NEW ORIGINAL WORKS (NOW) FESTIVAL REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles Program One July 30 - August 1 What are you doing for the next three weeks? This year’s edition of REDCAT’s 12th annual New Original Works Festival (NOW) looks to be a colorful debutante ball, with several stunning Cinderella arrivals in the mix. In three program … [Read more...]
Could an L.A. Dance Hub Grow from a Mapping Tool?
The L.A. dance scene of late has felt a fresh momentum. And the decade-long accumulation -- of new companies, new venues, new academies and institutions, prestige teachers and choreographers -- took a leap in cumulative power this past month, thanks to the debut of an elegant digital source called Dance Map L.A. Simple census taking can be a … [Read more...]
The Will of Eva Perón, Painted in Tango
If it's coming your way, you won't do wrong to grab tickets to Tango Buenos Aires' current touring show, "Song of Eva Perón." Already immortalized in music and on film, Evita's physical portrait here -- mostly an energetic one, as considered here through the lens of Argentine tango -- adds subtle dimension to her mystique. Eva Perón’s … [Read more...]
Do You Think You Know Gene Kelly?
Teasing apart the movie musical a few years back, cultural critic Gilberto Perez wrote that each successful musical positions one of two figures of the artist in the fore: either the performer or the director. Sometimes, as in "The Band Wagon," we actually see the two figures characterized on film, fighting for prominence. But usually, one of the … [Read more...]
Teatro Zinzanni Comes to Southern California
[first published in the L.A. Times] As the outré Euro-style dinner-theater called Teatro ZinZanni parks its vintage 1910 Belgian spiegeltent on the scrubbed architectural grounds of the Segerstrom Center for the Arts for the next three months, there's much cooing among the ZinZanni staff about the luxuries of this Costa Mesa locale. "Marble … [Read more...]
Bring it On!
[This piece first ran in the Los Angeles Times.] At the pre-show warm-up for "Bring It On: The Musical," performers in their 20s are stretching and assuming yoga postures, others are jumping rope or jogging softly in place. It's what you might expect from any cast of a musical. Then suddenly, downstage right, there's a complicated, unfamiliar … [Read more...]
Billy Elliot in Spades
The film “Billy Elliot” is a masterpiece of storytelling economy. Alongside its most famous thread — a young boy’s discovery of ballet — Lee Hall portrayed the impotent rage of a redundant working-class population (it’s set during the year-long strike of the British National Union of Mineworkers), the insularity and conformity of small-town England … [Read more...]
Behind the Scenes at Hanson’s Revolution
"Gloria’s Cause" is choreographer Danya Hanson’s first full-bodied ensemble piece since her 33 Fainting Spells days, and she has packed it more fully, and dug more deeply, than anything she’s done before. If her early works with Gaelen Hanson were like dense short stories, and her later works with Hanson, Peggy Piacenza, and Linus Phillips were … [Read more...]