Review: Memphis jookin phenom Lil Buck & pals wow @ Broad Stage
Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade is only eight blocks from The Broad Stage, but it took Memphis jookin phenom Charles “Lil Buck” Riley thousands of miles and several years to get from one to the other. Six years ago, he was busking for quarters on the Promenade, but when a video of him dancing to ...
Wyler’s ‘House Divided’ rises from the vaults @ MoMA
A House Divided — it’s one of those handy generic titles that has lent itself to half a dozen movies and a whole lotta TV episodes over the years. Back in 1931, it was an especially apt name for an early talkie starring Walter Huston, neatly encapsulating the drama’s dark oedipal stew. It’s a work ...
Film maestro Claude Lelouch’s visual symphony, “Un + Une”
Director Claude Lelouch (far right) with his A-list cast of “Un + Une” — Jean Dujardin, Christophe Lambert, Elsa Zylberstein. The director of some fifty films brought his latest to COLCOA French film festival’s big screen last night. The film explores Lelouch’s central theme and his career concern: to plummet the love that exists between ...
French music hall revisited with “Monsieur Chocolat” @ COLCOA
“Monsieur Chocolat,” a biopic set in the fin-de-siècle world of French circus and music hall opened the 20th anniversary edition of COLCOA French Film Festival in Los Angeles last night, bringing exotica and rich visual zing to the big screen of the Director’s Guild of America. The film’s talented director Roschy Zem and its star, ...
Like butter … dancer Clarice Young 3
A memorable performance tonight at the Broad Stage by Evidence: A Dance Company, the Brooklyn-based troupe overseen by uber talented choreographer Ronald K. Brown, whose dense dance vision overlays post-modern elements onto a rich African-based vocabulary, often working with jazz scores. Outstanding among the strong individuals to possess the stage was the radiant and beatific ...
REVIEW: ‘Remembering Water’ from String Theory
Everything about “Remembering Water,” a fully integrated dance-and-rock-music pageant presented by Los Angeles-based String Theory, and repeated next weekend at Santa Monica’s charming Miles Playhouse, is pure joy. Spooling through 13 staged songs for a nicely compact 65 minutes, the highly versatile and handsome troupe of eleven (seven musicians, four dancers) radiate a spontaneous pleasure ...
The Mikado gets a transfusion: Robert Allan Ackerman’s BLOOD 1
David Bowie would be proud. Within opening minutes of Robert Allan Ackerman’s highly original work of musical theater — it is promoted as a political thriller, to which we say pish tosh — this alluring and initially repellent (he grows on you) figure of glam rock played by Takaaki Hirakawa commands center stage of the ...
REVIEW: Garth Fagan Dance @ the Nate Holden
In the photos, captures from “So You See,” a stand-out work in the rich program presented by Garth Fagan Dance at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center last weekend. Choreographed in 2015 by longtime Fagan dancer Norwood Pennewell, to a jazz score by Marc Carey and Vijay Iyer, the work enjoyed two outstanding performances by ...
Not just talkin’ tap, dancing it too @ ALOUD
A wonderful learn-and-have-fun program heading our way after the New Year, as Central Library’s cozy Mark Taper Auditorium will host a special book talk sprung to life. New York Times dance critic Brian Seibert will converse with his Los Angeles cohort, Sasha Anawalt, about his new book, “What the Eye Hears, A History of American ...
Reading tap 1
Dancing, like writing, is a craft before it is an art. Rare is the professional who excels at both; the thousands of hours of practice necessary to make an artist rarely allow time for rigorous training in another genre. Somewhere between the craft and the art, though, lie scholarship and criticism, and the world is ...