The many moods of Engelbert
Our man in Las Vegas, Chris Nichols, reports back to artsmeme World Headquarters with this photo essay of a recent club performance by Engelbert Humperdinck (born Arnold George Dorsey, 2 May 1936).Nichols attended the 83-year-old crooner’s Dec 1, 2019 show at the Orleans Showroom in Vegas. Accompanying his photo essay, Nichols reduced the show to ...
Boy enslaved: ‘Buoyancy’ (2019)
A real stunner — and a stunning achievement for a first-time feature-film director named Rodd Rathjen — Buoyancy, the Australian entry for Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. At age 14, Charka (Sarm Heng) chomps at the bit to escape his daily labor in Cambodian rice paddies under his father’s tyrannical command. ...
Reviewing ‘The Report’: Adam Driver to next play Martha Graham? 2
The two faces of Martha We just endured the earnest-but-meh new movie, The Report (2019), written and directed by Scott Z. Burns with the backing of producer Steven Soderbergh. The film’s noble mission is to recount yet another norm broken in our once-shining nation: the Geneva Convention. A ‘backstage drama’ (an underground “scif” in CIA’s ...
Talking Ben Hecht
One of the greatest American screenwriters, Ben Hecht was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts—reporter, novelist, playwright, crusader for the imperiled Jews of Hitler’s Europe, and propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine’s Jewish terrorist underground. He was also a balletomane and auteur (wrote, produced and directed) the ballet-noir, Specter of the Rose (1946). Whatever the outrage he ...
REVIEW: Twyla’s back and Herman’s got her, in ABT’s ‘A Gathering of Ghosts’
Aran Bell, Calvin Royal III and Catherine Hurlin in Twyla Tharp’s A Gathering of Ghosts. Photo: Rosalie O’Connor. Twyla Tharp is back working with American Ballet Theatre. So for at least one evening — Wednesday’s much-anticipated premiere of her new ballet at the David Koch Theater — all seemed right with the world. Her prior ...
REVIEW: BODYTRAFFIC’s Wallis residency opens strongly
BODYTRAFFIC performs (d)elusive minds by Fernando Hernando Magadan (l-r) Guzmán Rosado, Tina Finkelman Berkett. Photo by Don Lee. Some dance performances give us gorgeous bodies, abstract movement and music we can hum: an escape from politics, madness and murder. Others use dancers for polemics and not much else; these may be worthy, but hard to watch. On Friday, ...
REVIEW: A ‘Royal’ August at the Joyce Theater
Calvin Richardson, Joseph Sissens in Christopher Wheeldon’s “Within the Golden Hour” The Royal Ballet has come to town – or rather, a small but potent ensemble of eight Royal Ballet dancers, who have taken up residence at the intimate Joyce Theater for the first of four Joyce Ballet Festival programs. Curated by RB artistic director ...
REVIEW: Go to ‘Royal’ hell, in Wayne McGregor ballet
edward watson & artists of the royal ballet, photo: cheryl mann In the first of my two viewings of choreographer Wayne McGregor‘s explosive and brilliant dance collaboration with composer Thomas Ades and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “The Dante Project Part 1 [Inferno]” danced by The Royal Ballet as a world premiere for Glorya Kaufman Presents ...
REVIEW: ‘Mayerling”s tornado at the Chandler
Kiss of Death: Natalia Osipova as Mary Vetsera, Ryoichi Hirano as Rudolf in Mayerling at the Royal Opera House. Photograph: Helen Maybanks Last night, at 8:20 pm, most of Los Angeles experienced a 7.1-magnitude earthquake. But those viewing Kenneth McMillan‘s sprawling historic dance-drama, Mayerling, performed by the Royal Ballet at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of ...
Review: a Bowl-ful of Playboy jazz
angelique kidjo, photo credit: matthew imaging The Playboy Jazz mold was set a long time ago. Saturday openers are for socializing and getting the crowd up and moving. Sunday is where the bulk of the serious jazz ensembles and features will be heard. That framework continued unabated, at the 41st anniversary edition of the Playboy ...