Cameron Carpenter, accompanying “Caligari,” pulls out stops 1
London’s Southbank Centre dearly loves a party. Give it any excuse and the architecture that some have characterized as brutalist is festooned with banners, murals and all manner of colorful whirligigs, giving this hitherto cultural bunker the air of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island-on-Thames. The return of the Southbank’s 7,866-pipe Harrison organ after six years of restoration ...
A doctor in the house: Doc Severinsen @ Valley Performing Arts Center 2
That Doc Severinsen is a natty dresser is well known. But when he hit the stage of the Valley Performing Arts Center Friday night clad in orange shirt, red pants and a blue, sequined paisley jacket, it took several moments for the rich visual effect to sink in. With unabated high energy, the 86-year-old trumpeter, ...
Come fly with artist Dan Reisinger
Mar
28
2014
Love the display of vintage El Al posters by Dan Reisinger (b. 1934), one of Israel’s design pioneers, known internationally for his innovative use of symbols and vibrant visual language. The entire Reisinger exhibition spans fifty years of iconic posters including ones of social and political protest (1963–1993); but the cream of the crop are ...
Bill T.’s “D-Man in the Waters” revived by Ailey @ Segerstrom
Mar
26
2014
On offer this weekend at Segerstrom Center for the Arts from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: a major reconstruction of Bill T. Jones’s AIDS-related dance work, “D-Man in the Waters.“ The controversial choreographer created “D-Man” in 1989 at the height of the auto-immune-disease pandemic that robbed our world of many lives nonsensically but hit the ...
British invade Noir City film festival
Mar
24
2014
IT ALWAYS RAINS ON SUNDAY 1947, Rialto, 92 min, UK Dir: Robert Hamer A former barmaid, now the harried matriarch of a family in impoverished Bethnal Green, jeopardizes everything to shelter the escaped fugitive who was once her lover. A slice-of-life noir and prototype of British “kitchen sink” drama. BRIGHTON ROCK 1947, Rialto, 92 min, ...
Catch it! David Parsons’ “Caught” @ Valley Performing Arts Center
Mar
20
2014
Roll with Parsons Dance Company, one night only, at the Valley Performing Arts Center, as the contemporary dance troupe — 13 movement frolickers, they’re nearly dance punsters translating tongue-tanglers into clever body licks — parades forth David Parsons’ uber-physical dance creations. It’s happening this Saturday night at the chic and lovely theater that sits at ...
Tere O’Connor Dance @ Skirball Center
Mar
19
2014
I see a lot of performances. Did you notice that? I do. But few dance concerts left as strong an impression as Tere O’Connor Dance‘s oh-so-casual “Rammed Earth,” presented at a downstairs performance space of the Skirball Center in 2008. I remember dancers cruising, moving, in clusters, formations, lines and rows. Simple, throwaway stuff that ...
Lyris-ists land on LaBrea, for ‘Music & Conversations’ 1
A high-performance moment slated, this weekend, for Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, the stellar LaBrea Avenue art gallery. Chamber music presenter Music & Conversations will host the Lyris Quartet whose punctilious playing we have so enjoyed around town — and who have a wonderful upcoming engagement on April 5 with Jacaranda, Music from the Edge. Saturday ...
Once upon a time, in Los Angeles …
Mar
18
2014
Fairytale houses dot the Southern California landscape, including neighborhoods of Burbank, Hancock Park, Los Feliz to name just a few. But where did this delightful architecture inspired by medieval Europe come from? For “Storybook Style: Whimsy in L.A.” Douglas Keister, a photographer-writer who has authored 25 books on architecture from Victorian homes to bungalows, cemetery ...
Flirting with Fascism, Sinatra: ENO’s Rodelinda
I’d been away from London, in New York, for Rodelinda’s Coliseum premiere but heard such good things about it that I arranged for one of its last performances and am so glad I did. Beyond the grace of Handel’s music conducted by baroque specialist Christopher Curnyn and played with usual panache by a reduced English ...