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Dis-Chord: Male Teenager While Black and the Presumption of Guilt

Dis-Chord: Male Teenager While Black and the Presumption of Guilt

Cedric Berry as Yusef Salaam, Derrell Acon as Antron McCray, Bernard Holcomb as Kevin Richardson, Nathan Granner as Khorey Wise, and Orson Van Gay as Raymond Santana

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE Opera Review

Every once in a very long while a work of art comes along that is so well done and important that a critic feels compelled to not only review it, but to champion the piece in the hope that more…

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Hot Docs Visits Latin America

Hot Docs Visits Latin America

Havana from on High

North America’s premiere Hot Docs Festival in Toronto featured several new and intriguing documentaries from Latin America. A few stand out as reminders of atrocities that were committed in the struggle for social liberation across the continent. Still reflecting on the unresolved crimes committed during the 70s in Chile, Haydee and the Flying Fish follows a woman searching…

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Verdi’s Verdict on the Camélias’ Courtesan’s “Crime”

Verdi’s Verdict on the Camélias’ Courtesan’s “Crime”

Adela Zaharia and Rame Lahaj (Photo: Craig T. Mathew/Mathew Imaging @mathewimaging)

La Traviata Opera Review

Originally taking place in the sensuous demi-monde of 1840s Paris, in LA Opera’s current iteration director/production designer Marta Domingo has reset Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviataduring the Roaring Twenties. This revival of Domingo’s Art Deco vision of Verdi’s vintage version injects new…

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Hot Docs: Lost Souls of Mosul

Hot Docs: Lost Souls of Mosul

Los Souls of Mosul

Constantly in today’s headlines and in our government’s gunsight, is Islamic terrorism. Several films at Hot Docs address the mess being created in the Middle East due to our foreign policy objectives of laying waste to lands sitting on our oil. After initially funding and arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan in an attempt to bring down the Soviet Union and gain access to an…

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Comic Cosmic Consciousness

(Photo: Lawrence K. Ho)

THE HITCH-HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY Theater Review

The Wallis Studio Ensemble’s The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a stage rendition of Douglas Adams’ sci fi send-up that has been adapted for radio, books, television and the movies. This fast-moving 90 minute version minus intermission is performed by around 10   youthful, colorfully costumed cast members. While…

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The Story of Lynn Manning Comes to the Hollywood Fringe

The Story of Lynn Manning Comes to the Hollywood Fringe

Lynn Manning

Watts is a village, not a riot. Poet, playwright, actor and world champion in blind judo – Lynn Manning had a vision powerful enough to transform the way people would see his people and his city. Playwright, producer and community leader Melvin Ishmael Johnson has written a play that beautifully brings Manning to life and chronicles the powerful partnerships Manning created,…

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Nowhere Hare: Stewart (French, Not Jimmy) Pulls a 75-Year-Old Rabbit Out of His Hat

Nowhere Hare: Stewart (French, Not Jimmy) Pulls a 75-Year-Old Rabbit Out of His Hat

French Stewart, Lily Gibson, Vanessa Claire Stewart and Carole Ita White (Photos Ed Kreiger)

HARVEY Theater Review

Seventy-five years ago playwright Mary Chase’s Harvey started hip-hopping across the stage for four and a half years, as this whimsical classic about a great white rabbit went on to have one of the longest theatrical runs in Great White Way history. Chase’s three-act play rather…

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Anton Chekhov: Environmental Prophet for Our Planet

Anton Chekhov: Environmental Prophet for Our Planet

As I was watching Netflix’s wonderful eight-part Our Planet series narrated by Sir David Attenborough, I often thought of Anton Chekhov. Like the series, he often displayed a deep love of nature in his hundreds of stories and plays. A doctor by training, he died 115 years ago, at a mere 44 years of age.

