Art is good. Good art is better. Good art with music and wine is, in most circumstances, the best — and that’s just what you’ll find next Sunday at Offramp, a relatively new gallery in a historic property. The reason for this party? The closing reception for their current exhibition, Small Works, a 12-artist show [...]
Everything comes from somewhere. Chickens come from eggs, paper comes from trees, and jazz comes from New Orleans — as do Don Vappie & The Creole Jazz Serenaders. The city’s self-proclaimed “premier classic jazz orchestra” has developed quite a following for its early Creole jazz, as well as for playing the tunes of Jelly Roll [...]
Fans of musicals, 1960s R&B and girl groups take note: Newly opened at the Pasadena Playhouse is Baby It’s You, a brand-spanking-new piece of theater that may well be headed for Broadway. Baby is the story of the Shirelles, the first American girl group to have a number-one Billboard single, and of Florence Greenberg, the New [...]
For more than twenty years, William Stranger has been turning wood into beautiful furniture. Only, as he would be the first to tell you, it’s still wood — but not just wood. Rather, in Stranger’s capable hands, lumber that would otherwise be destined for the scrap heap gets a “Second Life” (the title of his [...]
Hard times, like the ones we’re in now, are often extra hard for artists, who are usually among the last professional communities to find any evidence of “recovery” in their pockets — which is why the Arroyo Arts Collective’s 17th annual self-guided tour of artists’ studios and homes has been dubbed “The Recovery Discovery Tour.” On [...]
From lion-maned bad boy to bald and beloved tennis icon, Andre Agassi has had quite the journey — which you can read about in his highly anticipated new book, Open: An Autobiography. And after you buy the book, you can get it signed by Andre himself on Thursday at Vroman’s. But only if you bought [...]
And oh, what hair! Pictured here with coiffure ablaze is Léon Krier, architect, theorist, urban planner and anti-modernist — the last of which isn’t necessarily, you know, a bad thing. In Krier’s case, it entails advocating for the traditional “European” city model, i.e., the pre-automotive city, complete with walkable neighborhoods, a variety of job types [...]
A Noise Within, Southern California’s only classical repertory company (indeed, one of only a handful of repertory companies left in the country), is going a bit “meta” with its next production. The play — Noises Off, Michael Frayn’s 1982 British “farce from behind” — is a play within (that’s pun number two, scorekeepers) a play, [...]
True story: The word robot comes from the Czech word robota, which means “labor,” specifically forced labor, of the kind a serf would do. The word made its first appearance in 1921, in a play called R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek, whose brother, Josef, coined the term. The play is all about fun [...]
More often than not, performances of Beethoven predominately feature his instrumental work — which makes Pasadena Pro Musica’s upcoming concert of Beethoven choral pieces a rare opportunity to hear, live, an oft-neglected part of his corpus. The program, entitled Immortal Beloved, consists of the Missa in C, the Concert Aria: “Ah, perfido!” featuring solo soprano [...]
