Most of us take our hands for granted — we ask them to perform certain tasks and they usually respond as requested. But as the most complex grouping of musculature and bone in our bodies, all it takes is one local injury to quickly bring their importance into focus. As it is in life, so it...
Drug store lunch counters, electric streetcars, grazing goats, five-cent shoe shines, Bunker Hill tenements, ranches not yet doomed by Dodger Stadium; farm fields destined for burial under looping freeways....
Back in 1977, Dennis Reed read something that intrigued him: There once had been a vibrant society of Japanese American photographers, including first-rate modernists, but with the advent of World War II and U.S. internment camps, all of their work had been lost. “Nothing survived,”...
For decades, artist Arthur Pinajian created vivid, abstract canvases under the cover of anonymity, painting thousands of landscapes and figure studies in varying abstract Expressionist styles. He worked out of a small cottage in Bellport, N.Y. that belonged to his sister Armen — it was here...
A staggering amount of modern American comedy has passed across the stages of The Second City, the acclaimed improv group headquartered in Chicago. Its alumni stretches from Oscar-winner Alan Arkin to Stephen Colbert and generations of “Saturday Night Live” cast members — John...
Leapin' Lizards! The sixth-grade class from Palm Crest Elementary School will stage the musical "Annie Jr." at 7 o'clock Thursday night at Lanterman Auditorium, 4491 Cornishon Ave.
"In all my life I have always wanted to challenge what exists, wanted to bring together something no one has ever seen ... to challenge what exists in performing arts," says Normand Latourelle.
Getting back into the dating scene "when you're 100 years old — or might as well be," isn't for shrinking violets. Neither is breast cancer, losing your beloved husband unexpectedly, watching two brothers deal with mental illness, and hoping the bikini top that you're expected to wear for a...
The Victory Theatre Center's one-man show “Who's Your Daddy?” written by and starring Johnny O'Callaghan is heading to New York — a first for the Burbank company.
In the mood for a few chills and things that go bump in the night? If so, the Los Angeles premiere of Peter Colley's 1979 seriocomic psychological thriller, "I'll Be Back Before Midnight," at the Colony Theatre in Burbank may be your ticket, despite hokey hiccups here and there.
Once again, the Forest Lawn Museum is host to the work of an extraordinary artist: the Russian-born painter Marc Chagall. Currently on its walls are 65 early monochromatic works, under the exhibition title “Chagall: The Early Etchings,” showing illustrations that are vivid and...
We've heard lately that America is trying to rise up from "the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression." While economists, political scientists and historians will debate that point, an exhibition of paintings and prints by Maurice Merlin at the Huntington Library's Scott Gallery provides a...
Billy Wilder was a lover of words, and a writer above all else. He said many times in interviews that his move into the director's chair was simply to protect his scripts. Wilder cared deeply about the language, rhythm and timing he spent months crafting with his Hollywood writing partners....
Australian director Cate Shortland recalls the emotional moment when her film "Lore" was presented at the London Film Festival in October. The real-life Lore came on stage, finally prepared to acknowledge that the film was indeed based on her life and the experience of her family in post-World War...
"Fallen Angels," a comedy once considered too scandalous for polite society, opens Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse. This sly and sexy Noël Coward play may be tame by today's standards, but its 1925 London premiere — starring Tallulah Bankhead — was lambasted by critics of the...
Sometime in the last century, the great classical pianist Arthur Rubinstein is said to have been interrupted by a man on the streets of New York who asked, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” Rubinstein's response: “Practice, practice, practice.”
One of the best-received Los Angeles-themed books of 2007 was Judith Freeman’s “The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s fictional private detective, has captured the imagination of generations of...
Lance Davis, the co-founder and artistic director of Parson's Nose, a theater company now based in Pasadena, recalls the time that a nervous potential audience member phoned the company's reservation line and asked, “Are you doing the real Shakespeare?”
If you caught LACMA's great California design retrospective last year, “Living in a Modern Way,” you came away with the idea that Southern California was the tip of the post-World War II modernist spear. Along with the familiar names of architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler,...
The spirit of the holidays came in with a rush of wonderful music, dance and humor at the “Holiday Spectacular” performance by the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles last weekend at the Alex Theatre in Glendale.
Alanna Simone and Carolyn Radlo are two talented and creative artists based in Pasadena who collaborate on producing socially and politically provocative video art. They also happen to be mother and daughter, a fact they are reticent to admit when first meeting them. “I always refer to my...
Actress Mariette Hartley has been through drama before, with decades of experience in film, television and on local stages, beginning with a Los Angeles production of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” with Bert Lahr. But she experienced suspense unlike any other during rehearsals for “...
The evergreen appeal of Frank Capra's film classic, “It's a Wonderful Life,” about a despairing Everyman who learns that his life has had profound meaning, translates not only to frequent TV airings during the holiday season, but to numerous live stagings.
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