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Raymond J. Barry in “Awake in a World That Encourages Sleep”
Actor, artists and playwright, Raymond J. Barry, who currently plays Timothy Olyphant’s father in the FX hit drama “Justified” will be performing in his current play “Awake in a World That Encourages Sleep,” which also stars Joseph Culp from “Mad Men.“ It will run at the Electric Lodge in Venice January 7 through February 26. Barry’s other movie credits include “Born on The Fourth of July,” “Dead Man Walking,” “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” and Training Day.” You can check out his art and reel etc. here: http://raymondjbarry.org/
“Awake in a World That Encourages Sleep” is a dark comedy by Raymond J. Barry that explores the ever growing imbalance between the rich and poor, the complex issues of war, corporate greed and power. It was written well before the “Occupy” movement, but it delves into those same issues that is the driving force behind these protests.
At Barry he has acted in over 70 films and over 100 plays. In the 1970’s he did theatre workshops at Sing Sing and Attica Penitentiaries for about 10 years. He was a member of the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre and performed in over 70 productions on Broadway and off Broadway.
CALENDAR INFORMATION
WHEN:
January 7 through February 26, 2012
Fridays and Saturdays and 8:00 pm
and Sundays at 2:00 pm
WHERE:
The Electric Lodge, 1416 Electric Avenue,
Venice, CA 90291
PRICES:
$25.00 general, $18.00 seniors,
$15.00 students. Free on-site parking
TICKETS:
www.brownpapertickets.com/event/210533
SPECIAL:
Three course dinner with wine at Hal’s and ticket for $55
Saturdays 6:30 – 7:30 pm – 8:00 pm Showtime
Must be reserved in advance at livearts@electriclodge.org
‘Romantic Offerings,’ Santa Cecilia Orchestra’s Spectacular Opening Night Concert
Conductor Sonia Marie De Léon de Vega and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra (SCO) return to Occidental College with “Romantic Offerings,” a spectacular opening night concert of SCO’s 19th season on Sunday November 6, 2011, at Thorne Hall. Romantic Offerings will include the beautiful Bruch Double Concerto featuring the Orchestra’s own principal players: Michael Arnold, clarinet, and Lauren Chipman, viola.
Inspirational Maestra De León de Vega will conduct the most beloved of all the Brahms symphonies, the Second. The evening’s program also includes Mendelssohn’s St. Paul Overture and Bruch’s Concerto for Clarinet, Viola and Orchestra in E minor, Op. 88.
The concert begins at 4:00 PM and is performed without intermission. Tickets, which are on sale now for 26/$20 (adults) and $7 (children), are available by calling (323) 259-3011 or visiting www.scorchestra.org/201011orderform.html#romanticofferings. A complete season schedule is available at http://scorchestra.org/concerts.html.
Sonia Marie De Léon de Vega, Conductor
Maestra De Léon de Vega is world renowned for her skills on the podium as the music director and conductor of the Los Angeles-based Santa Cecilia Orchestra, the only orchestra in the nation with a specific mission to share the beauty and inspiration of classical music with Latino communities. Maestra De Léon de Vega is celebrated in education circles for creating Discovering Music in 1998, a two-year music education program that is currently offered in 18 elementary schools throughout Los Angeles. The program has touched the lives of more than 40,000 students in 35 schools through the power of music education.
About Santa Cecilia Orchestra
Founded in 1992, Santa Cecilia Orchestra has made a commitment to share the beauty and inspiration of classical music with Southern California audiences, giving special focus to Latino communities. SCO offers full orchestra and chamber concerts, and its nationally acclaimed Discovering Music, a two-year music education program. The upcoming season features four concerts: Three full symphony concerts and a chamber orchestra performance. Media and speaking engagement inquiries, please contact Richie Matthews of DIÁLOGO at richie@dialogo.us or for news, photos and biographies of the conductor and soloists, visit http://www.scorchestra.org/PressRoom.htm.
