Somi aces Ace Hotel Shoreditch
I’d never heard of her but liked her look on the press announcement: the youthful but knowing joy of her open smile, the color riot of her wax print dress celebrating the burnished brown of her skin. Tickets only £10 (in Shoreditch?)The London launch of Lagos Music Salon, her new cd from Okeh. I remember ...
Dance Biennale 2014: Marina Giovannini meditates on beauty
The second week of BIENNALE DANCE 2014, an ambitious urban festival showcasing contemporary choreography whose tag line, “Gesture, Place, Community,” reflects curator Virgilio Sieni’s high aspiration for the art form, got off to a particularly strong start Tuesday evening in Venice. Among four vivid presentations by choreographers Sieni, Roy Assaf and duo Raffaella Giordano/Maria Muñoz, a ...
Gilliam’s brilliant, bonkers Berlioz @ ENO
Bombastic imaginations, bonkers juxtapositions, no attention to rules of deportment, and energy without limit. It would seem that Hector Berlioz and Terry Gilliam are a match made.. well, somewhere .. but certainly for each other. Following the wild and wooly success of his Damnation of Faust in 2011, Gilliam has trained his most particular talents ...
REVIEW: Maurice Hines tappin’ to mother’s heartbeat @ The Wallis 1
The act was called Hines, Hines & Dad. But song-and-dance man Maurice Hines, 70, rectified any oversight of his mom, Friday night, as he opened his one-man show powered by personal history, “Maurice Hines is Tappin’ Thru Life,” at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. The touching, classy, and beautifully staged cabaret program, ...
Claude Lelouch on the friendship in “We Love You, You Bastard” 1
French film director Claude Lelouch, whose seventh film, A Man and a Woman (1966), catapulted an international career, persists in his cinematic exploration of the perils of the human heart — not just in love but in friendship. LeLouch’s 44th feature, “We Love You, You Bastard,” which opened the 18th annual COLCOA French film festival ...
Savion Glover, sole survivor
I’ve been paying attention to Savion Glover since he incandesced onto the theatre scene in The Tap Dance Kid at age 12. His level of virtuosity, enhanced by a cheeky grin and genuine joy at being up there just doin’ it! as impossible to resist as a warm sunny day (I live in London, remember). ...
Weaving magic to the Bard: The Royal Ballet in “The Winter’s Tale”
I don’t get to Covent Garden all that often lately. Downstairs to the Linbury Studio experiments, yes, but upstairs? Elegant always, but stately for my current tastes — my dance fix is generally fed by Sadlers Wells these days. Last season’s Royal Ballet encounter with Mayerling — my favorite narrative by far — had been ...
A doctor in the house: Doc Severinsen @ Valley Performing Arts Center 2
That Doc Severinsen is a natty dresser is well known. But when he hit the stage of the Valley Performing Arts Center Friday night clad in orange shirt, red pants and a blue, sequined paisley jacket, it took several moments for the rich visual effect to sink in. With unabated high energy, the 86-year-old trumpeter, ...
Flirting with Fascism, Sinatra: ENO’s Rodelinda
I’d been away from London, in New York, for Rodelinda’s Coliseum premiere but heard such good things about it that I arranged for one of its last performances and am so glad I did. Beyond the grace of Handel’s music conducted by baroque specialist Christopher Curnyn and played with usual panache by a reduced English ...
Review: Danielle Agami’s “EXHIBITa” @ Celebrate Dance 2
Think of a Robert Crumb cartoon strip — in all its gnarly, grotesque glory. That roughly equates to watching the weird and wonderful foot-parade choreographer Danielle Agami sent across the Alex Theatre stage last night at the ninth annual “Celebrate Dance.” Agami’s “EXHIBITa,” chock-filled with witty movement invention in its Los Angeles premiere, offered the ...