in Santa Barbara, the revelatory transgressive Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja plays Shostakovich’s intensely Russian First Violin Concerto, written eight years later, just after the war. A new work by Tania León and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony are on both programs. — M.S.

Nov. 12 and 15
Calidore String Quartet at Colburn
Formed by four restless students at L.A.’s Colburn Conservatory in 2010, the Calidore String Quartet has gained great acclaim, particularly for its recording of the late Beethoven string quartets (a new set of the middle-period quartets is an eagerly anticipated fall release), as well as for championing young composers. This fall, the Calidore returns to Colburn to survey a hometown composer, the Hollywood film-score icon Erich Wolfgang Korngold, playing his little-known three string quartets in the first program, in Zipper Hall. In a second concert, the Calidore is joined by Quartet Integra in Thayer Hall for Korngold’s String Sextet along with Mendelssohn’s Octet and Wynton Marsalis’ “At the Octoroon Balls.” — M.S.

Nov. 16 and Dec. 6-March 15
“Lightscape” at Walt Disney Concert Hall and Marciano Art Foundation
Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Los Angeles Philharmonic are combining their considerable forces for multimedia artist Doug Aitkin’s “Lightscape.” The project centers on a dream-like feature-length film of landscapes and encounters along the West Coast. The film will be screened in November with original live music by Aitkin performed by the Master Chorale, conducted by Grant Gershon, along with the L.A. Phil New Music Group. “Lightscape” will be the climax of this year’s L.A. Phil annual new-music extravaganza, “Noon to Midnight,” and then mounted as an installation at the Marciano Art Foundation in December (with pop-up live performances). — M.S.

Dec. 13 and 15
Zubin Mehta Conducts “Gurrelieder” at Disney Hall
Sept. 13 marks the 150th birthday of Arnold Schoenberg, an Angeleno for the last nearly two decades of his life. He was a composer of incalculable importance and influence, be it film music, the avant-garde or jazz, yet to this day he’s feared by audiences and ignored by far too many music institutions. Various groups and soloists in town have, though, been making amends, and Zubin Mehta has always been a champion. The beloved 88-year-old conductor emeritus of the L.A. Phil caps the orchestra’s Schoenberg festival with the gigantic, glorious post-Wagnerian “Gurrelieder.” — M.S.

VISUAL ARTS

The biggest visual art story this fall is “PST Art: Art & Science Collide,” the latest iteration of what used to be known as Pacific Standard Time. We have chosen highlights from that long roster of exhibitions and events in a separate guide to all things PST. But a MOCA series is also on our radar for fall.

Oct. 4-Nov. 16
Wonmi’s Warehouse programs at MOCA
The Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo will host a series of live events starting with “Build This House,” a celebration of ballroom culture co-presented by the Banjee Ball Foundation. Other programs feature Ellen Fullman and Theresa Wong, Wild Up and Dynasty Handbag, the alter ego of artist Jibz Cameron.