Review: Jean Genet’s ‘The Maids’ @ A Noise Within
Jean Genet had a remarkable career – a thief, a jailbird, an internationally celebrated playwright whose work often embodied his compatriot’s Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous line, “Hell is other people.” That was from Sartre’s play “No Exit,” and Genet’s play “The Maids” (1947) depicts a particularly suffocating hell. Two sisters, maids in a bourgeois French household ...
Why and when Ethel Martin started wearing hats
Yet another delicious show-business nugget from the plain-spoken Jack Cole dancer Ethel Martin, courtesy of the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts: So out of working for Jack [Cole] at the Casa [the Casa Manana, Billy Rose’s night club] , Jack held auditions for Something for the Boys. He took me. He didn’t ...
It’s cool. You’re cool. So go. AfterParty @ The Wallis.
As everyone in Los Angeles knows, it’s not the event. It’s the after party. That’s why a cool new theater package offered by the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Arts stands a good chance of attracting a younger demographic into its cozy theater smack in the center of Beverly Hills. It’s AfterParty @ The Wallis, ...
Anita Bryant tells it, once more, to Playboy magazine 1
Sep
6
2016
Less than 10 years after the Stonewall Riots, Anita Bryant launched a successful campaign to repeal gay rights in Dade County, Florida. Bryant’s notorious campaign gave legitimacy to a new style of right-wing politics and helped launch the Moral Majority and similar right-wing movements that continue to the present day. Bryant’s rumblings had a major ...
Gwen & Chita’s ‘Nowadays’ better than ours
In this yummilicious snippet from the Tony Award broadcast of 1984, Broadway goddesses Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon deliver a pastiche-pairing of numbers from Bob Fosse’s “Chicago.” Chita electrifies with her song-and-dance forcefulness in “All That Jazz.” But Verdon, joining for “Nowadays,” gives a lesson in subtle upstaging — no easy feat considering her dance ...
Be the swingin’est thing. Be a Jet … @ Laemmle Anniversary Classics
The film version of the legendary, game-changing Broadway musical was released 55 years ago, in 1961. arts•meme’s Debra Levine will offer opening remarks to the the movie at this week’s Anniversary Classics screening in Beverly Hills. Levine will share her dance appreciation of the musical’s creator and movie co-director, choreographer Jerome Robbins. She will also ...
“Dreamgirls”‘s Moya Angela to sing national anthem at Dodger Stadium 2
Apr
26
2016
It’s Oh say can you see & And I am telling you — all in one fell swoop. We’re all looking forward to four performances of the Tony Award-laden “Dreamgirls” at the Valley Performing Arts Center in early May. And now all the more so — having learned that the production’s star, Moya Angela, will ...
Shakespeare anniv brings murder, lust & madness
Apr
5
2016
One thing we wholeheartedly revere about the British, our former colonial masters, is their theater! Um… their theatre. That’s why we’re so looking forward to attending the big Britweek party at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Arts entitled Murder, Lust, & Madness, in honor of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. Noted Shakespeare ...
Fonda & Friend feted by Pasadena Playhouse
Mar
16
2016
The inestimable Jane Fonda, two times an Oscar winner and an inspirational figure to many women, together with her significant other, record producer Richard Perry, will be honored at an annual fundraiser at the historic Pasadena Playhouse. Billed as “the best party in Pasadena,” this happy occasion merits a wish, You go girl! And you ...
The Mikado gets a transfusion: Robert Allan Ackerman’s BLOOD 1
David Bowie would be proud. Within opening minutes of Robert Allan Ackerman’s highly original work of musical theater — it is promoted as a political thriller, to which we say pish tosh — this alluring and initially repellent (he grows on you) figure of glam rock played by Takaaki Hirakawa commands center stage of the ...