Arts & Culture

Welcome. Tonight, we have a double bill of exciting World War II morale boosters. Both were written by members of the Hollywood Ten. Two-time Oscar-winner Ring Lardner, Jr. and two-
time Oscar nominee Albert Maltz co-wrote Cloak and Dagger. None Shall Escape was co-
written by Lester Cole, along with Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than. The latter were nominated
for a Best Writing, Original Story Oscar.

(Note: This is the edited text for the introduction to the April 13 screening of Tender Comrade and Sahara at the Academy Museum for this series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist. The double feature included a discussion with screenwriter John Howard Lawson’s granddaughters Andrea Lawson and Nancy Lawson Carcione moderated by series co-presenter Ed Rampell.)

Friends, film fans, Angelenos – Comrades! Welcome, and thanks for joining us for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ film series, The Hollywood Ten at 75, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist. Tonight, we launch the series with an appropriate double feature written by the first two members of the Hollywood Ten to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

As a film historian, when I heard a bioplay was being mounted about silver screen siren Ava Gardner at one of L.A.’s finest theaters, the Geffen Playhouse, it was “Westwood Ho!” for moi. I strapped on my running shoes and said: “Feets, don’t fail me now! Feets, do your thing!” to go see a play about The Barefoot Contessa. All the more so when I learned that Ava, The Secret Conversations was not only starring, but written by, Elizabeth McGovern.

One of the delights of L.A. theater is that our hamlet’s vast talent pool includes big and little screen talents, and what a treat to see McGovern – who was Oscar and Golden Globe-nominated for 1981’s Ragtime, plus Emmy and Golden Globe-nommed for Downton Abbey – tread the boards live and in the flesh. (At my last foray to the Geffen in 2022 I had the pleasure to see Bryan Cranston act in person in Power of Sail.)

The second I entered the Matrix Theatre on the opening night of June Carryl’s Blue, Rogue Machine’s new play immediately got me into the mood. Not only was a woman in an LAPD uniform present, but soon she started barking orders to theatergoers assembled in the Matrix’s library and proceeded to have us line up and individually march through metal detectors as she searched our bags. Was she an actual police officer or a thespian? Was it live or Memorex? (For good measure, Blue’s press kit is also cleverly in the format of a police dossier.)

After passing through the ersatz (or was it?) tachometer about 30 audience members climbed up a flight of stairs to the inaugural performance to be held in the Henry Murray Stage and sat around a space about as big as a medium sized room. In the middle was a table with files and an old-fashioned cassette tape recorder atop and a light above it, plus two chairs, from which Caucasian officer Boyd Sully (John Colella) and African American LaRhonda Parker (Julanne Chidi Hill) face off against one another in an inquiry about a traffic incident with a young Black man that went very, very wrong.

Three museums are commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist, the darkest period in Tinseltown history. What happened during this period of rightwing repression? As actor Humphrey Bogart put it: “We saw it—and said to ourselves, ‘It can happen here.’ We saw American citizens denied the right to speak by elected representatives of the people! We saw police take citizens from the stand like criminals, after they’d been refused the right to defend themselves. We saw the gavel of the Committee Chairman cutting off the words of free Americans. The sound of that gavel, Mr. Thomas, rings across America, because every time your gavel struck it hit the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”

In French composer Claude DeBussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, while out hunting Prince Golaud of Allemonde (Iowa bass-baritone Kyle Ketelsen) stumbles upon Melisande (California soprano Sydney Mancasola) in the forest. They’re both lost and by the time the next scene takes place, we learn they have married. The couple have moved into King Arkel’s (Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto) castle, where Melisande proceeds to spend an inordinate amount of time with Golaud’s half-brother, Pelleas (Chicago baritone Will Liverman).
Golaud suspects that his wife is having an affair with his half-brother and, shall we say, complications ensure. Are they, or aren’t they? To this reviewer, the whole premise of the plot is senseless, unless Meilsande and Pelleas are indeed having a sexual relationship.

I honestly believe that Cirque du Soleil’s official motto is “gravity is for sissies” – or, if it isn’t, it really should be. This psychedelic circus, which had been wowing audiences for almost 40 years, has returned to Los Angeles with Corteo, a show that premiered in 2005. The barebones plot is that Mauro, the so-called Dreamer Clown, imagines his funeral procession to be a phantasmagorical parade inhabited by uninhibited free spirits and angels who form his cortege (or eponymous Corteo) as they run wild, celebrating joie de vivre.

I had second thoughts as I braved an atmospheric river of rain, using my periscope to drive on the freeway to Downtown L.A.’s Music Center to hear George Frideric Handel’s Solomon. But the rapturous atmospheric river of sound that awaited me made me glad that I had made the effort to hear the three-and-a-half-hour cascade of baroque instrumental music with choir and soloists regaling this heathen and a near capacity crowd with three vignettes from the Old Testament about Judea’s King Solomon set to Handel’s indelible strains.

This February, two major film institutions – the Pan African Film Festival and a movie museum – in Los Angeles, the world capital of cinema, honored Black History Month through the medium of moving images with screenings, presentations, panel discussions and more. Here’s the second of a two-part series.

THE ACADEMY MUSEUM OF MOTION PICTURES

Regeneration Summit

We live in an uncertain age wherein the very essence of truth is not only being questioned, but is literally under assault. Not one but two screen versions of the classic fable Pinocchio were produced in 2022. Books, including history texts, are being hysterically banned in Florida and elsewhere. Fox “News” (now there’s an oxymoron!) is embroiled in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, while its smug prig Fucker Carlson reportedly demanded the firing of a Fox staffer for fact-checking its 2020 election lies and telling the truth. Journalism has been decried as “fake news” – by a U.S. president who, in turn-around-fair-play, was accused of making “false or misleading claims” 30,573 times by The Washington Post’s fact checking team during Trump’s misbegotten presidency.