For Women’s History Month, It’s Two on the Aisle Part 2: George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession
How talky, that man, who never stopped spewing out his ideas through the mouths of actors who sat on a bench, stood by a gate, leaned on a fence, or at best, lit a fine cigar or took a swig of whisky, as Vivie Warren does when she finally settles down for a moment of relief. No tarantellas danced or doors to the home closed more...
For Women’s
History Month, It’s Two on the Aisle Part 1: Kevin O’Morrison’s Ladyhouse Blues
St. Louis, Missouri. 1919. There’s a hush over everything in this working-class neighborhood. In the evenings the blinds are drawn over all the windows. The homes have become still. “Ladyhouses,” the postman calls them, because they’re full of widows, or women waiting for their men to come home from the war more...
A Playwright Speaks of the Stage
Chekhov on Writing and Acting
Antaeus Casts The Seagull in Light and Shadow
When popular, puffed-up, and aging actress Arkadina returns with her younger lover, a fashionable writer, to her lakeside estate in late 19th-century Russia, she steps into a bees’ nest of would-be artists and jealous rivals — or at least as one critic put it, “a Petri dish in which frustration mutates and multiplies.” She also enters a more...
Dance Theatre’s Ode to Cinema A Filmmaker’s Dedication to a Poet
Canzoni del Secondo Piano: Dancing Songs from the Second Floor
The Italian dance company, Tecnologia Filosofica, comprised of five dancers, a singer, and a musician, performed Canzoni del Secondo Piano on December 9, 2011 at the Théâtre Raymond Kabbaz of Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles. Based on Roy Andersson’s apocalyptic Swedish film, Songs from the Second Floor more...
Photography Dissolves into Cinema Animating the Spectator at Edward Cella Art + Architecture
George Legrady’s Refraction:
Research in the Form of a Spectacle
There are so many ways to enter George Legrady’s new work; I must claim at the outset that my forays into his art stem from my individual interests in cinema and its relation to photography, especially in the context of very recent filmmaking in the world and my personal experience with cultures here and abroad more...
A World-Premiere Production at the La Jolla Playhouse A Playwright Sparked by Her Students
“Be careful what you wish for,” you want to tell the three sixteen-year-old girls who hold center stage, “...you might get it.” And what they say they want is someone they can call their own, manifest — in their eyes — in a baby, in the unconditional love of a child for its mother. Yet most likely what they’ll get will be the life more...
An Eclectic Mix of Sounds and Cultures An Idyllic Summer Setting
Since 1947, composers such as Stravinsky, Copland, Foss, Messiaen, Boulez, Berio, and Adams have graced Ojai’s stage, presenting their works. Conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Kent Nagano began their careers there. Marilyn Horne, Grace Bumbry, André Previn, and the Kronos Quartet have all performed more...
An American Classic Inspired by a Russian Master
Lillian Hellman’s The Autumn Garden as staged and performed by the Anteaus Company is one play you want to see twice. Forget that it runs three hours with an intermission; that will never occur to you as you settle into its balmy intimacy in the parlor and porch of a summer resort home on the Gulf of Mexico more...
A Georgian Mezzo and a German Tenor Kaufmann Is to Die For!
Thank God for mediated sounds and images, I am thinking at just this one moment, because these days, most any time, I would kill for a live performance of music or song, theatre or dance. But who would imagine it would come to the point of audiences preferring to look at a screen image of the conductor waving his wand more...
The Broadway Musical, an American Idiom Enchanted Evenings in Los Angeles
What American musical has not projected a symbolic, mystical place that offers in its embrace a release from taboos, a liberated spirit, a healed heart? The extended imagination and the yearning for communion, whether personal or social, are quests at the core of the lyrical form. “Some Enchanted Evening,” “Bali Ha’i,” and more...
Tactile Memories, Internal Landscapes A Chilean Writer, A
Musing with Mary Heebner and Pablo Neruda
To take in a series of paintings at a gallery is to dwell with them in an architectural site: their colors vibrate in the light and shadow of the hall as people pulse past them, to and from their sheen, wishing to run hands over the sensual surfaces and forms that change with distance and perspective. All of this is gone from the flat more...
A “Beijing Girl” is never at rest. Patches of pigment dance across her face, swelling and bursting from its surface in a buttery lather you could spread for miles. Each swish bends its own band of hues; each meddle makes its own light. Bold strokes volley across the bones, over the flesh, jostling and tossing with each other. Her more...
Dreaming for Peace