Our Planet documents the danger humanity poses to our oceans, sea creatures, and rivers. In Ou…

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Advocate & Gaza: Two Films About the Palestinian Struggle

Advocate & Gaza: Two Films About the Palestinian Struggle

Gaza

Two compelling films about the Palestinian struggle were featured at the Toronto Hot Docs Film Festival this year. The award-winning Gaza is a visually stunning documentary enhanced with a heart-rending musical score, and one of the most emotionally powerful representations of the hardships of a people living in an area that is only 7 miles wide and 25 miles long while occupied by 2 million…

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Songs My Son Taught Me

Songs My Son Taught Me

`WILD SON: THE TESTIMONY OF CHRISTIAN BRANDO, Theatre Review

Do you have a guilty pleasure? Mine is reading tabloidy tell-all books about the private lives of geniuses. Reading these literary invasions of privacy – such as Francoise Gilot’s blabby book about Picasso or May Pang’s salacious saga about John Lennon – helped pass the time while on long haul flights from Guam to New York or L.A. to…

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Our Mother Is Sea, Her Sisters Rhea and Cybele Mothering Our World

Our Mother Is Sea, Her Sisters Rhea and Cybele Mothering Our World

waves move mountains water so “soft” yet over eons like titanium drill as continents fall tides mean more than a romance with Pacific or Caribbean

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waves move mountains water so “soft” yet over eons like titanium drill as continents fall tides mean more than a romance with Pacific or Caribbean

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motherhood, trapped sea child swimming inside reef of progenitor, she lifts two g…

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Commemorating a Memorable Maori Moviemaker Plus a Forgettable Film

Commemorating a Memorable Maori Moviemaker Plus a Forgettable Film

Maori filmmaker Merata Mita and her son Hepi

Merata: How Mum Decolonized the Screen

Merata: How Mum Decolonized the Screen is a terrific biopic about Maori moviemaker Merata Mita, the first Pacific Islander woman to direct a feature film (1988’s Mauri, which means “Life Force” and Mita also wrote). This 95-minute documentary includes extensive interviews with Mita plus her relatives, colleagues…

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‘Daniel’s Husband’: A Persuasive Polemic for Marriage

‘Daniel’s Husband’: A Persuasive Polemic for Marriage

Bill Brochtrup, Tim Cummings, Jose Fernando and Ed Martin / Ed Krieger

[dc]M[/dc]ichael McKeever’s insistently moving play Daniel’s Husband, which premiered in Florida in 2015 before going on to successful off-Broadway runs in New York City in 2017 and again in 2018, as well as a 2017 San Francisco production, has landed in L.A. It’s about the necessity of marriage (and not just of the…

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The Humanism of Ken Loach’s Film I, Daniel Blake

The Humanism of Ken Loach’s Film I, Daniel Blake

Hayley Squires and Dave Johns

n a previous review of an earlier film (Jimmy’s Hall) by director Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty, Ed Rampell referred to them as “arguably the greatest contemporary leftist writer/director team in the English-speaking world now making pro-worker films.” In the pair’s newer film, the award-winning I, Daniel Blake (2016), now available on Netflix, their…

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‘Diana of Dobson’s’: A 1908 British Romantic Comedy Defies Oppressive Women’s Roles

‘Diana of Dobson’s’: A 1908 British Romantic Comedy Defies Oppressive Women’s Roles

John Bobek, Abigail Marks, Tony Amendola and Lynn Milgrim from the ‘Kettles’ cast / Geoffrey Wade

Move over, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw! A new contemporary of yours has come to town and she is kicking butt!

In an exceedingly rare revival, in a mostly “partner-cast” production with two ensembles, the “Kettles” and the “Pots,” the Antaeus Theatre Company presents the 1908 romantic comedy D…

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Dub and Dubber: The Sheer Exuberance of Joie de Vivre

Dub and Dubber: The Sheer Exuberance of Joie de Vivre

Michael Starr

Premiering as it did hard on the heels of the annual TCM Classic Film Festival, the must-see musical Singin’ in the Rain live onstage now at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts is like a delicious dessert conjured up by a three-Michelin star chef following an exquisite five course meal. This theatrical production is adapted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green from the book of…

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Terry Gilliam’s Quixotic Quest: Mancha Ado About…?

Terry Gilliam’s Quixotic Quest: Mancha Ado About…?

Toby Driver and Jonathan Pryce

THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE Film Review

[dc]M[/dc]onty Python collaborator Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote falls into an interesting motion picture category. Cinematic lore includes a sort of subgenre of “difficult” films often made by powerful directors seeking to impose their exacting, iconic, auteurish visions on studios, audiences, critics,…