Boy, uninterrupted: Choreographer Alexei Ratmansky in new biography 3
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
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 ...
Made in Los Angeles: dance-manufacturing by Raiford Rogers, Tony Testa
Los Angeles has long been an industrial hub; over this city’s relatively youthful history, we’ve been a maker of stuff: first oranges and lemons; then a film industry begun on a wooden platform under the noonday sun; next, aerospace and widget manufacturing to prosecute a world war and man’s first step on the moon; then ...
Review: Restive political offspring find romance in ‘Red, White & Royal Blue,’ the movie
Anyone who read Casey McQuiston’s best-selling 2019 novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, or who continues to be thoroughly demoralized by all-things-MAGA, will be thrilled to stream this rom-com/ alternate-reality/LGBTQ fantasy-fairy-tale produced by Amazon Studios and directed by Matthew Lopez (the acclaimed playwright of The Inheritance). The story imagines a world in which the son ...
REVIEW: Fascinating time-travel with Mark Morris Dance Group at the Joyce Theater 1
numerator, photo: christopher duggan Mark Morris Dance Group was formed in 1980. The Joyce Theater opened doors in 1983. Yet while it has presented dance companies eleven months of the year, the Joyce stage had never hosted a MMDG season until now. So Tuesday’s opening night felt momentous – even historic – as MMDG finally ...
Dancing with deer & birds: Dutch National Ballet’s ‘Frida’ at The Music Center reviewed
The deep fascination with the art and wrenching personal mythology of the great Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907- 54) found no better evidence than the fashion worn by the women of Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this weekend for “Frida,” the bio-ballet choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa for the Dutch National Ballet. Donning ...
Magisterial: Neil Young at the Greek Theatre July 10 2023 6
It wasn’t a smooth performance. He hemmed and hawed, he paced. He ambled between an upright Steinway to a grand piano and then to a vintage pump organ. He swapped his harmonica — he had a bunch of them. That made loud clicks in the holder he wore around his neck, as it banged against ...
REVIEW: Private dancer gone public: TINA, the musical, at The Pantages 1
The audience at TINA – THE TINA TURNER MUSICAL was mostly baby boomer. Which was fine by us. Because the audience was rapt. You felt the admiration, the place was oozing with it. With r-e-s-p-e-c-t for a formidable woman of entertainment, a force to be reckoned with: the late, great Tina Turner (1939-2023). The national ...
REVIEW: Under The Nicholas’s watchful eyes: Dance @ The Holden 1
Fayard & Harold Nicholas mural blesses Dance @The Holden The community feeling at the Nate Holden Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday night was so comfortable that at key moments, often in dead silence, an infant in the house gave salient dance shout-outs. It was the second evening of ‘Dance@The Holden,’ a mini-festival curated ...
REVIEW: ‘Rise’: dance film earnestly misses its pointe
The French film En Corps, curiously translated as Rise and presented by Blue Fox Entertainment, is a well-made, earnest, and thoroughly innocuous movie. It will interest anyone who watched Natalie Portman in Black Swan and railed to the heavens, “Why didn’t they cast a real dancer in the role!?” This new film will more than ...