I was admittedly charmed by these rehearsal photos from the upcoming production of RENT at the Hollywood Bowl.
RENT, written by Jonathan Larson and directed by Michael Greif, originally opened at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre on April 29, 1996, following an extended engagement at off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop.
The musical went on to win the Tony Award for best musical, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for drama. With a 12-year run on Broadway and 5,124 performances, RENT is the ninth longest running show in Broadway history.
Let’s see how the show does in the 18,000 seat Hollywood Bowl.
$1 buys a seat at the top of the Bowl for many of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s concerts, but perhaps this musical will fetch a higher rent.
The photos show director Neil Patrick Harris, a former New York cast member, with Vanessa Hudgens as Mimi and Aaron Tveit as Roger.
arts·meme is proud to announce her participation in “Jack Cole, Unsung Genius” a celebration of the innovative jazz choreographer at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the summer dance camp for grown ups in Becket, Massachusetts.
The event will take place Saturday August 14, 4 pm.
The Cole commemoration fits surprisingly well with Jacob’s Pillow history. In his early career, the genre-busting dancer-choreographer had his first dance training with pioneering dance troupe, Denishawn.
After Denishawn’s demise circa 1931, Cole became a member of founder Ted Shawn’s men’s group. Shawn himself begat the Jacob’s Pillow festival, donating his farm in the Berkshire Mountains as a summer retreat for modern dancers. Great modern-dance choreographers, from Graham, Humphrey, and Limon up through Bill T. Jones, created and performed important works at Jacob’s Pillow.
In the photo above, you can see imposing physicality of the dancer Jack Cole. May I also point out the sculptural detail as Cole reaches skyward and the two women claw toward the ground? Cole, by the way, was a master of low-to-the-ground choreography.
In the shot at right (click for detail), Cole coaches Marilyn Monroe, not on her dancing, although he did that too, but here, in rehearsal with Yves Montand for “Let’s Make Love” (1960), Cole appears to be helping Marilyn with dialogue or singing.
“We didn’t know if they were after Communists, Jews, or just short people.”
With that great one-liner, Mel Brooks, the funniest man in the world, defuses – no, ridicules – the McCarthy hearings and blacklist that terrorized the entertainment industry in the early 1950s.
Together with his longtime friend and indispensable straight-man, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks delivered 45 minutes of bliss to a sold-out American Cinematheque audience Friday night. Like, you died, went to heaven, and headlining in heaven: Brooks and Reiner doing stand-up comedy. Happiness filled the Egyptian Theater as the two alta cockers swapped schtick.
The kibitzing followed a screening of “Ten From Your Show of Shows,” a compendium of comedy sketches from the brilliant early television program that starred Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.
Reiner, now 88, shines in the clips as a durable and versatile straight-man foil to Caesar’s explosive shenanigans. Brooks, now 84, was a young writer on the show, and a protege of Caesar.
Asked how he first joined “Your Show of Shows,” Brooks said, “I wandered in off the street. It was a warm place. There were doughnuts and coffee.”
“The first time I heard Mel,” said Reiner, “He did a thing about a Jewish pirate. He was complaining about how hard it was to set sail. I was laughing hysterically. A Jewish pirate. That voice was the genesis of the “The 2000 Year Old Man.”
Said Brooks, “The voice was based on my uncle and my grandmother. The only word my grandmother knew in English was subway.”
Reiner continued: “Mel was obstreperous and he was also late. He had a problem waking up. But Mel was a firecracker. Sid wanted him there.”
“I was working in the mountains,” said Brooks. “I was a bus boy and a drummer. Sid was a tenor sax player and a comic on the side. I got to know him. Don Dell took me to the Copacabana to see him. Max Liebman ["Your Show of Shows" producer] was there, talking about a thing called television. I said, ‘What am I a wrestler?’ [wrestling dominated early television], but he said, ‘Milton Berle is on it.’ They were taping at the International Theater, a little theater at Columbus Circle. They needed a few jokes. The genius Mel Tolkin was head writer — a terrific composer and comedy writer, and father of Michael Tolkin [he points to MT, in the audience, looking pleased]. I threw in a few jokes about an airport interview and Tolkin liked it. It was “Jungle Boy” arriving at Idlewild Airport. Like, “Jungle Boy, what is the most frightening thing for you in New York City?” And Jungle Boy barks, “BUICK.”
“Sid hired me to be his personal writer and stooge. I got him corned beef sandwiches,” said Brooks.
The 90-minute weekly “Your Show of Shows” was “truly a live show. We were absolutely live. There were only two [full-time] writers Lucille Kallen and Mel Tolkin. I did additional writing. We had serious writers who were amazing. We’d all pitch, all be screaming jokes, to get the favor of the king [Caesar].”