Theater review: ‘This’ at the Kirk Douglas Theatre
A quick survey of the intriguing loft apartment conjured by scenic designer Louisa Thompson tells you all you need to know about the characters of Melissa James Gibson’s marvelous play “This,” which opened Sunday under the direction of Daniel Aukin at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. Filled with books, paintings, toys and remnants of a winding-down dinner party, the space quite obviously belongs to creative and highly literate parents who are far too steeped in the messiness of life to put on a show of perfect tidiness.
That messiness turns out to be the main subject of Gibson’s highly Chekhovian drama — it’s the “this” of her slightly annoying but apt title. The playwright’s manner might be quirky in a 21st century fashion that relishes language games and can bear realism only if it’s allowed maximum fluidity, but her vision bears striking similarities to her Russian predecessor, who wanted to capture the experience of human transience, the consciousness of time passing as life assembles itself in ways that are rarely in accord with our dreams and expectations.
The characters of “This” have just crossed the threshold into middle age, all of them approaching 40 or already over the line and wondering about the road ahead, its length, direction and ultimate purpose. Marrell (Eisa Davis), a jazz singer, and Tom (Darren Pettie), a woodworker, the occupants of this urban home, are an interracial couple going through a rough patch in their marriage after having their first baby. They’re acutely sleep deprived and chronically annoyed with each other for such domestic misdemeanors as not keeping the water pitcher filled to the Brita filter line.
The occasion for their relaxed soiree is to introduce their old friend Jane (Saffron Burrows) to Jean-Pierre (Gilles Marini), a sexy Frenchman involved with Doctors Without Borders, a name that provokes all kinds of lightly libidinous wordplay from the infatuated group. Jane, a beautiful poet who’s as self-effacing as she is verbally exact, is still getting over the death of her husband. She’s less excited about the prospect of a dalliance with this hunky humanitarian physician than Marrell appears to be. Alan (Glenn Fitzgerald), Marrell and Jane’s gay buddy from college, cuts through the tension with wisecracks and non sequiturs that suggest someone should cork that bottle of wine he’s been compulsively fondling.
As with Chekhov’s plays, the plotting of “This” is less conspicuous than its perceptiveness. The incident around which the play revolves happens the day after the party, when Tom unexpectedly drops by Jane’s apartment and confesses that she has invaded his mind. The two succumb to the feverish sexual moment, and guilt — the corrosive kind that afflicts decent people after they’ve made an uncorrectable mistake — ensues.
But don’t expect the neat story arc of a well-crafted adultery-themed screenplay. “This” is in many ways a more
conventional drama than Gibson’s previous work — the Obie-winning “[sic]” is an oblique little wonder — but it’s the type of piece that was made purely for the stage.
A chunk of the first scene is devoted to an adult game, in which Jane is duped trying to guess a secret story, and throughout the play are bouts of linguistic horseplay testing how far words will bend before breaking. The characters even perform for us. Marrell sings at a club (allowing the extraordinarily multitalented Davis to exercise her musical gifts) and Alan, a mnemonist, goes on a talk show to display his unbelievable memory (a talent that Gibson humorously employs later on in an emotionally charged scene).
The work isn’t without flaws. The style can get precious at times, as when Gibson has Jane ask Alan why he’s sitting in “the almost dark,” presumably to indicate the character’s poetic precision. Alan’s avalanche riffs (though entertainingly delivered by Fitzgerald) have a whiff of gay motormouth theatrical stereotyping. And the play’s conclusion singles out Jane as the protagonist in what had struck me all along as an ensemble piece. (Imagine Chekhov choosing to end “The Cherry Orchard” with a monologue by Ranevskaya.)
But the pleasures of “This” more than outweigh these quibbles. The work abounds in wit, cleverness and surprise. How can you not smile at Marrell’s taxonomy of unhappiness, broken down into “personal, marital, professional, existential and interdisciplinary” subgroups? And how infinitely charming of Alan to share with us, apropos of nothing, that he’s “thinking of adding a second L” to his name.
