The La Jolla Music Society, the San Diego area’s leading presenter of touring classical music and dance performers, is building a two-audottoprium venue that will host films, lectures and exhibitions as well as concerts. The grand opening is planned for 2017.
Tag: 08.09.14
Idris Muhammad, Leading Jazz Fusion Drummer, Dead At 74
“[He] was a proud product of New Orleans, whose strutting parade rhythms always lurked just beneath the surface of his style.” He played for everyone from Curtis Mayfield to Roberta Flack to the original Broadway company of Hair, but “the heart of his work was at the intersection of jazz, R&B and funk, especially as they converged in the 1970s.”
Inside Theme Park Musical Theater
“Theme park shows have a reputation like cotton candy’s: They’re sweet and they go down easy, but they’re not much to write home about. Part of that comes from how much they stick to a formula. Run times rarely exceed 30 minutes, the faster to get people dried off or cooled down and back to the rides. … But streamlined doesn’t mean substandard. Though the shows’ content may be lighthearted, the talent is often Broadway caliber.”
“Sick To My Teeth”: UK Jewish Film Festival Director Speaks Out About Controversy
“[Stephen Margolis] has spoken for the first time about the row that led to it being withdrawn from a north London theatre, and said he felt ‘sick to my teeth’ when the theatre’s director demanded to scrutinise the list of films to be shown.”
Menahem Golan, King Of The ’80s B-Movies, Dead At 85
Though he and his partner Yoram Globus were best known for action and exploitation films such as The Delta Force, Enter the Ninja, the Death Wish series, and The Happy Hooker, Golan also produced such prestige projects as Cassavetes’s Love Streams, Godard’s King Lear, the Meryl Streep vehicle A Cry in the Dark, and Altman’s Fool for Love. (Not to mention his extensive career in Israel that included several foreign-language Oscar nominations.)
The Tragedy Of Stefan Zweig
Unlike his near-contemporary and fellow suicide Walter Benjamin, Zweig had safe haven (first in London, then the U.S. and Brazil) from the Nazis and the ravages of World War II. Even so, he had his reasons for not being able to go on …
Here’s What Black Ballet Dancers Really Go Through
“Racism is less about what happens to you and more about what doesn’t happen to you.” As ABT’s Misty Copeland prepares to dance the White and Black Swans for the first time, she and several of her dark-skineed colleagues (including Carlos Acosta) talk about the challenges they still face (yes, including hate mail and physical threats) and the progress that’s being made.
The Metropolitan Opera House Is Too Damn Big (And Opera In The Entire U.S. Is Messed Up Because Of It)
Joseph Horowitz, looking back at what U.S. opera houses were before the 20th century (smaller, more eclectic, and more popular), argues that the size of the Met’s auditorium, along with the company’s outsize influence, has led to “a presiding notion of opera giving priority to big voices hurled into big spaces, singing words in foreign tongues set by deceased European composers … a notion of ‘grand opera’ that is increasingly unsustainable.”
Michael Govan: Audacious New LA County Museum Of Art Would Signal A “New” LA
“The opening would come 20 years after the 2003 arrival of the $284-million Walt Disney Concert Hall. Govan said LACMA would be continuing the “movement” that the acclaimed concert hall launched. The new LACMA would show that L.A. was, in effect, not a one-hit wonder, but a city capable of charting an ambitious, ongoing course of increasing and revitalizing its cultural offerings.”