“I went to Chicago to help Sid on his act at the Palmer House. It was 12, 1 a.m. I was tired. Sid was smoking, I couldn’t breathe. ‘Sid,’ I said, ‘I need air.’ He held me out the 8th floor window by my feet. I could see the traffic on Michigan Avenue. ‘Enough air?’ he asked me.
“Sid was strong. One day he couldn’t park his car in Manhattan so he picked up a Volkswagen [in two lifts, one front, one back] and parked in the space. Guy comes out and his car is on the sidewalk.”
Answering questions from the house, Brooks said: “Sketch writing is an art. It has to have a beginning, middle and end. It has to have characters. At “Your Show of Shows,” we tried to write about things people understood.”
What about Woody Allen? “He was in the writer’s room, but he didn’t work on “Your Show of Shows.” He was 18 years old. He did four specials, ‘Sid Caesar Presents.’”
“He’s a genius,” said Brooks, “but not as good as I am.”
What does Mel Brooks find funny today? “I like ‘Family Guy.’ That’s a very funny show. I like Steve Carrell. And Dave Chappelle was wonderful, truly a creative talent. I put him in ‘Robin Hood – Men in Tights.’”
Los Angeles, a patchwork of suburban satellites assembled into a daunting megalopolis, felt urban Thursday night. A smart young contemporary ballet company, City Ballet of Los Angeles, performed downtown using our handsome cityscape as a backdrop.
Robyn Gardenhire, the group’s go-get-’em artistic director, a veteran of Cleveland Ballet, Karole Armitage, American Ballet Theatre, and the White Oak Project, had the moxie to present her group’s homespun choreography in an abandoned Bank of America banking hall.
Dance square-footage occupying commercial real estate: that’s the kind of architectural creative re-use we like to see!
Gardenhire’s nicely trained dancers, all capable performers, looked their best in her swaggering, pleasantly sensual and taunting work for five, “Salt” to a pulsating disco-style beat. In “Death & the Maiden,” men joined the red-satin-slip-clad ladies pictured above. Dancing barefoot, the ensemble rode the undercurrents of Schubert’s soulful string quartet, with Billie Holiday songs mixed in. Gardenhire’s unforced timing and her pliant and zestful use of ballet technique gave credible and pleasing results. The program also showcased the works of aspiring dance makers in her company.
Related story:
Review: City Ballet of Los Angeles in “Peter & the Wolf” at the Ford Amphitheater
“He got pegged as being short, 5′2″. But he was actually 5′6″ or 5′7″,” said actor/producer David Ladd, himself a very tall man and one of actor Alan Ladd’s four offspring to work in the film industry.
Ladd spoke about his father following the absolutely fantastic screening of “The Blue Dahlia” at the Academy’s summer film noir series curated by Randy Haberkamp.
The George Marshall-directed Los Angeles crime whodunit, dating from 1946, has at its gritty core a tough-guy screenplay by crime writer Raymond Chandler. It was Chandler’s only original screenplay, his follow-up to a successful collaboration with Billy Wilder on “Double Indemnity.” There’s urban legend about Chandler finishing the script at home while on a bruising round-the-clock bender, dispatching pages to the studio by courier.
Watching “Dahlia’s” close-knit ensemble of character actors hurl Chandler’s hard-boiled lines at each other gives tingling pleasure. The director burns time and space around the words so you can take them in.
“Dahlia” is one of seven films Ladd made with co-star Veronica Lake. Ladd, junior, noted: “My parents loved each other. Veronica and my Dad did not have a real relationship outside their films,” adding, “One of his dearest friends, a life long friend, was [actor] William Bendix [who plays Buzz, a key role in "Dahlia."].”
“”Shane,” of course, was my father’s favorite film. But “The Great Gatsby,” he was most proud of. It was not successful. They [Paramount] knew they would re-do it and so they held it back [from distribution.] Howard DeSilva [also in "The Blue Dahlia"] was in it. It was set in the 1940s.”
“My father came from humble beginnings. His family came to California during the Depression; they were in Oklahoma for awhile. It was like “The Grapes of Wrath.” They lived in a tent city in Pasadena. He was malnourished. [Initially] he failed as an actor; they told him he was too short and too blond. Then he worked as a grip. So when he finally became a star, it was hard for him to believe. In Hollywood, the dreams are hard to hold onto. It’s hard to sustain.”
“When he eventually left Paramount, it was for financial gain, but it was like leaving his family.”
Alan Ladd died young, at age 51. Booze and pills were involved: “He was a tremendous athlete, he was a great diver and swimmer. But he didn’t take care of himself like people do today. He had depression problems. He had a tough time,” said his son David, with compassion.
We’re midway through Ian Birnie’s weekend film retrospective of the American-made comedies of Ernst Lubitsch.
