TED MILLS, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
April 12, 2007 9:08 AM
Choreographer Ohad Naharin provides a spectrum through which we watch the world anew. In his dances, the pedestrian and even the private and unconscious become poetry, leading to equal parts laughter and rapt silence. Behind it all, there’s an intelligence in the career-spanning “best of” work “Minus One.” Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de MontrËal brought this 90-minute piece to Arlington Theatre on Monday night.
Santa Barbara has seen some of these works before, performed by other companies in other years. But they have usually been one piece among other choreographers’ work. “Minus One” gave us a full evening to explore Israel-born Naharin’s world, and never once did the man repeat himself or repeatedly hammer themes. This time, too much was a good thing.
Category: Writing
Clear Direction
Led by artistic director Gradimir Pankov, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens debuts Monday at Arlington Theatre with a reimagined version of Ohad Naharin’s ‘Minus One’
Ted Mills, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT
April 6, 2007 9:52 AM
‘If a dance is good, then it will be appreciated,” says Gradimir Pankov, artistic director of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. “It’s that simple.”
After 50 years in the dance world, Pankov has returned to the most basic of philosophies. But it’s a thought he says he shares with Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, whose “Minus One” comes to the Arlington on Monday.
Concert Review – Cat Power
It’s the Year of the Cat
While the hippies danced in Alameda Park post Solstice on Saturday, the hipsters were lined up outside SOhO, two snaking threads starting upstairs that easily found their way down to street level. The lines were for ticket-holders and those seeking tickets, all wanting to see Chan Marshall, better known as the enigmatic singer-songwriter Cat Power.
Fragile of voice and temperamental of mind, the singer has a reputation: A concert can be filled with walk-offs, wordy digressions, freakouts or be canceled altogether. Or it can be brilliant and electrifying.
Dance Review – Baryshnikov and Hell’s Kitchen
Wednesday night’s performance at the Lobero, one of three sold-out nights and the opening of Summerdance’s 10th season, finds Mikhail Baryshnikov back in Santa Barbara for the fifth time in 13 years.
Now 58, Mr. Baryshnikov cuts an elegant figure on stage, with sad, yearning eyes, a face made of diagonals and angles, contrasting with a supple torso and arms that suggest massive strength even when they look light and as mutable as rising smoke. No doubt he is still fascinating to watch, but his Hell’s Kitchen Dance company proved to be equally exciting.
Music Review: Pianofest @ Music Academy
EIGHT VIRTUOUS HANDS
We open with black, all the lights in Abravanel Hall extinguished. We can hear shuffling on stage, and then some odd notes rise out of the darkness.
Then the see-sawing, off-key intro to Saint-Saëns “Danse Macabre” begins and with a sudden burst of light, the stage is revealed: four men, two pianos, a flurry of hands. This is Pianofest, Saturday night’s opening to Music Academy of the West’s Summer Festival.
Live Music Review — The Greencards
The Blue and the Green
Roots music — traditional country music without the gloss, whatever one might call it — finds itself always returning to its origins the further out it goes. An Australian-English bluegrass combo that formed in Austin, Texas, and records in Nashville, Tenn., the Greencards push the genre into the future while reminding audiences of its long past. White Australians don’t have to go back too many generations to return to England. And bluegrass is only a fiddle or two away from Eire.
And so at the Lobero on Saturday night, and as part of Sings Like Hell, audiences were not so much hearing a outsider’s take on tradition, but a fun-house mirror of styles and influences that sounded bracingly fresh. Surely The Greencards’ marriage of Americana can earn them citizenship.
Theater Review: The Dinosaur Within
‘Dinosaur’ Invites Audiences to Dig
With David Lynch-like moments of crossed realities, John Walch’s “The Dinosaur Within” wears influences from the film world on its sleeve. Yet the play, which Theater UCSB is presenting through the weekend, is not a frustrated screenplay. Instead, its numerous time-jumps and parallel narratives push what can be done with theater. By stripping down a convoluted story to a minimalist stage, Mr. Walch’s play manages to be complex yet comprehensible.
“The Dinosaur Within” opens with five characters in a tableau, like figures in a natural history museum. They are introduced by a sixth, 12-year-old Tommy (Ryan Lockwood), who addresses us from the podium of the Young Paleontologists Convention. He speaks of evolution, of adapting to survive, of excavating the past and understanding the present. Tommy is introducing the themes of the play, but it’s OK, since how these five characters are going to work out these themes is not apparent.
Theater Review: Lola Goes to Roma
‘Lola’ offers a world tour of clichès
May 3, 2006 8:19 AM
Yet another frustrated movie script masquerading as a play, Josefina Lopez’s “Lola Goes to Roma” follows in bitty and piecemeal fashion the travels of a Los Angeles-based mother and daughter in Europe. Apart from a colorful set and glamorous parade of costume design, the play has little to recommend it — full of anti-intellectualism, tired clichès of European nations and perfunctory writing.
The play tells us little about life lived, but more about the amount of European-set Hollywood films watched, stitched together as it is from remnants of “Roman Holiday,” “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “Shirley Valentine,” and a whole slew of Yanks abroad romantic comedies.
Theater Review: Spitfire Grill
SUNSHINE IN YOUR CUP
March 15, 2006 12:00 AM
“The Spitfire Grill” was one of many ensemble films to appear in the ’90s that featured a strong cast and a cafè as a nexus of maternal warmth and life-affirmation. Think of “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “Baghdad Cafè,” both of which came earlier than Lee David Zlotoff’s 1996 film.
But something in the Alison Elliot and Ellen Burstyn vehicle cried out to creators James Valcq and Fred Alley, and in 2001, “The Spitfire Grill — The Musical” premiered.
The show opened in a post-9/11 America hungry for an extra helping of small-town Americana. Five years later, in its Santa Barbara debut at the Garvin Theater, does Spitfire Grill still offer the same pleasures?
Theater Review: Deathtrap
The twists and turns of ‘Deathtrap’
March 8, 2006 12:00 AM
Ira Levin’s “Deathtrap” — the 1978 play and the 1982 film — can be seen as the Yanks’ answer to Anthony Shaffer’s earlier “Sleuth” — the 1970 play then 1972 film.
Both cast Michael Caine in the lead; both attempt to outmaneuver a clever audience wise in the ways of the typical whodunnit. Both reduce their cast to the barest minimum, fill their sets with murderous props and work out their suspense with the precision of a classic watchmaker.
“Deathtrap” remains the longest-running Broadway show in history, and it’s the Virtual Theatre Company’s turn to hope we’ve forgotten the twists and turns by now, as it stages the play through Sunday in Victoria Hall.
The company is a splinter cell of regulars from Circle Bar B Dinner Theater making their foray into the downtown theater scene and taking advantage of larger performing spaces. Victoria Hall remains an odd location for a play, with the large gulf (dance floor? orchestral pit?) between the front row and the stage. It’s also a shallow but wide performing space, which can lead to odd blocking.