Valentine’s Day movie date
Feb
2
2011
There’s a good Valentine’s Day selection at the movies this year. For the unabashedly romantic, Bogie and Ilsa will always have Paris at Cinefamily on Fairfax Boulevard — the Champs-Elysees of Los Angeles. Further down Fairfax, at LACMA, “Klute,” a hard-nosed film about a harder-nosed call girl follows film critic Kenneth Turan’s in-person Jane Fonda interview. This should ...
Lorenz Hart taught Balanchine English 1
Chatting by phone with George Balanchine’s longtime assistant, Barbara Horgan, I learned an amusing story about the great expatriate choreographer. “Balanchine was rather reserved,” noted Horgan. “But he adored Lorenz Hart [the brilliant but troubled lyricist of Rodgers & Hart songwriting team]. “Balanchine always used to say that ‘Larry taught me how to speak English.'” ...
Swan Lake mania hits the San Fernando Valley 2
Feb
1
2011
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Marvin Hamlisch, Shirley Maclaine, Joan Rivers, kindly step aside. Proud though you may be to partake in the opening season roster of the brand new Valley Performing Arts Center (VPAC), look who’s the first to sell out the 1,700-seat house on February 8. The Russian National Ballet! Um, what’s that? Not ...
Three smart women, one performing arts center
Jan
31
2011
This proud photo shows architect Kara Hill posing with her spanking-new creation, the Valley Performing Arts Center, which opened Saturday January 29, 2011, in the northern reaches of Los Angeles’s 500-square-mile radius. The Center sits on the south-east corner of the campus of California State University, Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley, the site of ...
What a piece of work is Hamlet!
I am attending “The Trial of Hamlet” this evening to determine the competency of the defendant to stand trial for the murder of Polonius. United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy will adjudicate this mock trial of Hamlet, Crown Prince of Denmark. The trial takes place tonight on the USC campus. [Justice Kennedy was nominated ...
Kalman show closing soon at Skirball
Jan
30
2011
The whimsical flotsam and jetsam of the graphic designer, magazine illustrator, children’s book writer and tchotchke collector Maira Kalman is on view at the Skirball Center through February 13. The impressive show, “Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World),” displays Kalman’s prodigious output. Yes, I bought Kalman’s illustrated Strunk and White at the gift shop. Because ...
Bodacious Brazilian bodies of Grupo Corpo
If you don’t speak Portuguese, but do speak slithering, sinuous, samba sensuality, you’re in good stead at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles this weekend. Contemporary dance troupe Grupo Corpo, visiting from Brazil, is in the house. Grupo Corpo’s red-hot, audience-pleasing performance is part of the Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music ...
Virginia Johnson remembers her path to Dance Theatre of Harlem
Jan
27
2011
Dance Theater of Harlem Artistic Director Virginia Johnson, once the company’s tall prima ballerina — and she still has gorgeous gams — spoke today to a group of African-American dance students at the annual conference of the International Association of Blacks in Dance at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The classy Manhattan-ite told ...
“Scarecrow” cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond @ LACMA
Jan
23
2011
Following a double bill at LACMA so soulful and affecting that the feeling was beatific [“Electra Glide in Blue” & “Scarecrow” both from 1973], the museum hosted the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond for a talk. Zsigmond, in tandem with his compatriot Laszlo Kovacs, introduced a palette of mittel European muted natural light to Hollywood. According to ...
Polina Semionova, one of seven powerful female dancers of “Reflections” 1
Just back from “Reflections” at Orange County’s Segerstrom Center, a beautifully performed showcase for the spectacular skills of seven Bolshoi Academy-trained ballerinas and four of their male counterparts. Lots of vibrant creativity on display here — in a regrettably overly long program. (I never thought I’d write the words, ‘Cut the Balanchine,’ but here they ...