Arts

Renowned and beloved playwright, actor and pianist Hershey Felder’s newest musical play, Rachmaninoff And The Tsar is now on stage at South Coast Repertory. The musical play features Felder as composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff alongside British-Italian actor Jonathan Silvestri as Russian Tsar Nicholas II.

Rachmaninoff settled in Beverly Hills decades after leaving Russia during the 1917 Russian revolution. While he lived in America, the composer’s heart was always in Tsarist Russia, which he knew and loved as a young man. While suffering from a terminal illness in his late 60’s, he recalled a memory of an encounter with Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II, and the Tsar’s daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia. The memory haunted him until the end.

Rachmaninoff And The Tsar features some of Rachmaninoff’s most beloved compositions, including the Paganini Variations, Preludes, Symphonic Selections, and his most famous piece, the Second Piano Concerto. This incredible music underscores Felder’s mystical musical journey in his signature style, which his audiences know and love.

American Theatre Magazine says, “Hershey Felder, actor, Steinway Concert Artist and theatrical creator, is in a category all his own.” Felder’s genius has conjured up the spirits of George Gershwin, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leonard Bernstein, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Irving Berlin. Felder’s solo performances have been seen across America and around the world.

Rachmaninoff And the Tsar runs through March 2, 2025.

For tickets, click here.

In her American debut, Su Yu-Xin brings her unique style to the Orange County Museum of Art. The Taiwanese-born artist considers painting “a place where multiple disciplines and various perceptual capacities intersect. Painters have always played a vital role in the visual art industry, and the medium of painting reflects the discovery and re-invention of the material world.”

Her vision is expressed through transforming natural and synthetic materials into pigments. As the artist explores and discovers these materials, they become both the medium for her paintings and the focus of her research. Yu-Xin has a deep interest in the materiality of color, exploring how pigments are obtained from the Earth’s crust through processes such as mining, grinding, and refining. She also examines how color is identified as a property based on the physical origins of the pigments. She challenges modern color systems by investigating aspects such as the origins, functions, migrations, and potential futures of color.

In her Searching the Sky for Gold, Yu-Xin explores amorphous and seemingly invisible substances with colored, tangible foundations. Examples include salt air along the California coastline, underground mine fires in Utah, smog in Chinese mountains, and nuclear gases in New Mexico.

At OCMA, the artist presents landscapes as dynamic, interconnected realms, offering visitors a novel way to understand our world.

For more information, click here.

The Holocaust Museum Los Angeles will unveil a poignant art installation called Die Plage on February 6, 2025, created by the late visual artist Harley Gaber.

Die Plage, or The Plague, is a large-scale collage of approximately 4,200 canvases that interpret German history from the Weimar Republic to the end of World War II. Gaber made multiple trips to Germany, researching archives and visiting historical sites to inform his work.

The exhibition consists of 600 of the 4,200 canvases, covering six walls in grid-like formation, as per the artist’s original design. The installation showcases Gaber’s unique perspective on this critical historical period and a comprehensive view of his interpretation.

The grid-like formation in Die Plage is both aesthetic and conceptual, symbolic of the systematic and bureaucratic nature of the Nazi regime, reflecting the ordered chaos of that period. The grid formation also enables a deliberate juxtaposition of images, allowing visitors to draw connections and contrasts between different canvases, enhancing the artwork’s narrative and emotional impact.

Gaber worked on Die Plage from 1993 to 2002, using various techniques, including collage, photomontage, painting, xerographic manipulation, pastel, and charcoal.

As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, exhibits like Die Plage become increasingly crucial in preserving their stories for future generations. The museum continues to innovate in its approach to Holocaust education, recently introducing AI technology that allows visitors to interact with survivor testimonies.

For more, click here.

Batsheva Dance Company, one of the world’s most renowned contemporary dance ensembles, presents its latest masterpiece, MOMO, at The Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion from February 14–16, 2025.

This 70-minute tour de force, conceived by visionary Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin, is a mesmerizing exploration of human emotion and physicality. MOMO explores the duality of the human soul, presenting a narrative that intertwines raw masculinity with the search for individual human identity.

The piece is performed to a haunting soundtrack primarily composed of Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet’s album “Landfall,” with additional music by Philip Glass, Arca, and Maxim Waratt.

Batsheva dancers, known for their exceptional physicality and emotional depth, will bring MOMO to life through a combination of ensemble work and individual expression. The performance features intricate choreography alternating between soft, gravity-defying movements and explosive, high-speed sequences. Audiences can expect a series of atmospheric sequences that blend lightness with anguish, creating a texture as ambiguous and complex as reality itself.

Naharin’s signature movement language, Gaga, forms the core of MOMO, challenging traditional dance norms and pushing the boundaries of contemporary performance.

MOMO is not just a dance performance; it’s an evocative journey into the depths of human experience, promising to leave audiences both moved and exhilarated. Critics have praised MOMO for its intensity, musicality, and ability to create an atmosphere that is difficult to describe but irresistible to see.

For tickets and more, click here.