‘A Week of French Language Cinema’ is a good week!
Mar
4
2024
Some call it “Francophonie.” Others call it “la belle langue.” All we know is it just feels nice on the world-weary brain to allow the dulcet tone of francais into your ears — if only for a few hours. For the fifteenth year straight, in collaboration with the Consulates General of Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, France, ...
The many modes of Chita Rivera
Mar
1
2024
Let’s watch this great dancer/entertainer, Chita Rivera (1933-2024), do her thing in her 2005 show “The Dancer’s Life,” in which she pays homage to her choreographers, Jack Cole, Peter Gennaro, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins. It is a brilliant montage impeccably performed. Rivera found this luminous path to continue to share her gifts well into ...
TCM: Turner Classic Mishpocha
Feb
19
2024
At the Beverly Hills Four Seasons Hotel a cocktail reception celebrating 30 years of Turner Classic Movies: TCM. A classy affair with a real family feeling. Mishpocha, in Yiddish, means “family.” One was struck, in attending Turner Classic Movies‘ 30th anniversary gathering, January 12, 2024, at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons Hotel, that, beyond the ...
Musica Angelica to honor Richard Colburn with mighty Bach St Matthew Passion performance
Feb
19
2024
Last month we visited the welcoming campus of the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles for a rousing and very spiritual rendition of Yuval Ron’s “Rumi’s Wedding,” an inspiring mashup of Jewish, Christian and Muslim music and dance. Now the esteemed church will host a performance of the life-affirming Baroque music-masterpiece, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, ...
Artist George Evans: Native son in perpetual motion 2
If you walked into the intimate Matter Studio Gallery and were told nothing about the current exhibit, you’d be forgiven for wondering what unites the group of artists represented. Large neon figure slashes dance through space over dark brown-magenta grounds. Brilliant photographic prints capture big-sky panoramas with low horizon lines. Muted watercolors of figures and ...
Pina Bausch, Matthew Bourne in dance takeover of Bunker Hill
ROMEO AND JULIET director/choreographer matthew bourne, photo credit: johan persson It warmed my dance critic’s heart to see swarms of Angelenos flocking onto the Plaza of the Los Angeles Music Center to enjoy two impressive and complex dance showcases, both running, separately, at the stalwart performing arts center’s active houses. The 2,000-seat Ahmanson Theater is ...
A still-timely revisit to TMB’s ‘Tiny Little Town’
Feb
7
2024
When I saw it in a workshop production in July 2022, I immensely enjoyed “Tiny Little Town, A New Musical” by the witty folk who comprise Theatre Movement Bazaar. A thinly veiled allegory to our own society’s serious malaise rendered laughable in the guise of theater, the show gives a reprieve by hinting that our ...
A closer look: “Worker and Machine” (1928) at The Huntington
Hugo Gellert, Worker and Machine, 1928, oil on board, 30 1/2 × 30 7/8 in. Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra The anonymous working man in this painting, “Worker and Machine” (1928) by Hungarian-born artist Hugo Gellert, is one of nineteen striking canvases exhibited in “Art for the People,” a boutique collection of paintings, a ...
A rousing banquet of New Orleans jazz: Delfeayo Marsalis at The Soraya
ed. note: This story by jazz writer, Kirk Silsbee, was commissioned by The Soraya in advance of Delfeayo Marsalis and the Uptown Jazz Orchestra on Wednesday February 7. It is published with permission. Brass bands smear the air with unbridled exuberance. A second line of dancers swagger-and-cut in their wake, goosed by the popping rhythms ...
Radical reading room: Shepard Fairey at Glendale Central Library
Well we love libraries. And don’t you sense they are coming back? It was wonderful, the other night, to see scores of people milling about, chatting, in the grand-scaled lobby of Glendale Central Library … a safe public space. The reason for their visit was “Peace is Radical“, a solo exhibition by renowned street artist ...