Ballroom isn't for sissies. Hours of training and grueling rehearsals are required for a seamless meshing of minds and bodies when the music kicks in. So when Steve Valentine and Robbie Tristan take to the floor at Balliamos Dance Studio in West Hollywood, there isn't a couple that looks more elegant, more in sync or more natural together.
Beyoncé's "I'm a Boy" swells from the boom box. Confident and reed-slim, Tristan assumes lead position. As his hand encircles the gold-belted waist of his buff partner, a powerful surge drives him as he fluidly guides his crackling blond around the floor. It's high-voltage stuff. The moves are razor-sharp. "You have to show your physicality," Tristan says.
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We Don't Need No Playwright: How Ensemble-Created Work Is Changing L.A. Theater
A A A Comments (2) By Steven Leigh Morris Thursday, Mar 29 2012
A row of actors sitting side by side in chairs, collectively unrolling a ball of string. The character of Death stands with a pair of scissors, leaning over a seated actor on one side, snipping strands of string as it unfurls. The rope of life, some long strands, some short, snipped capriciously, falling to the floor in piles, like tiny corpses tumbling into a graveyard. The scene is from a workshop production of Nancy Keystone's An Alcestis Project, commissioned by and presented at the Getty Villa. Playwright-director Keystone didn't conjure the scene while sitting at a computer in her office. It was created in collaboration with improvisations and exercises by her acting compan
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A cacophony of feedback howls, odd keyboard blasts and tasty-lick guitar noodles of every conceivable rock genre echoes through the halls of NoHo's AMP studios. A burst of melodic brass from behind a door at the end of a corridor pierces the discord. It's the sound of the rehearsal stage where Troubadour Theater Company musical director Eric Heinly has spent three weeks re-creating the mellifluous sound of early-'70s rock balladeers Chicago for the Troubies' newest musical comedy mash-up, The Two Gentlemen of Chicago.
Inside the living room–sized space, a seven-piece band tunes up as the arriving Troubies squeeze into what's left of the studio. Tonight they're working with the band for the first time, trying out the retrofitted lyrics
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Car Wash is about a close-knit group of employees who one day have all manner of strange visitors coming onto their forecourt, including Richard Pryor as a preaching 'wonder-man' who is loved by most but loathed by one, and a man who looks like a thief by the way he is holding his bottle, but it is really his urine sample as he is off to the hospital. T.C's love life takes a turn for the better and the songs keep coming. - Written by Graeme Huggan A day in the life of the employees at a Los Angeles car wash. Not all of the employees are black, there's a Mexican American and a Native American also out on the line. The man with the pop bottle is not thought to be a thief, but a madman known as "the pop bottle bomber". The chase around the car wash with the p
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A hearing-impaired artist uses the story of L.A. tuba thieves to ask: What happens when sound goes missing?
T here are no tubas in artist Alison O’Daniel’s in-progress film The Tuba Thieves — at least none you see in full. You occasionally get glimpses of mostly shrouded instruments, as in the first scene, when two culprits leave a high school in dead of night, carrying unwieldy objects in black bags. "It was fascinating that the thieves wouldn’t take the cases,” O’Daniel says of the real-life burglars who were the basis for the film. They began their tuba-taking rash in 2011, hitting schools from Manhattan Beach to South Gate. "I think it was just easier for them not to.”
After L.A. Times reporter Sam Quinones wrote a story exposing tuba thefts in
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José Tanaka was born in Kyoto, Japan. But his parents were so dedicated to flamenco music that they named him José, to make sure he'd always be tied to the traditional Spanish Romani folk art of singing, dancing, guitar and hand claps.
His father had been captivated by the music as a teenager after seeing legendary flamenco guitarist Sabicas perform on television. His mother, who'd been his father's guitar student, became a flamenco dancer.
"We were a flamenco family," Tanaka says. "There weren't many families like us. In our building, the first floor was our guitar shop, guitar lessons were on the second floor, and the rest was our house."
Tanaka is now 44 and has lived in California since the late '80s. He's become an enormously successful f
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Michael Jackson had a thing for military jackets, as the display at Julien's Auctions makes clear. See also:
*How Ozwald Boateng Helped Invent the Suits Men Wear Today
*Michael Jackson's Art and Studio, Revealed for the First Time
On this November day, Julien's Auctions resembles what Michael Jackson's closet might have looked like, albeit a much shabbier version. It's the opening of "The Collection of Tompkins & Bush: Michael Jackson" exhibit, and the Beverly Hills showroom is almost wall-to-wall military-style jackets. A week later, on Dec. 2, some very rich collectors will clean out the place during a live auction.
But perhaps none of those collectors is bigger than Michael Bush, who, with his late partner, Dennis Tompkins, designed for Jackso
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The brazen hedonism of Bangkok agrees with Jerry Hopkins. The co-author of No One Here Gets Out Alive, the best-selling portrait of iconic Doors frontman Jim Morrison, Hopkins has been described as "the dean of pop biographers." He laughingly refers to himself as a free-spirited "bottom feeder" with good timing.
"I've been in the right place at the right time often in my life, just like Forrest Gump," says the 77-year-old wordsmith, who also penned the first bio of Elvis Presley, as well as accounts of Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and Yoko Ono. As Los Angeles correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine in the late 1960s, Hopkins experienced flower power in full bloom.
Four times married, Hopkins has lived in Thailand since 1993; his current Bangkok apartment nestles on a restful downtown side st
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A duo of Ron and Russell Mael in the Fonda Theater in Hollywood yesterday. They said a good news – in 2014 there will be featured a movie The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman
Ах, счастливые времена. Вьющиеся волосы, Классные парни...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzoDVHR7UuA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Iz53uzlNls
Tribute to Lou Reed in New Beverly Cinema: GetCrazy is today. The New Beverly Cinema was founded in the time of Counter-culture as a counter-cultural theater. In Get Crazy there is the Sparks music too. Between Sparks and Andy Warhol friends was some friendship.
A FANTASTIC NEW DOCUMENTARY BY THE SON OF JOHNNY CASH'S MANAGER
It’s a weird miracle that Johnny Cash and his primitive twosome banged out music that still feels so full and vital today. And it’s a weird miracle that My Father and the Man in Black is itself full and vital, despite throwing off all sorts of vanity-project warning signs: It’s directed by a first-timer with a personal stake in the story. It tells much of that story through green-screen re-enactments in which actors play the father of that director and no one less a personage than Cash himself, that hopped-up oak of a man. It even opens with a reel-to-reel playing back a conversation between the director, age 7, and his father.
But, as Cash might say, it has the heart, and it has t
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