Last weekend, we levitated in pleasure under the spell of “Design for Living“ (1933), the sophisticated German-born film director’s version of the Noel Coward play.
Two Americans sharing a flat in Paris, playwright Tom Chambers (Frederic March) and painter George Curtis (Gary Cooper, gorgeous), fall for free-spirited Gilda Farrell (Miriam Hopkins, running the show). She can’t make up her mind which she prefers, and proposes a “gentleman’s agreement”: She will move in with them, but they will never have sex.
Hopkins, shown in the photo at right kibbitzing with Lubitsch, forms the fulcrum of a love triangle that would be the envy of any woman. She swaps between Cooper and March, jangling the two men like charms from her bracelet.
Hopkins dresses in spectacular evening gowns designed by Paramount costume designer supremo, Travis Banton (one nifty number pictured above). Banton, of course, famously created Carole Lombard and did wonders for Marlene Dietrich.
Here’s a good Banton tidbit from his Paramount protegee, Edith Head, quoted in Paddy Calistro’s biography, “Edith Head’s Hollywood“:
“Travis was very slick and personable. He knew how to talk to the stars — how to make them feel absolutely beautiful in his clothes. I learned everything from him…I learned more from Travis Banton by watching him dress Carole Lombard than anything I’ve ever done. I spent every possible moment staying glued to Travis, trailing him everywhere like a puppy. After all, he was the best designer, bar none, in the world. And he taught me everything I knew about designing.”
Tchaikovsky, its composer, was lucky. They wrote his stuff down.
The Russian Imperial Ballet choreographer, Marius Petipa, less so. No video cameras in 1890. So following Petipa's original "Beauty," a century of quibbling ensued over the grand spectacle's staging, intentions, and shoot, its steps!
A huge eye-glazing gob of ink has been devoted to academic and critical discourse — all for a ballet I never found as compelling as other 19th century full-evening works.
But the mish-mash of aesthetics in American Ballet Theatre's "Beauty" production dating to 2007– now on view at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion — gave me greater appreciation for those who care for the historic accuracy of the lumbering full-evening pageant.
photo: Carlotta Brianza as Princess Aurora and Pavel Gerdt as Prince Désiré, costumed for the Grand Procession of Act III in Petipa's original production of The Sleeping Beauty. (Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, 1890) Gillian Murphy photo: Gina Ferrazi, Los Angeles Times
Two recent biopics portray the torrid love lives of great artists — one of our favorite subjects.
First, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (2009), a chicly decorated French film about a purported love affair between the stern couturière and equally rigorous modernist composer — all while Mme Chanel hosted Stravinsky's wife and kids at her impeccably appointed country home. Hot stuff!
Then there's Mahler on the Couch (2010, not yet in distribution), a film that thrashes through the tempestuous times of the battling Mahlers. That would be composer Gustav and his wife, Alma, a girl who got around. Which drove her husband nuts.
The rapturously photographed, overly talky, but still enjoyable German film directed by Percy Adlon debuted at June's Los Angeles Film Festival. I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
Coco & Igor were for me more entertaining than Gustav & Alma, but what do I know? My touchstone is Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
Now, I'm all for suspension of disbelief. I want to believe everything!
But some of the casting in these two films is a bit …. um … beyond the pale !
Igor Stravinsky, shown above, surely among the most brilliant if not the most gorgeous of men to inhabit our planet, gets as his unlikely doppelganger a virile Danish actor, Mads Mikkelsen, also above. Yes, the pallored Igor Stravinsky as wild Scandinavian stud muffin.
And then in "Mahler on the Couch," we meet Viennese temptress Alma Mahler, widely reputed as an irresistible vixen in her era. Evidence: a list of lovers as long as your arm, one artier or more intellectual than the next, viz., Gustav Klimt, Alexander Zemlinsky, Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, Dr. Paul Kammerer, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Werfel, Johannes Hollnsteiner. What a woman!
In the film, a 21st century Pilates-buffeted German actress, Barbara Romaner, gives an altogether splendid and sensual performance as the art-world hottie that you would love to enjoy … if only you could suspend your disbelief ~ ! Okay, Alma Mahler was fast, but this actress is a speeding bullet.
And here the story comes full circle — could it portend a sequel? While living in L.A., guess who Alma Mahler hung around with? Igor Stravinsky! The lovely duo shown at right in 1946.
LACMA's retrospective of Ernst Lubitsch comedies, made in America with a classy European sensibility, opened with the giddy perfection of the German-born director's "Trouble in Paradise" (1932).
Of all the ingredients simmering in this film's sweet stew, it's the pre-code evening gowns in which "Trouble"'s two leading ladies circulate the sound stage dropping witty dialogue that most boggle.
