George Chakiris, Sally Forrest perform “Night and Day” in 1956
Nov
20
2013
At Saturday’s “An Evening with George Chakiris,” at UCLA Film & Television Archive, we enjoyed footage of a vintage live television broadcast, “CBS ‘Ford Star Jubilee: You’re the Top, A Salute to Cole Porter'” which aired on October 6, 1956. Among other great entertainers on the 90-minute live broadcast (Louis Armstrong, Dolores Grey, Shirley Jones, ...
“An Evening with George Chakiris” passes beautifully @ UCLA Film & Television Archive
Prior to a screening of French director Jacques Demy’s auteur-masterpiece, “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort,” in which the dancer-actor-singer appears prominently, UCLA Film & Television Archive honored George Chakiris with clips from his many appearances on television variety shows and an interview that touched on both his singing and his dancing career. The full-evening event took ...
Rokia Traoré brings Malian magic to the Luckman
Though Rokia Traoré began her genre-, culture- and gender-bending incursion into the international music scene in the late 1990s, I didn’t encounter her until Peter Sellars’ 2006 New Crowned Hope Vienna festival, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Reconceiving the composer as a griot traveller between Paris and Mali’s capital of Bamako, Traoré’s glorious ...
Koehler Clips: Iranian filmmaker featured @ REDCAT
Among its countless ethnic/national communities, Los Angeles has Irangeles, the sprawling Iranian diaspora that extends from Encino to south OC and amounting to the largest group of Iranians outside of Tehran. Yet the city curiously seldom sees visiting major Iranian filmmakers. REDCAT is helping counter this odd pattern Monday with the presence of the country’s ...
“Nebraska” tries too hard to be loved
As written by Bob Nelson and directed by Alexander Payne, “Nebraska” is a movie couched in two attitudes—warmth and stubbornness. The former is meant to soften the latter, the latter meant to put some edge on the former. Like Lee Marvin’s Walker in “Point Blank” who goes after the mob for the $93,000 he’s been ...
Shechter, Cherkaoui @ Sadler’s Wells
The big kahuna of London dance, the temple, is Islington’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre. A place of entertainment for 300 years, dance became Sadler’s priority in 1928 when Old Vic manager Lilian Bayliss convinced Ninette de Valois to present the performances of what would eventually become the Royal Ballet (the English National and Birmingham Ballets started ...
Pianist Dick Hyman, a many-colored chameleon
It takes an exceptional chameleon to be able to master every piano style of consequence in jazz history. There have been some good comprehensive players; the late Dr. Billy Taylor comes to mind. But it takes an extraordinary artist to be able to accurately interpret the work of great pianists in their own respective vernaculars, ...
George Chakiris chats about career — in the Los Angeles Times 1
“Gracious Dance” Los Angeles Times, Nov 11, 2013 An excerpt from Susan King’s article here: “It was groundbreaking choreographer-director Jerome Robbins who gave Chakiris his first big break when he cast him as Riff, the leader of the Jets, in the London stage production of “West Side Story.” Years later, Robert Wise, who co-directed the ...
REDCAT’s Dutch treat, Miyazaki’s farewell
An urgent message: Yes, AFI Fest continues hot and heavy through Thursday at the TCL Chinese multiplex, with such must-sees as Denis Cote’s dark and ironic “Vic + Flo Saw a Bear,” Hany Abu-Assad’s acclaimed “Omar,” and the year’s major discovery from the young Argentine cinema, “The Owners.” But make room tonight for Film at ...
‘The Magic Flute’ at English National Opera
Opera lovers in London have any numbers of possibilities. We can go mammoth: Aida in the Royal Albert Hall for an audience of 3500 with singers and orchestra miked to the max; or miniscule: the prizing-winning Opera Up Close at the Kings Head Theatre Pub in Islington for 110, its Prohibition-set Traviata currently running until ...