Herb Alpert to be honored with prestigious UCLA Medal
Jun
13
2017
National Medal of Arts recipient and nine-time Grammy winner Herb Alpert will be awarded the UCLA Medal, the campus’s highest honor, on June 16 at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music’s inaugural commencement ceremony. This is recognition for one of our community’s foremost artists, arts producers, arts philanthropist. If anyone embodies the super-cool nature ...
Populist Eifman Ballet en route to Southern California
Choreographer Boris Eifman is the Donald Trump of the ballet world. His fans love him for his provocative, populist appeal while his critics find him unsophisticated and far from coherent. And then there’s the Russia thing. Eifman is Russian and his narrative ballets, while modernist in story line, have the old-school Bolshoi tendency to go ...
A voyage through French cinema hosted by Bertrand Tavernier
Jun
7
2017
Described by director Bertrand Tavernier as “an expression of gratitude to all those filmmakers, screenwriters, actors and musicians who have erupted into my life,” the documentary, A VOYAGE THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA, is manna from heaven to fans of French film. Spanning nearly half a century of the country’s cinematic history, the clips and reminiscences here ...
Bob Dylan’s latest dream: Nobel Laureate speech
excerpted: Achilles tells Odysseus, it was all a mistake. I just died, that’s all. There was no honor, no immortality and if he could he would choose to go back and go back and be a lowly a slave to tenant farmer on earth rather than be what he is, a king in the land ...
Hocus-pocus, here comes the circus!
Just to prove that Washington D.C. does not have the lock on staging circuses, we’ve got a really cool one coming our way in Los Angeles. It’s a revival, by The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, of The Circus, a Bob Baker original production that has not been seen in nearly 40 years. The Circus, originally ...
Gray Davis’s grandest battement
Jun
4
2017
“I never realized how high it was,” he said. “Luckily, I’m a ballet dancer, so I swung my leg up.” That’s what American Ballet Theatre dancer Gray Davis, 31, told the New York Times in describing how he got himself out of the grisly pit of the subway track at Broadway and 72nd Street station. ...
Who was Olga Spessivtseva?
Jun
4
2017
Olga Spessivtseva (1895 – 1991) was the quintessence of a Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet romantic ballerina whom George Balanchine famously called “a beautiful diamond, cool, distant, and perfect.” The legendary Russian ballerina, who died in the United States, is the subject of choreographer Boris Eifman’s full-evening work, Red Giselle, coming soon to Segerstrom Center for the Arts. ...
‘Last Remaining Seats’ super-good throughout June
Jun
2
2017
Glancing through the roster of the Last Remaining Seats (LRC) for the summer of seventeen, I was struck by a better-than-usual selection of flickers and programs. The first three offerings, all in the first half of June, beg attention. The massively popular summer screening series (ahem, hosting the LRS screening of West Side Story in ...
Chatting with Michael Govan about ‘Moholy-Nagy: Future Present’
May
28
2017
It was nice watching the at-home manner in which LACMA CEO Michael Govan toured the cascading galleries of “Moholy-Nagy: Future Present” during the impressive show’s opening week in February. The highly recommended exhibition of 250 works by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a visual master much known for photography and filmmaking, will close on June 18. Sure, the ...
Andrea Martin, beautiful & funny, in support of Armenian women in need 2
We so enjoyed last night’s cabaret-style performance by actress Andrea Martin, accompanied by her versatile sidekick (every woman needs one) Seth Rudetsky. The evening-length fundraiser for the Armenian International Women’s Association took place at North Hollywood’s show-bizzy El Portal Theater. Paying respect to her Armenian family background, the multiple Emmy Award-winning and two-time Tony Award-winning ...