A ‘Hungry Ghost,’ satiated, at Skylight Theatre
It’s everyone’s nightmare … to have a very weird white man, a hermit who lives in the woods, pry apart your sliding-glass doors and invade your crib, your private space, your digs, your boite, your last-ditch barrier of bricks-and-mortar against … people like him. And yet, that’s exactly what happens in Hungry Ghost, a new ...
Cowgirl lassos Metropolitan Opera House 2
Sep
3
2023
In 1942, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which, during the European war, toured in exile extensively across the American heartland, en route picked up marvelous dancers and dances. Following the success of Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid (1938) for Ballet Caravan, the Ballet Russe invited Agnes de Mille to create yet another Americana-themed work, ...
Meet Ernest Belcher’s prize pupil, Pola Negri 2
News of the digital restoration of The Spanish Dancer (1923) by Milestone Film & Video and the Eye Film Museum caught our fancy for several reasons. The silent movie is promoted as a “great romance epic,” and gosh, you can never get enough of that, right? In its making, director Herbert Brenon employed a “cast ...
Rock mogul Lou Adler in WeHo convo
Sep
1
2023
The City of West Hollywood presents Lou Adler and Nic Adler in conversation for the City’s Artists & Icons series. Adler, of course, is an American record and film producer and the co-owner of the Roxy Theatre in West Hollywood, California. He developed and produced, among others, The Grass Roots, Jan & Dean, The Mamas & ...
Made in Los Angeles: dance-manufacturing by Raiford Rogers, Tony Testa
Los Angeles has long been an industrial hub; over this city’s relatively youthful history, we’ve been a maker of stuff: first oranges and lemons; then a film industry begun on a wooden platform under the noonday sun; next, aerospace and widget manufacturing to prosecute a world war and man’s first step on the moon; then ...
The ‘Beauty’ of Disney-100 Thursdays
Aug
28
2023
We don’t have kids, so somehow lived through the 1990s (and beyond) without seeing Beauty and the Beast (1991). It was a great delight to make up for lost time. Last Thursday evening, we attended a centenary celebration of the Walt Disney Company at the marvelous El Capitan Theatre — to be enchanted and entertained ...
Chamber music on high — in sync with science & nature 1
Aug
14
2023
Zelter String Quartet It was so fantastic. I had never made the climb up Mt. Wilson, but rectified that mid-day Sunday urging my 2003 Honda Civic through the ricocheting twists and turns of Angeles Crest Highway toward my destination. The draw? Impresario Cécilia Tsan’s “Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome,” a six-year running classical chamber ...
Smashingly trashy: John Waters retrospective at AMPAS Museum
Aug
8
2023
John Waters: Pope of Trash, the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the eponymous artist’s contributions to cinema, opens at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on September 17, 2023. The exhibition will trace the grotesque, daring, tacky, hilarious, and salacious elements that recur throughout Waters’s sixty-year career of filmmaking and reveal how his movies have ...
Of human desire: Adrian Danchig-Waring at Lake Tahoe Dance Festival
Aug
7
2023
Lake Tahoe Dance Festival, Tahoe City, July 27, 2023 Photo: Erin Baiano It is a danced solo for a great dancer of our time, Adrian Danchig-Waring. The muscular yet faultlessly precise twenty-year principal of New York City Ballet ascended the stage in the guise of a 19th century poet: handsome in grey trousers and a ...
Review: Restive political offspring find romance in ‘Red, White & Royal Blue,’ the movie
Anyone who read Casey McQuiston’s best-selling 2019 novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, or who continues to be thoroughly demoralized by all-things-MAGA, will be thrilled to stream this rom-com/ alternate-reality/LGBTQ fantasy-fairy-tale produced by Amazon Studios and directed by Matthew Lopez (the acclaimed playwright of The Inheritance). The story imagines a world in which the son ...