REVIEW: Liza Minnelli, Michael Feinstein enchant at Segerstrom 5
I never saw Judy Garland in performance. I was fifteen in 1969 when she last played in Copenhagen. Now I wish I had gone. But Saturday night, I got a frisson of that Garland feeling, when in a first, I attended Liza Minnelli’s show at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. The legendary singer delivered a ...
A neighborly day in this beautywood with Fred Rogers
All that was missing was my blankie and a pacifier. Then I would hunker down all night with “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” the latest documentary from Morgan Neville. Neville, whose Twenty Feet from Stardom shone a thrilling light on the unheralded talent of backup singers, in this new doc shifts focus to yet another ...
La vache! French moooo-vies with cows @ COLCOA
Fans of French movies are familiar with seeing scenes from the nation’s rural paysage, the countryside to which Parisians repair for weekends and summer holidays. The usual trope is the stone country-home where, seated ’round big outdoor tables, city dwellers slurp soupe, quaff wine, and discuss in non sequitors the meaning of it all. There they ...
REVIEW: ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ @ A Noise Within
When A Raisin in the Sun was first performed on Broadway in 1959, it became a landmark. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry was the first African-American woman to author a Broadway play, and at 29, she became the youngest playwright to receive New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. While the setting of the piece ...
REVIEW: Keigwin + Company Celebrates Bernstein @ The Soraya
Not one, but two, sweet-hearted, newly commissioned dance works by choreographer Larry Keigwin for his charming and excellent dance troupe, Keigwin + Company, had world premieres tonight in the classy, comfortable, and elegant Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts (The Soraya), formerly the Valley Performing Arts Center. The commissions came as part ...
REVIEW: The Suzanne Farrell Ballet’s farewell bid @ The Kennedy Center 1
Forever Balanchine: Farewell Performances The Suzanne Farrell Ballet Kennedy Center Opera House, Washington, D.C. December 7 – 9, 2017 The repertory for “Forever Balanchine” – the final, bittersweet four-performance season of The Suzanne Farrell Ballet – resonated deeply and on many levels. At the Saturday matinee (the same program as Thursday’s opening night, but with ...
LACMA ‘Found in Translation’ documents Mexi-Cali design dialogue 1
From Sacramento to San Diego, California’s Mexican and Spanish underpinnings are as historic as they are pervasive. We often take those connections for granted, but LACMA’s exhibition “Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915-1985” offers a fascinating view of the influence and confluence between the two cultures in the 20th Century. It’s part ...
REVIEW: Kimin Kim brings action-hero explosiveness to Mariinsky Schéhérazade 2
I admit that prior to Sunday night I had never seen a full-length, fully produced staging of Michel Fokine’s Schéhérazade — including lengthy orchestral prelude, sets, costumes, the works. The Mariinsky Ballet and Orchestra delivered their version this weekend at Segerstrom Center for the Arts as part of an all-Fokine program. At Sunday’s performance, the ...
REVIEW: Michelle Dorrance Dance @ The Wallis 1
The night before seeing Dorrance Dance at The Wallis in Beverly Hills I binge- watched Astaire and Rogers clips on YouTube. Such elegant technique! Two bodies moving as one in gauzy ballrooms. Dancing as if on air. In the 1930s and ‘40s, Fred and Ginger embodied love and luxury for a generation eager to escape ...
Review: Karen Sherman’s “Soft Goods” @ CAP UCLA
As the Freud Playhouse lost its moorings and ran amok in the final harrowing minutes of choreographer Karen Sherman’s “Soft Goods,” presented Saturday night at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, I’d be hard pressed to believe that the audience, too, did not become untethered. An out-of-control fog machine spewed smoke from stage to ...