Newsletter: Essential Arts & Culture: Beyond the Broad
I'm Kelly Scott, arts and culture editor of the Los Angeles Times, with some stories I'd recommend to keep you abreast of the world of theater, visual art, architecture and design, music, opera and dance.
Sing, Conduct, Repeat
Placido Domingo may be just shy of 75 but if you think he’s slowing down, forget it. For the season opener of the Los Angeles Opera, its general director sang the lead in one opera and conducted the second. “Domingo sounded as if he could go on forever,” Mark Swed wrote in his review. He brought his special touch to the character of "Gianni Schicchi" and got a "robust sound" from the orchestra with "Pagliacci." For Swed, the ideal situation would be "if Domingo could have also been his younger tenor self singing along with his older self conducting, that just might have worked.”
Isaiah Morgan as Gherardino and Placido Domingo as Gianni Schicchi. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
Beatle-era Bard
Adaptations of Shakespeare to a modern day setting -- or simply a time other than Elizabethan -- come fast and furious, some good, some less so. Theater critic Charles McNulty enjoyed the comic energy that writer Rolin Jones brings to “These Paper Bullets! A Modish Ripoff of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing” at the Geffen Playhouse. Set in London during the swinging ‘60s, "Bullets" features songs by Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. It could use some pruning, McNulty says, and there's little emotional depth, but the show has a “tremendous fizziness.”
The Quartos — Claude (Damon Daunno), Balth (Lucas Papaelias), Pedro (James Barry) and Ben (Justin Kirk) — perform in "These Paper Bullets!" (Michael Lamont)
Why we shouldn't fear bikes and buses
Straight talk from architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne last week about Mobility Plan 2035, with which the city hopes to diminish the dominance of the car and encourage other forms of transportation like bikes and buses. Blowback to the plan has, not surprisingly, emphasized what opponents see as the adverse impact on drivers and traffic. Hawthorne is not sympathetic to them. “We've convinced ourselves that we are the only big city in the country where we can have all the great things that come with urbanization and, remarkably, none of the eternal and endless traffic congestion," he writes. "We want the cultural amenities and economic clout of a major metropolis but the traffic patterns of a garden-variety suburb.” He gives readers some talking points to brush back Mobility Plan naysayers and deconstructs one of the hot-button issues associated with it: soccer practice.
A bike lane on 7th Street is one of several such pedal-focused commuter lanes introduced in downtown Los Angeles. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
It's not every day a new art museum opens in L.A.
Sunday is the first day the doors of the Broad will be open to the public. Still, it’s been a busy week at 2nd and Grand. A media preview, a gala, a public dedication with Gov. Jerry Brown on hand. We also learned a little bit about how the museum is going to operate.
The gala red carpet runs into the new Broad museum Thursday in downtown Los Angeles. (Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times)
There’s an art and science to washing the Broad’s windows.
The Broad's lobby is not an Apple store, even if it feel like one. No central desk. Roving "VSAs" are combination museum guards/docents/customer service reps ("visitor service associates" to you.) You won’t be asked for a donation. And if you’re someone who goes to an art museum just to drink coffee in hipper environs, the Broad is not for you: there's no food or drink in the new building. (There is a restaurant next door but it's not open yet.) “The Broad decided to take a rare opportunity to build a system of its own,” Mike Boehm writes.
Coming up this week
Charles McNulty reviews a new musical based on the 2001 movie "Amelie" at Berkeley Rep ... David Ng explores the L.A. Philharmonic's new virtual reality program, Van Beethoven...we review the Frank Gehry retrospective at LACMA ... and talk to Duncan Sheik ("Spring Awakening") about his new pop music recording.
What we're reading
"I Try to Talk Less: A Conversation with Ai Weiwei and Liao Yiwu. From the New York Review of Books. -- Christopher Knight, art critic.
It's not a million-dollar divorce, a slim blond girlfriend or a corporate takeover, but New York businessman Ron Perelman made the news last week when he abruptly quit the board of venerable Carnegie Hall. A high-profile nonprofit board brouhaha, reported by the New York Times. -- Kelly Scott, arts and culture editor
... and listening to and watching
Former L.A. Opera music director Kent Nagano began his appointment as music director of the Hamburg State Opera Saturday with a major new production of Berlioz's epic opera, "Les Troyens." If you missed it live, the video will remain archived for a year at this link. The production is staged by Michael Thalheimer, who is little known in the U.S. but one of Germany's rising theater stars. The impressive cast includes Catherine Naglestad as Cassandra, Elena Zhidhova as Dido and Torsten Kerl as Aeneas.– Mark Swed, music critic
Follow me on Twitter at @kscottLATarts.
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