The First Picture Show\” at the Taper Forum resembles the early silent movies whose creators the play celebrates — sometimes fuzzy, sometimes jerky, but moving the action, and the audience, right along.<
It\’s a unique mixture of Hollywood marketing savvy and Chassidic religious fervor — one of the last live variety shows on TV, according to its promoters. The goal is to surpass last year\’s telethon tote board total of $4,387,652.
Three years ago, the BBC decided to make a television documentary to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1956 Sinai campaign.\n\nThe filmmakers were soon stymied in their search for one top-secret document: the Protocol of Sevres, in which leaders of the three temporary allies coordinated their plans to seize the Suez Canal, five days before the actual attack on Oct. 29, 1956.\n\n
In 1936, Edward G. Ulmer, the expressionist wunderkind and aspiring filmmaker, chanced to meet the beautiful, young wife of a studio executive — boss Carl Laemmle\’s nephew.
All her life, Jeanette Kopitowsky has been searching for a face in the crowd. She scans strangers\’ faces for someone, anyone who looks like herself. Her biological mother. Her father. A sibling.\nThe playwright-actress, who was abandoned by her parents as a baby, grew up in foster homes until she was adopted by a Jewish family at the age of seven. She describes the painful experience in her powerful, one-woman show, \”What\’s Your Name, Who\’s Your Daddy?\” which asks the question, \”Do I exist if I don\’t have anyone to claim me?\”\n\n
When you grow up in the States, all you know is Ashkenazi Jewish culture,\” laments Moroccan-Jewish musician Ron Elkayam. \”But that is such a small part of the continuum of Jewish life.\”
\”Merton of the Movies,\” the wonderfully funny production at the Geffen Playhouse, shows that not all that much has changed in Hollywood since the comedy\’s première in 1922.
In spite of thunder, lightning, pouring rain and occasional gusts of unchecked sentimentalism, the Viva Klezmer-L\’Khayim Mariachi concert at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre on Sunday, July 11, was a high-energy, crowd-pleaser that mostly delivered on its promise to explore the intersection of the two forms.
Whenever John Mauceri conducts the Israel Philharmonic, Israeli reporters ask him why an Italian Catholic is so preoccupied with Holocaust refugee composers.
The tale of an orphan\’s search for acceptance. A lawyer\’s fantasy of a Holocaust survivor\’s revenge. A book that may save your marriage. These are just a few of the interesting choices made for this year\’s People of the Book Festival.
