TCM: Turner Classic Mishpocha

Film
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

Music
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

Visual arts
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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

Dance · Reviews
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’

Theater
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

Ideas & Opinion · Visual arts
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

Music
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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

Architecture & Design · Visual arts
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 ...

REVIEW: A well-heeded call for community: DIAVOLO’s ‘Existencia’

Architecture & Design · Dance · Music · Reviews
We all knew why we were there. We were there to remember and commemorate — most of us having lived through it. We were there to ruminate, and then, to thank our lucky stars. For, in the ashes of the January 17, 1994 Northridge Earthquake, a 6.7-magnitude tumbler that overturned the campus of Cal State ...

Dance of death and renewal by Pina Bausch at The Music Center

Dance
How would you dance, if you knew you were going to die? This is the central question the late choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009) asked of her dancers in 1975 when she created her seminal work The Rite of Spring. The work examines an unyielding ritual in which the sacrifice of a “chosen one” changes the ...