Hold onto your hats ~ here comes VPAC’s new season!
A new season at a performing arts center arrives as a list, perhaps just like any list. But if you pause to peruse the rich offerings on tap at Valley Performing Arts Center in the coming season, 2015-16, you’ll feel the fun. Arts energy that is fun, youthful, excellent and diverse will emanate from Cal ...
Jacaranda’s summer party supreme 2
The architectural space of Rachlin Partners in Culver City provided the backdrop for the annual summer party of contemporary classical music society, Jacaranda, on a splendid Sunday afternoon in June. Filling the airspace was the music of Prokofiev and Philip Glass delivered in a blazing mini-concert by string ensemble, Lyris Quartet. Following the concert, the ...
Review: The History of Black Dance in America 4
It’s a safe bet that many in the audience at Saturday’s vibrant “The History of Black Dance in America,” performed by Central Avenue Dance Ensemble at Cal State Dominguez Hills’s University Theater, while attending an event that celebrated African-American creativity, were nursing bruised feelings over the insane racist violence targeting black people that shamed our ...
Interviewing top television talent Jeff Eastin
Jun
24
2015
On arts•meme, we keep a pretty strict focus on the performing arts, sometimes neglecting our most respected and hardest working of artists: writers. We recently interviewed one of the top successful writer/producers now working in the hot medium of television. He’s Jeff Eastin, and his series, “Graceland” launches into its third new season Thursday night ...
The death of a dancer: Albert Evans
Jun
23
2015
Our sadness is profound at the loss of a beautiful Balanchine dancer, a great veteran of New York City Ballet where he was a principal dancer. Albert Evans perished today at age 46. photo credit: Albert Evans, The Four Temperaments, Paul Kolnik/New York City Ballet Read more: The death of a dancer: Michael Jackson Death ...
Go “South” for the summer
Jun
23
2015
The turn of the calendar page into full-fledged summer has many people hot and bothered. That’s why a fun evening at the Velaslavasay Panorama, part of the Mush! To the Movies! series co-sponsored by Los Angeles Filmforum, is just the thing. Go see South, aka “Endurance,” (UK, 1919, 81 min., restored digital projection), a silent movie ...
Buy me! Marlon Brando’s 1969 Harley Davidson
Jun
23
2015
Shopping for a chopper with a pedigree? Buy one from the guy who starred in “The Wild One” (1953). On Saturday, June 27, 2015, collectors and the transportation-challenged will have a chance to bid on Marlon Brando’s personally owned Harley Davidson FLH Electra-Glide at Julien’s Auctions Beverly Hills (Lot #791, Estimate: $200,000-$400,000). Hollywood Legends Auction ...
Hepworth’s beautiful “bird” nests in Los Angeles
Jun
19
2015
Concurrent to a retrospective of the esteemed artist’s oeuvre at Tate Britain, on view, a distinguished sculpture, “A Bird Form,” at Leslie Sacks Contemporary in Bergamont Station, Santa Monica. “Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World” opens at the Tate this week, the first major Barbara Hepworth exhibition in London for almost 50 years. It ...
The French named it … let’s see how they do it … film noir
Jun
19
2015
The French coined the term “film noir” (both for dark plot lines and shadow-soaked visuals). In a land that reveres cinema like no other, France has hidden in its oeuvre crime films and dark melodramas that capture the essence of noir. A series spooling at the Aero Theatre this weekend, “The French Had a Name ...
Bawdy, bodacious broads on parade
Author/radio host Sandra Tsing Loh presents her solo comedy act, The B**** is Back: An All-Too Intimate Conversation, inspired by her best-selling memoir The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones. For mature audiences. From 1906 through the beginning of television, Sophie Tucker and her bawdy, brash, and risqué songs paved the way ...