Awake to the world, with Jacaranda
Oct
11
2017
The onslaught of bad, breaking news has us numbed. Howling winds, gushing waters, marauding mass murderers, predators of pretty movie stars, all pummel our sensitive souls. That’s where the artistic director of Jacaranda music has stepped into the breach. In launching AWAKE, Jacaranda’s 15th season, Patrick Scott is pushing back against the bad noise, and replacing ...
Love without the germs … from director Garry Marshall
This passionate-but-sanitary movie kiss comes courtesy of “Young Doctors in Love” (1982), the opener of a film series replete with many titles in the comedy genre, all directed by Garry Marshall. It takes place at the Burbank theater that bears the director’s name. “Movies at the Marshall” will screen all 18 films directed the Bronx-born ...
Review: Karen Sherman’s “Soft Goods” @ CAP UCLA
As the Freud Playhouse lost its moorings and ran amok in the final harrowing minutes of choreographer Karen Sherman’s “Soft Goods,” presented Saturday night at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, I’d be hard pressed to believe that the audience, too, did not become untethered. An out-of-control fog machine spewed smoke from stage to ...
Ticket to ride: ‘L.A. Documentaries at Union Station’
A wonderful idea: a film screening series in the noble and ghostly ticketing hall at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. Where the teaming masses purchased train tickets, over decades, to all destinations north, south, and east. Lately the historic hall has emerged as a creative space. There, in 2013, photographer Dana Ross captured Yuval ...
Family redefined: Armistead Maupin @ WEHO Reads
Oct
3
2017
An upcoming evening at WEHO Reads has Armistead Maupin discussing and signing his latest book, Logical Family: A Memoir. [The acronym ‘WEHO’ signifies ‘West Hollywood,’ home to many distinguished writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lived – and died – there.] Maupin, the author of the best-selling Tales of the City series, recounts his odyssey ...
Backstage building, courtesy of Karen Sherman @ CAP UCLA
Oct
2
2017
Los Angeles dance fans have been tickled by Matthew Bourne’s front/backstage machinations in “The Red Shoes,” now on at the Ahmanson Theatre. Bourne cleverly uses a freestanding, and rotating, proscenium arch to physically separate the backstage drama from the show-biz pizzazz of performance. It’s a timely moment, then, to seek a smaller-scale, perhaps quieter, variation ...
Memo to L.B. from W.R. re: ‘hoodoo’ president
Excerpted from “Lion of Hollywood,” by the award-winning film historian Scott Eyman, whose new book, “Hank and Jim” concerning the lifelong friendship between Henry Fonda and James Stewart will be out in November 2017. In his 2005 biography of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, Eyman captures a fascinating exchange between two prominent right-wingers of ...
Corruption, extremism, politics, decadence. Washington D.C.? No, ‘Babylon Berlin’
Sep
28
2017
Berlin in the 1920s was a time when German arts, culture and sciences flourished with immense liberty. It was also a time of decadence. A new German-made television series, Babylon Berlin, features the full spectrum of Berlin life, fueled by drugs and music, corruption and politics, and murder and extremism. Sounds much like a day ...
REVIEW: ‘Bobbi Jene,’ life-and-love in contemporary-dance lane
Bobbi Jene Smith, Or Schraiber in “Bobbi Jene” Tropes and customs of the world of contemporary dance are on view in the new dance-documentary, Bobbi Jene, soon to open in Los Angeles. Rarefied and bizarre rituals, notably a naked dancer, that would be the titular Bobbi Jene, masturbating against a sandbag before a roomful of ...