Newsletter: Essential Arts & Culture: The Tonys' fear of the new and TV's take on Boyle Heights' art fight

By Laurie Ochoa

May 6, 2018 1:40 PM PT

Tony nominations that signal a post-Hamilton hangover. A theatrical conjuring of the spirit of Virginia Woolf. And as more Boyle Heights art galleries announce they are closing, a new TV drama set amid the neighborhood’s gentrification battles. I’m L.A. Times arts and entertainment editor Laurie Ochoa, your guide to this week’s essential arts stories. Carolina Miranda returns from vacation next week.

BROADWAY’S FEAR OF THE NEW

For Times theater critic Charles McNulty, this year’s Tony nominations, announced Tuesday, were a sign of distress. Broadway, he writes, is “looking pretty dismal as a platform for artists to shock us with the new.” The problem: “Producers still seem to be having a hard time trusting the message sent by the last three best musical winners — ‘Fun Home,’ ‘Hamilton’ and ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ — that prestige and profitability work best together.” Still, he was pleased to see nominations for “The Band’s Visit,” a “magnificently original show” and “season-salvaging Broadway musical” starring Tony Shalhoub; as well as an acting nod for Glenda Jackson in “Three Tall Women,” “a lock” for the award. Los Angeles Times.

Tonys scorecard: The Times’ Jessica Gelt assessed Broadway’s “penchant for the familiar” and talked with Tony nominees as she outlined the front-runners. “Mean Girls” and “SpongeBob Squarepants” led the nominations with 12 each; “The Band’s Visit” and the revivals of “Angels in America” and “Carousel” received 11 nominations and “Harry Potter and Cursed Child” and the revival of “My Fair Lady” scored 10 nominations. The awards will be announced in a televised ceremony June 10 at Radio City Music Hall with hosts Sara Bareilles and Josh Groban. Los Angeles Times

The complete list of 2018 Tony nominations: Los Angeles Times

EGOT Street: Broadway’s most in-demand show, “Springsteen on Broadway,” took itself out of the running for a Tony, in part because its producers didn’t offer free house seats to more than 800 Tony voters as required by the eligibility rules. But those voters didn’t seem to hold a grudge. On Tony night, Bruce Springsteen will receive a special award, bringing him one step closer to an EGOT. He won a 1993 Oscar for his original song “Streets of Philadelphia” for the film “Philadelphia,” multiple Grammys, and after picking up his Tony next month, he’ll just need an Emmy (he’s been nominated twice) to acheive EGOT status. Los Angeles Times

AN INSIDER’S OUTSIDER COMES IN

Times music critic Mark Swed examines the long-overdue attention and career of John Luther Adams. “Little known outside a very small, patient, West Coast-admiring New York new music minority before he received the Pulitzer and the Seattle Symphony brought ‘Become Ocean’ to Carnegie Hall four years ago,” Swed writes, “Adams almost overnight became a celebrity.” Swed heard Adams’ most recent piece, “Become Desert,” and concludes Adams “has found his lost horizons.” Los Angeles Times

DESTINATION: SANTA BARBARA

Last weekend’s “Shared Madness” recital by violinist Jennifer Koh “would surely have felt special any place,” Mark Swed writes, “given her ability to hold an audience spellbound for 90 nonstop minutes of new music.” But inside Santa Barbara’s “lovely” St. Anthony Chapel, just a few months after the area was devastated by fire and mudslides, Swed was struck by the beauty of the coastal city and how it has become an important destination for arts performances. And then there was that violin. When Koh, unable to keep up with punishing loan payments for her multimillion-dollar instrument, was on the brink of giving up her violin, Orange County new music patrons Elizabeth and Justus Schlichting offered to help. Koh’s “shared madness” plan to repay them was to ask “composer friends to write solo pieces for her — 21st century Paganini-style etudes that she would offer the couple.” She performed 14 of those pieces at St. Anthony. “Not only does Koh now have her violin life partner,” Swed writes, “but she also seems eager to make Santa Barbara a significant part of her extended community.” Los Angeles Times

THEATRICAL SEANCE

In “The Theater Is a Blank Page,” “a graceful collaboration between visual artist Ann Hamilton and SITI Company, director Anne Bogart’s avant-garde troupe,” writes Times theater critic Charles McNulty, “the solitary act of reading becomes a shared activity.” The audience, restricted to 90 people, was divided into small groups and directed to different parts of UCLA’s Royce Hall where Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel “To the Lighthouse” was “summoned in a theatrical séance.” The immersive performance, which continues through May 12, left McNulty filled “with a kind of religious emotion. Reading is transformed into rituals that tantalize us with the deeper meanings of a literary masterwork while luring us to question the essence of theatrical performance, the way it joins strangers, artists and civilians alike, in a passing cloud of understanding.” Los Angeles Times

Ann Hamilton and SITI Company's "The Theater Is a Blank Page" immerses the audience in the performance at UCLA's Royce Hall.

