![]() It’s somewhat involving and apparently novel until one realizes that the text, drawn by youthful composer Christopher Cerrone from Italo Calvino, is dense, poetic, profound and truly requires undivided concentration, while the music is lyrical and rigorous and points the words with skillful felicity and no little gorgeousness. Camera crews abound, and cellphone recordings promiscuously document everyone’s presence at the “Scene.” And listening to playback, we are all our own cameras, walking a tracking shot, head-twisting a pan, staring a close-up. The audience, in their Mickey Mouse ears, look like touristing aliens, and it is hard not to regard the station’s patrons with their luggage and other baggage as objects being observed. The singers and dancers in mufti are interspersed among the terminal’s regular travelers, though it doesn’t take long to spot the tiny “tells” that differentiate them. Some move in packs, instinctively following one another, while others edge more towards the peripheries. ![]() Issued our Sennheiser headphones with their disorienting sense of suggestive directionality, we are consigned to wander the terra cotta tile floors and travertine marble walls of the waiting rooms and of the side patios and grassy areas after starting out in the now-unused “Harvey House” restaurant (the last ever built) where the 11-piece ensemble plays a startlingly rousing overture. Many Angelenos are rarely there or otherwise invariably rushing through. Union Station makes for a spectacular and apt location for such an endeavor, with its smooth melange of Dutch Colonial, Mission Revival and Streamline Moderne styles, an architectural mash-up before we became so self-conscious about the technique. Tony Nominations: Oscar Isaac, Danielle Brooks, 'Ain't No Mo,' '1776' Among Snubs and Surprises
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