BUSINESS
May 13, 2012 | By Lauren Beale, Los Angeles Times
Singer and actress Julie Andrews has listed the Brentwood house she owned with her late husband, director and screenwriter Blake Edwards , for $2.649 million. Less than a month after coming on the market, the tidy white home with gray shutters is already in escrow. The traditional-style house features a family room and living room with French doors opening to a fanciful garden that appears to be "practically perfect in every way" to borrow a phrase from "Mary Poppins. " The formal dining room has a cathedral ceiling and glass walls.
ENTERTAINMENT
May 2, 2012 | By Rebecca Schmid, Special to the Los Angeles Times
BERLIN - Magdalena Kozena, one of today's most versatile mezzo-sopranos, has never chosen a predictable path. With her flair for Baroque music, flexible voice and striking looks, she won comparisons to the Italian diva Ceclia Bartoli shortly after she signed with the Deutsche Grammophon label in 1999, yet she quickly proved herself an equally coveted interpreter of Romantic music, championing Czech composers such as Janacek and Martinu along...
ENTERTAINMENT
April 27, 2012 | By Oliver Gettell, Special to the Los Angeles Times
"Headhunters,"the new Norwegian thriller based on the novel of the same name by Jo Nesbo, tells the story of a wealthy but insecure executive recruiter who moonlights as an art thief to support his posh lifestyle. Years before "Headhunters" was an international box office success or a bestselling book, Nesbo was living his own double life as a stockbroker at the Oslo Stock Exchange and rock musician with the band Di Derre (translation: "those guys"). "I was seen as this sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," said Nesbo, 52, on the phone from his native Oslo.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 26, 2012 | By Chris Willman, Special to the Los Angeles Times
You'd be hard-pressed to find a musical with less dramatic tension than "Million Dollar Quartet" anywhere this side of a "My Little Pony" touring show. The production that opened Tuesday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts really just wants to let the good times roll, so you can be glad it devotes only about 10 minutes of its 105-minute running time to drumming up token conflicts between Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash and their visionary producer, Sam Phillips.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 24, 2012 | By Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times Theater Critic
NEW YORK - Anyone out there heard of George and Ira Gershwin? Well, apparently, the brothers - long dead, if I'm not mistaken - have a "new" musical comedy, which opened Tuesday at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. The show, which stars Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara, is called "Nice Work if You Can Get It," but please don't get the idea that the songwriting legends have been granted a second coming. The only miracle going on here is a marketing one. A treasure-trove of tunes by the Gershwin boys has been repurposed into a wobbly jukebox musical, with a hot-off-the-press book by Joe DiPietro ("Memphis")
ENTERTAINMENT
April 21, 2012 | By Drew Tewksbury, Special to the Los Angeles Times
For legendary Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar's 75th birthday, a very special guest was invited onstage to perform with the onetime Beatles cohort. Shankar's accompanying orchestra members set down their instruments as she walked onto the New Dehli stage, sat down with her own sitar and performed a 15-minute solo set. In front of 2,500 people, Anoushka Shankar, Ravi's daughter, had made her musical debut. She was 13. "It was utterly terrifying," Shankar says of her big premiere in 1995.