RADICAL CASTING?

Lisa Fung talks with playwright David Henry Hwang and cast members of his new play “Soft Power,” which opens in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson on May 16. Fung explores why the fact that “Soft Power” has an almost all-Asian cast is such a radical idea for American theater. Los Angeles Times

Francis Jue during a rehearsal of "Soft Power," a play by David Henry Hwang at the Ahmanson Theater.

AIR FROM ANOTHER PLANET

At Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium on Sunday, the Brentano String Quartet and soprano Dawn Upshaw closed the 114th season of the Coleman Chamber Music Series, “surely the longest-running such series in the country,” Mark Swed writes. Upshaw, “one of America’s most persuasive opera singers, known for making every word she sings register,” may be performing less now that she is in her mid-50s, but as Swed says, “her voice has thickened with time, which gave [Respighi’s ‘Il Tramonto’] the kind of heft it needed.” And of her interpretation of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, for which she sang the line “I feel the air from another planet,” Swed says, “the emotions ... were intense.” Los Angeles Times

Soprano Dawn Upshaw performs with the Brentano String Quartet at Caltech's Beckman Auditorium.

CITY SPACE

Times art critic Christopher Knight calls painter Mark Innerst “an intimist of spectacle.” At Hollywood’s Kohn Gallery, where 23 recent Innerst paintings are on view through May 23, you can see what he means. “The closely held visual language of quiet French domestic scenes — think Édouard Vuillard or Pierre Bonnard — is relocated into the modern, usually urban American public sphere where it blows up into a showy pageantry of anonymous pomp and circumstance. The result can be disarming. The seductive, eye-popping glamour of the city hums as a roaring engine of solitude and loneliness.” Los Angeles Times

MORE IN THE GALLERIES

Knight also took in “The Rainbow Sign,” a show of 16 large-scale collages and mixed-media works from artist Rashid Johnson, on display at L.A.’s David Kordansky Gallery through May 19. “Perhaps the most moving work in the show,” Knight says, “is the simplest — an awkwardly affecting group of 30 joyfully glazed, kiln-fired ceramic ‘Ugly Pots,’ set out as if for sidewalk sale. ...Vessels are analogous to human bodies, so the display of imminent commercial transactions generates an unexpected jolt of recognition.” Los Angeles Times

Also, reviewed by Knight, a “striking — and timely” group exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum commemorating the 30th anniversary of Richard Lou’s “Border Door,” erected at the U.S.-Mexico border in 1988. “Lou’s sculpture,” Knight writes, “was a symbolic gesture of migratory welcome in a harshly contested landscape.” Los Angeles Times

BOYLE HEIGHTS DRAMA

The anti-gentrification protests against the art galleries of Boyle Heights are now playing out in the fictional world of “Vida,” a Starz drama debuting Sunday. One of the chief antagonists of two sisters who return to Boyle Heights after the death of their mother is a young activist who is part of a movement that, as Times writer Alejandra Reyes-Velarde describes it, somewhat resembles Defend Boyle Heights, a group that has put pressure on galleries like the soon-to-close 365 Mission, started five years ago by artist Laura Owens and Wendy Yao. “We don’t get a lot of chances to tell our complicated narratives,” says showrunner and writer (“How to Get Away With Murder”) Tanya Saracho. Los Angeles Times

As Times TV critic Lorraine Ali wrote in her review of “Vida” about the Boyle Heights depicted in the show, “It’s a Latinx community on the verge of whitewash, like Silver Lake 20 years ago. But the neurotic hipsters who populate shows such as ‘You’re the Worst’ or ‘Love’ haven’t taken over yet...The politics of displacement and gentrification are rendered personal.” Los Angeles Times

Meanwhile, in the nonfictional landscape of Boyle Heights, more art galleries have announced they are closing. Chimento Contemporary will relocate to a Mid-City space on Adams, according to an Instagram post from the gallery, after its June exhibition. After the April 7 ending of its “Cam Worls” exhibition by video artist Petra Cortwright, UTA Artist Space — opened in 2016 by the talent agency UTA — posted an announcement on its website that it was “closed for relocation” and would reopen this summer. Museum as Retail Space, also known as MaRS, hasn’t announced a closing date, but owner Robert Zin Stark has offered the protesters “the ceremonial closing of my gallery to contextualize the relevance of your cultural enaction.” He told KCRW’s Frances Anderton and Avishay Artsy that he sees at least a faction of the protesters, including the activist art group Ultra-red, as “a group of intelligent cultural enactors ... working with symbols and symbolism and community more so than actual political aims.” Hyperallergic / KCRW