Best of 2024, arts•meme movie picks!
Dec
23
2024
in mumbai, with ‘all we imagine as light’ We’ll leave THE BRUTALIST, Timothée Chalamet, Angelina Jolie descending the staircase of the Metropolitan Opera House in a St. Laurent cape, possibly confusing herself with the diva she played in MARIA. Leave all that to others. Can we say a polite “no thank you” to the horrifying ...
‘Once Upon a Mattress’ at Ahmanson: from Carol Burnett to Sutton Foster
Dec
22
2024
Well, she certainly passed OUR “sensitivity test.” The adorable, kooky, brave and prodigiously talented triple-threat performer, Sutton Foster, commandeered the barn-like Ahmanson Theatre from a royal roost atop twenty mattresses in Once Upon a Mattress, a vastly entertaining re staging of the goofball classic musical-comedy treatment of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Princess and ...
Jeremy Denk’s profound encounter with ‘crazy uncle’ Charles Ives at 92nd & Lex
Jeremy Denk, pianoall photos: Joseph Sinnott for 92nd St Y Jeremy Denk, one of our leading classical pianists, winner of a MacArthur fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, originally dismissed the gnarly genius Charles Ives as “the crazy uncle of American music, weaving familiar tunes—hymns, ragtime, marches—into unsettling quilts.” But over time Denk has evolved ...
Stirring farewell to ‘Dancing Spirit’ Judith Jamison at New York City Center
There was a vast family gathering at New York City Center on Wednesday December 11, and it felt like a warm embrace encompassed everyone in the theater. While there were no blood relatives of Judith Jamison speaking from the stage at this superbly and lovingly produced tribute, the Alvin Ailey family was out in full ...
Joey Luft to fete Mother in MGM ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’
Dec
10
2024
Luft & Mom (1954) Judy Garland’s son, Joey Luft 2010 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Jonathan Leibson/FilmMagic) Our friends at Hollywood Heritage have invited us to attend an event at the Lasky-DeMille historic film-making “barn” on Highland Avenue, across from the Hollywood Bowl. They entreat us to join them at the Fair – the 1903 ...
To historic Sierra Madre Playhouse, for ‘Bob Baker’s Nutcracker’
We’re heading into the beauty time in Southern California, the holiday season when the air grows nippier, the sun seems more yellow and warming than ever, and white caps of snow decorate the San Gabriel Mountains as you venture east toward the desert. And what better stopover than the charming Sierra Madre Playhouse, where this ...
REVIEW: Nickel Boys’ immersion-cinema rings true in sadness
Dec
9
2024
They look innocent, right? And why shouldn’t they? Two young guys growing up in the late ’50s to early ’60s contemporaneous to the launch of the U.S. space program — where the sky was literally the limit — shouldn’t look any other way. But things on the ground were very different for some. Innocence was ...
Special big-screen viewing of ‘BRUTALIST’ in New York/Los Angeles
Dec
6
2024
brutalist/futurist architecture Geisel LIbrary, UC San Diegoarchitect: William Pereira photo by Erik Jepsen It’s really nice that film distributor A24 is going to extra effort to make sure THE BRUTALIST, shot by director Brady Corbet in 70 mm film format, can be seen not just by elites but by a wide-spreading audience projected on the ...