Viva

In the six-part BBC America series "Viva Blackpool," David Morrissey plays Ripley Holden, a fledgling casino owner with visions of transforming his gray, seaside entertainment town of Blackpool into a glittering Vegas-by-the-sea. Ripley's all self-styled bombast, a B-level striver in a white suit and Elvis sideburns. It's a nervy drama with a great, nervy lead; in Morrissey's hands, Ripley changes the tenor of a room in the way that James Gandolfini does as Tony Soprano.

A fiesta in celebration of Mexican independence day offers mariachi music, folkloric dancing and food Saturday at the Abrazar Center. Highlights include a dozen Mexican food booths, and the band Mariachi Michoacano, which will play from 3 to 6 p.m. Event organizers said they expect almost 2,000 people to attend the fiesta, which will be from noon to 9 p.m. at 7101 Wyoming St. The event is free. For more information, call (714) 893-3581.

"Viva Vivaldi" is one of Gerald Arpino's strangest and most fascinating Joffrey Ballet showpieces. Created in 1965 and revived this season, it contains duets of great originality as well as group passages just as slick and empty as Arpino's recent output. A real back-to-the-future oddity. For starters, it's curious that Arpino made a Spanish-style divertissement from the Venetian composer's Concerto in D for violin, strings and cembalo. And those two moody, intimate duets--each of them ornamented by three subsidiary dancers--are puzzling too, structurally and spatially, very imaginative but expressively enigmatic, even private.

To accuse playwright Luis Valdez of "selling out" in "I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges" is ludicrous (Calendar Letters, Feb. 9), and I for one am appalled at hearing upward-mobile, pseudo-intellectual (am I being redundant) Latinas parrot this line. Most critics and letter-writers are missing the point of Valdez's last play. His main thrust was to castigate the media for the "crumbs" they throw at ethnic-minorities in demeaning roles--anything else was incidental. Valdez's ability to castigate the media, second-class citizenship and our immoral foreign policy, and still entertain and make us laugh, is brilliant.

With a refreshingly intelligent program of four challenging works, the ensemble Boston Musica Viva prevailed in an evening of chamber music Wednesday at the Schoenberg Institute at USC. The 21-year-old septet, conducted by founder Richard Pittman and made up of musicians mostly with ties to the New England Conservatory, demonstrates a remarkable togetherness along with an honest, unpretentious approach.

At age 28, Boston Musica Viva is one of the burnished veterans in the ranks of American new music ensembles and, sure enough, the group delivered quietly commanding skill and commitment in concert Monday at the L.A. County Museum of Art. Apart from the sheen of the playing, it presented a well-designed program on the themes of cross-cultural instincts and tracing one's musical roots. The program was also framed by works from composers based in Los Angeles and in the same household.

Though the buildings themselves are sometimes Modernista masterpieces, apartments in the turn-of-the-century Barcelona neighborhood known as the Eixample (Expansion) are often dark warrens of little rooms, cut off from one another and from the air, the sun and any urban activity taking place outside. English architect Jonathan Caplan saw through the walls, though, and turned two adjacent flats in a modern (though non-Modernista) apartment building into a roomy home-and-office combination.

Most pop fans may have probably heard more in the last two weeks about the late Doc Pomus than they did during the late songwriter's five decades on the pop, rock and R&B scenes. Pomus was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last week in recognition of writing or co-writing hits for such artists as Elvis Presley ("Little Sister" and "Viva Las Vegas"), Ray Charles ("Lonely Avenue"), the Coasters ("Young Blood"), the Drifters ("Save the Last Dance for Me") and Dion ("A Teenager in Love").

Florida goes Vegas this week with the opening of two behemoth hotels linked to convention centers and replete with lagoons and fantasy landscapes. The $450-million Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center sprawls across 63 acres in Kissimmee, south of Orlando and about five minutes from Walt Disney World Resort. It has more than 1,400 guest rooms.