Stylish mid-century Frost Auditorium re-opens with big bash 1
Oct
1
2018
What if you threw an old-fashioned block party and half of Culver City, California, attended? That’s what happened Saturday night at a joyous occasion: the grand re-opening/fundraiser for a newly refurbished landmark building, the Robert Frost Auditorium — a rare gem of Southern Californian mid-century-modern architecture. Cozy, yet imposing, the curvilinear structure houses a 1,200-seat ...
Wake-up call for “Sleeper” modernist auditorium
In the screenshot above, red-headed comic Woody Allen saunters alongside a daring curvelinear-roof’ed structure in SLEEPER (1973). A decade prior, the great Los Angeles architectural photographer Julius Shulman (1910-2009) captured the eggy update on a civic auditorium (below). The building’s bold shape fit aptly with Southern California’s persistent modernist trend when it opened in 1964. ...
Pianist Dick Hyman, a many-colored chameleon
It takes an exceptional chameleon to be able to master every piano style of consequence in jazz history. There have been some good comprehensive players; the late Dr. Billy Taylor comes to mind. But it takes an extraordinary artist to be able to accurately interpret the work of great pianists in their own respective vernaculars, ...
Catskills University, educating Jewish comics 2
Oh pure pleasure to watch these guys — and a few very brave women, Totie Fields and Joan Rivers — spiel, kvetch and kill in WHEN COMEDY WENT TO SCHOOL. A wonderful new documentary opening Friday at Laemmle theaters spools a nostalgic tour of a sweaty swathe of summertime civilization — the erstwhile Borsht Belt, a ...