Arts & Culture

According to its website, “Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s mission is
to enrich and connect our community through intimate and
transformative musical experiences which exemplify and foster artistic
excellence, education and innovation.” Based on its Jan. 17 Baroque
Brass III performance at The Huntington, which included works by
Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, Scarlatti, Bach, etc., lucky listeners could add,
to coin a term, “transport-ative” to LACO’s mission statement. In that
the ensemble’s conservatory-trained players transport world weary
audiences far from the workaday domain of routine daily existence,
with all its cares and woes, to a more serendipitous, sonorous higher
realm of bliss.
The evening opened with a quartet enticing German composer Johann
Melchior Molter’s serene 1696 “Symphony in C Major” out of their
brass instruments, setting the stage, so to speak, of a tranquil night
with an exceedingly peaceful six minutes. The four musicians - three
men, one woman - clad in elegant black outfits, played horns and
trumpets, issuing a clarion call for calm in our whirligig, troubled

According to its website, “Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s mission is
to enrich and connect our community through intimate and
transformative musical experiences which exemplify and foster artistic
excellence, education and innovation.” Based on its Jan. 17 Baroque
Brass III performance at The Huntington, which included works by
Handel, Vivaldi, Purcell, Scarlatti, Bach, etc., lucky listeners could add,
to coin a term, “transport-ative” to LACO’s mission statement. In that
the ensemble’s conservatory-trained players transport world weary
audiences far from the workaday domain of routine daily existence,
with all its cares and woes, to a more serendipitous, sonorous higher
realm of bliss.
The evening opened with a quartet enticing German composer Johann
Melchior Molter’s serene 1696 “Symphony in C Major” out of their
brass instruments, setting the stage, so to speak, of a tranquil night
with an exceedingly peaceful six minutes. The four musicians - three
men, one woman - clad in elegant black outfits, played horns and
trumpets, issuing a clarion call for calm in our whirligig, troubled

A new freely downloadable book

I would like to announce the publication of a book, which deals with the world's failure to adequately address the existential danger of catastrophic climate change. The book consists mainly of book chapters and articles that I have previously published, although a considerable amount of new material has been added. It can be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link:

http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Climate-Change-Means-Lifestyle-Change-John-Scales-Avery.pdf

Greta Thunberg's speeches at Davos, 2020

Speaking fearlessly to billionaires and heads of state like a new Joan of Arc, Greta said:

To commemorate and celebrate the auspicious 50th anniversary of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s founding, this venerable mainstay of L.A.’s live stage scene is presenting the “Circa ’69” season, with revivals “of significant and adventurous plays that premiered around the time of the Odyssey’s 1969 inception,” according to a press release. A Sam Shepard double-header is being mounted as part of this ambitious program.

First up is a sort of hors d’oeuvre, the 15 minute or so Killer’s Head, before the main dish, The Unseen Hand, is served. Alas, Killer’s isn’t killer drama and to be honest is quite an unappetizing appetizer. I was bored by the monologue in this one-man show. It wasn’t the actor’s fault - Steve Howey fully inhabited the part of Mazon and did a good job, considering the material he has to work with. (Howey is the first of eight actors scheduled to play Mazon, including Shepard veteran Dermot Mulroney who tackles the role Feb. 7-9 and Feb. 14-16). I just found the lines written for the character to be uninteresting and this reminded me that what may have seemed innovative in 1969 isn’t necessarily so half a century later.

Since 1984, the Quebec-based Cirque du Soleil entertainment organization has become best known for imaginatively combining death-defying acrobatics with storytelling to creatively dramatize themes, as circus-meets-theater with a high-tech panache, international flair and savoir faire. My personal favorite is Cirque’s Love, a radiant ode to the Beatles I relished at Las Vegas. Toruk -The First Flight adapted elements of James Cameron’s 2009 special FX big screen extravaganza Avatar to a live stage performance. And so on.

Rogue Machine’s world premiere of Disposable Necessities contains plot points that could be dramatized in a Eugene O’Neill or Arthur Miller play about family and friend dynamics. But innovative playwright Neil McGowan has mixed things up by injecting sci fi elements plus a heavy dose of comedy into his two-acter so that Disposable’s Tottens would not only be right at home with A Long Day’s Journey Into Night’s Tyrones and Death of a Salesman’s Lomans, but with Hanna-Barbera’s loony cartoony Jetsons.

If that animated futuristic family was 1962’s humorous prediction of what tomorrow may hold for us (hey! while I’m stuck in traffic on the 10 Freeway, I’m still waiting for my winged car, and while we’re at it, for dogs like the pit bull mix named Babaloo to talk back to me!), set in 2095, Disposable has a more sophisticated scientific vision of, as H.G. Wells put it, The Shape of Things to Come.

BOMBSHELL Film Review

Estranged Bedfellows: What the FOX is Going On?

By Ed Rampell

The star-studded anti-FOX News movie Bombshell is perfect for the #MeToo era, as it dramatizes the struggle of those “FOXy” ladies in front of and behind the camera against sexual harassment at the unfair and unbalanced cable “news” TV network. Classically beautiful atomic bomb Charlize Theron, who can currently be glimpsed in a sensuous perfume ad on the boob tube, won an Oscar for “disfiguring” herself as an ugly murderess in 2003’s Monster. It took me about five minutes to realize that the actress portraying the far more conventionally attractive Megyn Kelly in Bombshell was also Theron. The gifted thespian submerges herself into the role and not only looks like the beleaguered Kelly but preternaturally sounds exactly like the former FOX News host.

The world premiere of Tim Alderson’s Salvage is a little gem. Musicals are often faced with the creative conundrum of how and why the characters move from talking to singing, but Salvage solves this naturally because it is largely a story about singer-songwriters who strum their own guitars. Preacher (the smoldering David Atkinson, a Georgian who, at certain angles, resembles Kris Kristofferson) is boozing it up, in between crooning CW tunes at a nearly empty hole-in-the-wall bar in god-knows-where-ville. When in walks the much younger Harley (Christopher Fordinal), another Country Western wannabe superstar, who is passing by when he’s lured into the watering hole he has recognized as a musical shrine.

Writer/director Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire epitomizes the type of specialty cinema that makes a cineaste’s heart go pitter patter when it plays at a favorite art house. On the other hand, popcorn munchers at the local multiplex used to superheroes, explosions and car chases would likely find this 2-hour foreign film subtitled in English to be excruciatingly slow - only “redeemed” by its hot lesbian sex scenes.

This French feminist film - which won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Screenplay and Queer Palme awards, and was nominated for Cannes’ grand prize, the Palme d’Or - is set in Brittany in 1760. Portrait ponders: How enlightened was the Enlightenment when it came to women and their rights? In particular, how reasonable was the Age of Reason when it came to the love that dared not speak its name - especially when it involved the female of the species.

[NOTE: This review may contain some plot spoilers.]

Anastasiya Miroshnichenko’s well-made, touching documentary Debut provides viewers with a rare glimpse behind the “Iron Curtain.” By this I’m not merely referring to the fact that this 80-minute film was shot in Belarus, which was formerly known as Byelorussia or Belorussia and, like Ukraine, a former Soviet republic. Rather, more to the point, Debut was largely filmed behind bars and barbed wire, inside the sprawling complex of “Women’s Prison #4 of Gomel City” in the southeastern part of Belarus.