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 ...
Cherbourg umbrellas pop with panache, fifty years later
The delicious, the divine, the delectable and digitally restored, THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, opens Friday at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles for a one-week big-screen viewing engagement. If you’ve not yet seen Jacques Demy’s candy-colored all-song French classic — yes, it’s an operetta à la française — on the big screen doing so at ...
Review: Danielle Agami’s “EXHIBITa” @ Celebrate Dance 2
Think of a Robert Crumb cartoon strip — in all its gnarly, grotesque glory. That roughly equates to watching the weird and wonderful foot-parade choreographer Danielle Agami sent across the Alex Theatre stage last night at the ninth annual “Celebrate Dance.” Agami’s “EXHIBITa,” chock-filled with witty movement invention in its Los Angeles premiere, offered the ...
Kosloff, unfurled
He worked for two of the greatest arts titans of the 20th century: Ballets Russes impresario Sergei Diaghilev and Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille. After a long career as a silent movie actor, Theodore Kosloff made his final film appearance in DeMille’s “Madam Satan,” DeMille’s failed movie musical created on the cusp of the Depression. ...