Only Marvin Hamlisch was missing. Pasadena Pops honors conductor.
A concert that culminates with the great lyricist Alan Bergman crooning in aching nostalgia The Way We Were, a song that he, his writing partner and wife Marilyn, and composer Marvin Hamlisch co-wrote for Barbra Streisand, is an event I’m interested in attending. Bergman is so special, a poet, really. The Pasadena Symphony’s high-quality tribute ...
Southwest Chamber Music’s plein air concert at The Huntington
A terrific, even heady, evening of chamber music at the Huntington Gallery in San Marino last night — a neatly tailored program of French composers for a Sunday’s eve by Southwest Chamber Music. After picnicking on the manicured lawn, we repaired to the gallery’s high-ceilinged, red-tiled patio-loggia decorated with doric columns and marble busts. There ...
Gary Lucas’s “scary magical Jews” terrify in “Der Golem” @ Cinefamily 1
Grammy-nominated Gary Lucas, whom Rolling Stone calls “one of the best and most original guitarists in America,” performed his well-traveled and exceedingly harrowing score to “Der Golem,” the brilliant 1920 silent horror exemplar of German expressionism. The sold-out performance took place earlier this evening at The Cinefamily on Fairfax Avenue — speaking of ghostly Jewish ...
Review: BodyTraffic at the Gindi 1
Did you feel the earthquake that rocked the top of the 405 Freeway near Mulholland Drive Thursday night? Oh, you missed it? It was the tremor of excitement when BodyTraffic, Los Angeles’s newest and best entry into the contemporary dance universe, shook the stage of the University of Judaism’s Gindi Auditorium. The ten-member troupe, co-directed ...
“Patty The Revival” at Highways. Smart and wonderful. Go! 1
Unlike the 28-year-old theater wunderkind Patrick Kennelly, whose electro-opera “Patty the Revival” I very much enjoyed at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica last night, I was a vulnerable ten-year-old sponge when “The Patty Duke Show” hit the airwaves circa 1964. Ka-thunk. That’s the sound of television pablum landing on my undefended prepubescent brain. And ...
Misha acts at Broad Stage, then Tavis Smiley chats him up
I enjoyed watching Mikhail Baryshnikov prowl the Broad Stage, supple as an alert deer, in director Dmitry Krymov’s “In Paris.” Playing a rigid retired military man, Nikolai Platonovic, Barysh speaks mellifluous Russian, his mother-tongue, and Russian-inflected French. The 80-minute dance-drama, an adaptation of a Russian short story by Ivan Bunin, opened Wednesday night in Santa ...
Review: Keith Jarrett travels over the rainbow @ Disney Hall 2
Jazz legend Keith Jarrett opened his solo concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall Tuesday night by plucking on his Steinway’s strings — avant-garde style. Fast forward to his evening closer, a love letter to Los Angeles: Somewhere Over the Rainbow, by composer Harold Arlen. A parade of music, not quite jazz, instead, unidentified art songs, ...
Classical Underground rocks
Clamor filled the central-Los Angeles industrial loft last Thursday evening, when the Russian expatriate painter, Alexey Steele, and his wife Olga opened their funky-junky, atelier-style home to the music lovers of Los Angeles. Amidst a clutter of books, art supplies, burning candles, and oversized classical paintings, propped onto surfaces or hanging from walls, habitués of ...
Between “Pina” and a hard place 4
Heavy-hitting filmmakers are turning their cameras on dance and it’s an honor. It’s also a puzzlement, to the dance world. It surprises us. We thought that the only folk attending dance performances were fellow dancers, parents, and dance critics. But clearly we were wrong. Other artists – filmmakers – love dance too. With “Pina,” German ...
Janet Jackson, queen of the desert, thrills fans @ McCallum Theatre gala 4
Twenty minutes after Janet Jackson’s much anticipated “Number Ones: Up Close and Personal” gala concert was scheduled to start Thursday evening at Palm Desert’s McCallum Theatre, some in the audience began to squirm in their seats. Many of the theater’s older patrons, though geared for an unusual performance, were unaccustomed to late-starting rock shows. Suddenly, ...