So Cal Arts & Entertainment

It’s not every day a director calls you with an invitation to see a new show. The director was Mark Travis and the show was called “A Bronx Tale,” starring a cast of one, a young actor I’d never heard of named Chazz Palminteri. I was knocked out by it. Here was a guy...

Not too sure about the so-called New Normal, but the new “Next to Normal,” at Anaheim’s intimate Chance Theater through Feb. 27, is a smash. Granted, a show about mental illness will not be everyone’s cuppa, and this Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning musical might hit...

While I’m waiting for live theater to come back to life I’m catching up on vintage films, and books about entertainment personalities of the past. And I have a lot of catching up to do, at the rate Kino Lorber and other companies are putting out Blu-ray releases....

Remember when actors were the special effects? The OC premiere of Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman (at the Chance Theater in Anaheim through Oct. 24) exemplifies what makes live theater so magical, at a pivotal time in this era of pandemic—the art of storytelling, a...

Eddie Muller has made TCM’s Noir Alley must-see TV #1. Figured I could skip the flick last weekend since I’d already seen it, and just watch his intro/outro. Right? That strategy might work elsewhere, but the host with the most makes the introduction so damn...

You can never be quite sure what you’re going to get when you go see a play by Wendy Graf, but you can be sure it’s going to be something of substance. Hands and legs inside the car and buckle your seatbelt, it’s going to take you for quite a ride—if the four plays of...

So many vintage films on home video, so little time. An obscure little film like “The Man In Search of His Murderer” (available from Kino on Blu-ray) could easily get lost in the shuffle. And that would be a real pity. For this offbeat black comedy with overtones of...

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which boasted “more stars than there are in heaven” in the so-called golden age of Hollywood, went to extraordinary lengths to conceal the private lives of its stars from the public in the 1920s and ‘30s. They would “fix” speeding tickets and...

Kino Lorber has gone into overdrive in recent months, pumping out more vintage films on Blu-ray than I can cast an eyeball on. Happily they haven’t ignored lovers of silent film, with a noteworthy Lois Weber twofer among their recent releases. Weber, perhaps the...