These hand-stitched, body-clinging wonders are the consummate craft of Paramount's great costume designer, Travis Banton, a Texas-born fashion genius with a deceptively common American name. His one eye on Paris, and the other on his audience in Peoria, Banton served up slinky little numbers like the ones Kay Francis and Miriam Hopkins don in this wonderful movie.
[Costume guru David Chierichetti chatted with me about Banton a year ago. Read it here.]
Afloat on the frothy charm of "Paradise," Friday's packed house at LACMA's Bing Theater enjoyed a second feature, "Desire" (1936), starring the great Marlene Dietrich, a film not directed but produced by Lubitsch.
[Double-bill programs, a staple of LACMA's classic film programming for forty years, are in jeopardy, according to LACMA president Melody Kanschat, sour and unpleasant in a recent Los Angeles Times interview. Kanschat tenaciously clings to her message that the museum's audience for film is inadequate -- a mere 30,000 clients lapped up classic cinema at the Bing over the just-finished 2009-2010 season.]
On happier note, Dietrich, at piano below, seduces one of Hollywood's most notorious ladies' men, Gary Cooper, in "Desire." Not one pin dropped in the 600-person auditorium during this song; rather, pins and needles prevailed. The mane of black feathers framing Dietrich's exquisite face: pure Travis Banton.
Tonight at LACMA — the launch of Ian Birnie's 16-film retrospective of the American-made comedies of Ernst Lubitsch.
Both films run a dreamy 90 minutes long! Let' s see how much great entertainment the German expat could pack into 1.5 hours.
Nicola Lubitsch, the director's daughter, will be in the house for a curtain talk.
Trouble in Paradise (1932), dir. Ernst Lubitsch w/ Miriam Hopkins, Herbert Marshall, Kay Francis. Gleaming black and white cinematography and incredible Art Deco sets by Hans Dreier, Paramount's top production designer, add sparkle to this witty tale of two jewel thieves—Marshall and Hopkins—who pose as sophisticated aristocrats in order to rob languorous Parisian widow Francis of her perfume fortune. Lightning-quick repartee between these con artists (meeting for dinner in Venice, they express their growing attraction by pick-pocketing increasingly personal items from each other) gives way to complicated emotions when Francis falls for Marshall, thus forcing an incensed Hopkins to concoct her own brand of larceny.
Desire (1936), prod: Ernst Lubitsch, dir: Frank Borzage; w/ Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper. As Paramount's newly appointed head of production, Lubitsch oversaw The Devil is a Woman, Sternberg's last film with Dietrich, and personally produced Desire, the star's first post-Sternberg film, in which she plays a cosmopolitan jewel thief whose attempts to retrieve the necklace that she dropped into the pocket of American businessman Cooper while crossing the Spanish border leads to comedy and romance.
Los Angeles is bursting with fine art and performance -- plus the best big-screen film viewing in the world. I've covered L.A.'s cultural beat for two decades, lately for Huffington Post and the Los Angeles Times. I mix it up on arts·meme.
I was admittedly charmed by these rehearsal photos from the upcoming production of RENT at the Hollywood Bowl.
Together with his longtime friend and indispensable straight-man, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks delivered 45 minutes of bliss to a sold-out American Cinematheque audience Friday night. Like, you died, went to heaven, and headlining in heaven: Brooks and Reiner doing stand-up comedy. Happiness filled the Egyptian Theater as the two alta cockers swapped schtick.
player and a comic on the side. I got to know him. Don Dell took me to the Copacabana to see him. Max Liebman ["Your Show of Shows" producer] was there, talking about a thing called television. I said, ‘What am I a wrestler?’ [wrestling dominated early television], but he said, ‘Milton Berle is on it.’ They were taping at the International Theater, a little theater at Columbus Circle. They needed a few jokes. The genius 
Los Angeles, a patchwork of suburban satellites assembled into a daunting megalopolis, felt urban Thursday night. A smart young contemporary ballet company, 
“He got pegged as being short, 5′2″. But he was actually 5′6″ or 5′7″,” said actor/producer 
“Dahlia” is one of seven films Ladd made with co-star Veronica Lake. Ladd, junior, noted: “My parents loved each other. Veronica and my Dad did not have a real relationship outside their films,” adding, “One of his dearest friends, a life long friend, was [actor] William Bendix [who plays Buzz, a key role in "Dahlia."].”
Ah, "The Sleeping Beauty" ballet.
Two recent biopics portray the torrid love lives of great artists — one of our favorite subjects.
Igor Stravinsky, shown above, surely among the most brilliant if not the most gorgeous of men to inhabit our planet, gets as his unlikely doppelganger a virile Danish actor, Mads Mikkelsen, also above. Yes, the pallored Igor Stravinsky as wild Scandinavian stud muffin.
actress, 
LACMA's retrospective of Ernst Lubitsch comedies, made in America with a classy European sensibility, opened with the giddy perfection of the German-born director's "
movie.
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