SAN DIEGO – Following up three successful albums of pop covers and originals, Chris Hassett brings his warm baritone and impeccable interpretive style to twelve standards for his fourth album, Just in Time. Having delighted local Southern California audiences with live performances since the 1980s, Hassett began his recording projects just four years ago and…
The Normal Heart When Larry Kramer premiered his play The Normal Heart off-Broadway in 1985, his agonizing, angry autobiographical story about the AIDS epidemic in New York City and the few activists desperately trying to help their lovers and friends, hit the city like an emotional meteor. While a very few theater critics were able…
I first discovered Elaine Stritch on the original Broadway soundtrack to Company, the classic 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical about then-modern love in New York. The plot revolves around perennially single Bobby and his married friends; Stritch played Joanne, the oldest of the group. At the end of the second act she sings “The Ladies Who…
Spring is in the air (here in San Diego of course, spring looks a lot like summer and winter), March is nearly upon us and I am feeling just a little lyrical. Or maybe there are a slew of lyrical-like activities happening in town these next few weeks. What could be more poetic in nature…
As Gloria in Gloria, Paulina García has such a gravitational effect on your eyes, ears and empathy that it’s nearly impossible not to be enrapt with her, as an actress and as a middle-aged Chilean divorcée coping with both loneliness and with falling in love again. Unfortunately, Gloria was not nominated for the Best Foreign…
It came as such a surprise. You knew that you were in love, and the feeling was reciprocated. You knew you and your beloved had a future together, but marriage? Maybe, maybe not. And then a little black box showed up, someone said “yes,” and it’s all good. Well, maybe not all. In the new…
Jodie Foster and Matt Damon in Elysium dvd of the week Somehow, I missed Elysium, Neill Blomkamp’s follow up to the now-classic District 9. It’s about a future humanity where the rich and powerful live in a paradisiacal space station called Elysium, and the poor and desperate are still on Earth, scrounging for scraps and…
dvr this Turner Classic Movies, Friday, Sept. 13, 9:15 p.m. Two hundred years from now, the survivors of humanity all live in a domed city and their lives are totally controlled by a computer that, among other unsavory things, kills every person when he or she becomes 30, though they think being vaporized means they…
