Free tix! Twyla Tharp, Sunday at The Soraya
Feb
18
2025
Yeppie, it’s Twyla. Twyla’s back and The Soraya‘s got her. First at the Segerstrom Center and then, this coming weekend at the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, February 22 and 23, Tharp is hitting the stage with fourteen best-in-class dancers in a 60th anniversary of her career as a choreographer. Here’s what ...
Oscar-nominated designers in 15th annual costume panel at the Egyptian
It’s such a fascinating “way in” when considering the different elements that go into making a successful feature film — via the vision and craftsmanship of the artists who create the costumes. Just consider one of them. Arianne Phillips, nominated for A Complete Unknown, has garnered prior nominations for Academy Award for Best Costume Design ...
High fliers in Brooklyn: STREB’s ‘Do Not Try This At Home’
Feb
16
2025
photo credit: stephanie berger High-octane and daring. Action-packed and gravity defying. Surely we’re describing Hollywood stunt work, right? Wrong! We’re talking about rarefied choreography of extreme physicality, innovation, and near-misses that have made Elizabeth Streb a genre leader in this limit-pushing display of human action. Others in this niche of dance that we have written ...
Ratmansky rocks the classical ballet form, in ‘Paquita’ for New York City Ballet
We’re all about high-quality dance. And while we weren’t at the performances, thanks to the vivid writing of dance critic Marina Harss, and the superlative dance photography of Erin Baiano, we can experience Alexei Ratmansky‘s restaging of Petipa’s “Paquita” (1881) vicariously. According to Harss, Ratmansky infuses this warhorse ballet to music by Minkus with his ...
Rarefied air: Justin Peck’s new work at New York City Ballet
Mystic Familiar, choreography by Justin Peck, photo: Erin Baiano The symmetry is uncanny. Almost exactly eight years ago, on January 26, 2017 – six days after an impactful inauguration — Justin Peck delivered a robustly explosive, invigorating ballet, The Times Are Racing. Set to four sections of Dan Deacon’s 2012 album “America,” it throbbed with ...
Twyla Tharp, irrepressible, meets Beethoven, Philip Glass, for Jubilee Tour
Ed. note: This story by Susan Reiter, commissioned and published by the Younes & Soraya Nazarian Center for the Arts, is reprinted with permission. Twyla Tharp: The name is distinctive and memorable. So, too, are the accolades the choreographer has accumulated over decades in the creative artist’s lane. Now, at 83, the Tony/MacArthur/Primetime Emmy/Kennedy Center/Guggenheim ...
Haunting new Vivaldi opera a cautionary tale at Guggenheim ‘Works & Process’
In these cataclysmic times it sometimes seems that, if we’re looking for leadership out of an existential crisis, we need artists more than we do politicians. That thought occurred to me two weeks ago, while wildfires ravaged Los Angeles and New York shivered through an Arctic vortex, and I sat in the auditorium of the ...
Digging & dining: ‘Groundhog Day’ at Alamo Drafthouse
Jan
26
2025
We need fun! We need fun! There. I’ve said it twice — because I mean it doubly. Also because it’s in keeping with the time warp of repetition proffered by a very funny movie along that theme. Groundhog Day (1993) tells the tale of an egotistical Pittsburgh teevee weather guy, Phil Connors (Bill Murray), who ...
Only the screen was small: Ida Lupino television work at UCLA Film & Television Archive
Jan
25
2025
It bodes one of those great-but-long evenings at UCLA Film and Television Archive, where we have produced several film events, in the Billy Wilder Theater at UCLA’s Hammer Museum. I want to go. born to play with bogie, here, High Sierra (1941) Why? Because Ida Lupino was so cool. She was a really good actress ...
Fascinating: Dances by Charles Weidman
Jan
20
2025
It was a triumvirate. The brilliant second-generation offspring of Denishawn, the pioneering American modern-dance company comprised a trio of names: Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. A fourth post-Denishawn great was Jack Cole, but Cole came to the party after that first fabulous threesome had departed. I have listed the names of Graham, Humphrey, ...