Bawdy, bodacious broads on parade
Author/radio host Sandra Tsing Loh presents her solo comedy act, The B**** is Back: An All-Too Intimate Conversation, inspired by her best-selling memoir The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones. For mature audiences. From 1906 through the beginning of television, Sophie Tucker and her bawdy, brash, and risqué songs paved the way ...
arts•meme at seven: confident, independent
May
19
2015
Well wishes go to arts•meme, the fine arts blog, on her seventh birthday, May 24, 2015. The little mademoiselle is pictured on her tricycle-ramble ’round town, collecting memes to dispatch in the daily gazette. A special thank-you to our advertisers. Thank you for working with us! Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, Segerstrom ...
Tap across 42nd Street with “Gotta Dance!” book & movie posters
Above: Belgian poster for 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, USA, 1933). Artist unknown. “The sharp, spunky granddaddy of all backstage musicals… [Busby Berkeley’s] choreography takes center stage in this stunning Belgian poster, showcasing his dancers atop and within the three-dimensional title treatment… the actors took second place to Busby Berkeley’s dazzling, kaleidoscopic production numbers, with their ...
Choreographer Leonid Yakobson’s Soviet struggle detailed at USC Conney Conference
Our good friend, the Stanford University-based dance historian Janice Ross, has written an important new biography about a seminal choreographer in the Soviet Union whose name does not have much recognition in the U.S. Few outside Russia know of Leonid Yakobson, a contemporary to George Balanchine and the leading modernist — and only Jewish — ...
Forceful Mamet patois bolstered in Deaf West Theatre “American Buffalo” 1
In the photos, actors playing a trio of small time Chicago criminals (Troy Kotsur, Paul Raci, Matthew Ryan Pest) stammer, stutter, sputter, and spew the kind of rat-a-tat-tat verbal-jousting that characterizes the dialogue of David Mamet. It’s on offer in a new staging, just opened, of the playwright’s groundbreaking two-act play from 1975, “American Buffalo.” ...
The gorgeous sound of Godard’s ‘Goodbye to Language’ 1
The handwritten scrawl below comes from the pen of cinéaste-provocateur Jean-Luc Godard. The influential director, still working in his eighties, shares the scenario for his startling new film, “Goodbye to Language” (“Adieu au langage”), now in an exclusive run at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre through much of next week. Godard’s 43rd film, a ravishing ...
‘Kinetic Los Angeles’ heralds impact of Russian ballet in California
This startling and marvelous image of a ballerina garbed in an unprecedented and surely unreplicated costume graces the cover of “Kinetic Los Angeles: Russian Emigres in the City of Self-Transformation.” The journal, the 20th edition of the esteemed “Experiment,” has just been published by the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at the University of Southern ...
Sid Grauman, Kim Jong Un collude on Christmas to screen “The Interview” 1
In a cultural mash-up that could perhaps happen anywhere — but let’s face it, it succeeds best in crazy Los Angeles — a Jew and a North Korean are celebrating Jesus’s birthday by screening “The Interview” at the Egyptian Theatre, the movie palace Sid Grauman built in 1922. The screenings are the best rebuttal to ...
Rachel Maddow hails dancing brothers & sisters from Cuba 2
Mr. Obama, tear down that wall! In her news broadcast last night, MSNBC commentator/anchorwoman Rachel Maddow gave a righteous shout-out to the Cuban-expatriate (really “exile’ is the proper expression up till now) classical dancers who grace our major ballet companies — and oh yes, for good measure Maddow also notes sports figures! Featured dance companies ...
Culture war erupts over cellphone useage @ AFI Fest
Nov
18
2014
It was the aggrieved versus the entitled in an unsurprising yet noteworthy altercation that broke out at AFI Fest, as the shared public viewing experience ratchets down. The depressing incident (ironically occuring at a screening of a new biopic on British painter William Turner) perhaps serves as a cautionary tale for those of us aggrevated ...