REVIEW: Chilly Nimoy night warmed by jazz duo Goldings & Koonse

Music · Reviews
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photo credit: bob barry It’s a quiet Saturday night on Westwood Boulevard, and all that’s left of the latest rainstorm is a light mist. The Nimoy Theater marquee is the brightest thing on the street, and it draws some people inside. Organist Larry Goldings and guitarist Larry Koonse are playing jazz duets tonight, under the ...

Pina Bausch, Matthew Bourne in dance takeover of Bunker Hill

Dance · Reviews
ROMEO AND JULIET director/choreographer matthew bourne, photo credit: johan persson It warmed my dance critic’s heart to see swarms of Angelenos flocking onto the Plaza of the Los Angeles Music Center to enjoy two impressive and complex dance showcases, both running, separately, at the stalwart performing arts center’s active houses. The 2,000-seat Ahmanson Theater is ...

REVIEW: A well-heeded call for community: DIAVOLO’s ‘Existencia’

Architecture & Design · Dance · Music · Reviews
We all knew why we were there. We were there to remember and commemorate — most of us having lived through it. We were there to ruminate, and then, to thank our lucky stars. For, in the ashes of the January 17, 1994 Northridge Earthquake, a 6.7-magnitude tumbler that overturned the campus of Cal State ...

‘Perfect Days’: Wenders’ cinematic diary of dappled light & shadow

Film · Reviews
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Soon after the pandemic, acclaimed German filmmaker Wim Wenders was invited to witness Tokyo’s award-winning urban renewal project, The Tokyo Toilet, in which renowned designers reimagined the typical urban public restroom. Wenders, who is also a celebrated documentarian (Buena Vista Social Club, Pina, and the new Anselm), was expected to craft short films about each ...

Mini-movie review: Michael Mann’s ‘Ferrari’

Film · Reviews
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If all you want for Christmas is excellent acting and heart-pounding race-car chases in a complex drama-filled love triangle, then master action movie-maker Michael Mann’s Ferrari (presented by NEON) is waiting in a cinema near you. The excellent Adam Driver heads the cast, channeling Enzo Ferrari’s smoldering intensity while working overtime to master the proper ...

FILM REVIEW: ‘Eileen,’ a movie to haunt you on a cold night

Film · Reviews
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One of the rewards of watching Eileen, directed with a pitch-perfect noir sensibility by William Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) and presented by Neon, is embracing the unknown. Are we watching a prison break film with an unlikely accomplice? A repressed lesbian love story set in the 1960s? Or is it a violent revenge fantasy fueled by ...

REVIEW: ‘Pal Joey’ presses ahead, at New York City Center ‘Encores’

Reviews · Theater
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My introduction to Pal Joey came at New York City Center in 1995, when the then-new “Encores” series presented the iconic Rodgers and Hart’s 1940 musical with its original Hans Spialek orchestrations restored. The music – which included an old-fashioned overture and a five-minute ballet (a Richard Rodgers specialty in those vintage early musicals) to ...

REVIEW: When opposites attract, Bridgewater & Charlap at CAP UCLA 1

Music · Reviews
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It was a provocative entry to a fall jazz season: singer Dee Dee Bridgewater and pianist Bill Charlap, performing in a duo format at Royce Hall for UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance. Like a pro wrestling match between a pile-driving heel and a gymnast babyface, it was a potential mismatch too tantalizing to ...

Boy, uninterrupted: Choreographer Alexei Ratmansky in new biography 3

Dance · Reviews
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alexei ratmansky, center, rehearses the sleeping beauty: from rosalie o’connor photo The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet, Marina Harss’s biography of one of the world’s most active choreographers, is just exactly that: a beautifully written, close examination of the many ways in which the 55-year-old artist’s work and life are intertwined. Moreover, her ...

A ‘Hungry Ghost,’ satiated, at Skylight Theatre

Reviews · Theater
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 ...