It’s uncategorizable moments like these that give “This” its unique texture. But lest I give the impression that the play is all loopy frivolity, let me remind everyone that Gibson is grappling with those intimations of mortality that lie behind the clichéd yet cursedly inescapable midlife crisis. The work’s comic ping emanates from a scary psychological place — one of the reasons it’s so amusing. Loss haunts the action, and when heartbreak hits in the play’s home stretch, it hits hard.
For the Los Angeles premiere, this Playwrights Horizons production, which I first encountered in New York in 2009, has recast the roles of Jane and Jean-Pierre with Burrows and Marini. Burrows has the tougher challenge of the two newcomers, but she sails through admirably, seeming as comfortable in her character’s skin as Davis, Fitzgerald and Pettie seem in their portrayals. Marini adopts a subdued theatrical presence that handsomely fills the bill but could be strategically amped up. (Lines of Jean-Pierre’s that were hilarious off-Broadway seem lackadaisically wry here.)
It’s most satisfying to report that the collaborative chemistry between Gibson and Aukin, her go-to director, has deepened over the years. Their innovative style now seems enriched with a greater emotional maturity, which is at least some compensation for the humiliating torment of getting older.
“This,” Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City. 8 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Sundays (Call for exceptions). Ends Aug. 28. $20-$45. (213) 628-2772 or www.centertheatregroup.org Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes (with no intermission)
Written by:
Charles McNulty
Photos:
Photos: Top: Eisa Davis, Darren Pettie, Saffron Burrows. Bottom: Burrows and Glenn Fitzgerald. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times
‘Hamlet,’ Hank and the Bard
A summer Shakespeare festival isn’t the first place you’d turn looking for good country music.
But L.A.’s Independent Shakespeare Co., which is in the midst of its annual run at the old zoo in Griffith Park, has inserted a surprising albeit fitting country music spotlight in its production of “Hamlet,” which continues Sundays through Aug. 28.
Without completely robbing the show of the element of surprise, let’s just say that during one pivotal scene, a gravedigger starts singing Hank Williams’ lovelorn classic “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
Hear that lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to cry
The midnight train is whining low
I’m so lonesome I could cry
As it turns out, the song made it into the show more by happenstance than design.
“I’m pretty sure Luis Galindo, the actor, used it as sort of a placeholder one day, because we didn’t yet have the music to the song Shakespeare provided,” said the company’s artistic director, Melissa Chalsma.
“Luis grew up in Houston, and Hank Williams music is a big part of his life,” she said. “It felt right to hear those lyrics and that tune come out of his mouth. And, the theme of that song — loneliness and isolation — is a beautiful reflection of both the ultimate loneliness of a graveyard (‘all men die alone,’ and all that) and also Hamlet’s subjective experience of being alone in the world. Not to mention Ophelia’s trajectory, who literally is so lonely she dies!
“So I suggested we keep it, and we even amplified and highlighted its use.”
Indeed, the country music great was often referred to as “the hillbilly Shakespeare,” and this use prompts the question: Why haven’t Shakespeare and country music come together more often?
“Country music deals so unabashedly with big feelings — just like tragedy,” Chalsma said. “I thought the audience would connect to the song.”
Country music has long been a place where songwriters explore romantic tragedy using language as compact and colorful as the Bard of Avon’s. Clever couplets, vivid imagery and unexpected turns of phrase are the stock in trade of both.
In modern times, Shakespeare’s work is often placed among the pinnacles of high art in the Western world; just the opposite of country music, which is strongly rooted in the lives and concerns of regular folk. But the two are, historically speaking, closely connected.
“It’s always ironic to me when people start talking about Shakespeare as being so highfalutin’,” said Thomas Bradac, founder of Shakespeare Orange County and a theater professor at Chapman University in Orange. “The poetry was always considered high art, and the sonnets, but the plays themselves were the dime novels of their day. That’s why the royalty didn’t go to them, and why they got kicked out of London and moved to the South Bank, next to the whorehouses.”
Some directors have set productions of “Taming of the Shrew” in the Old West to help audiences connect better with Shakespeare’s treatise on gender stereotypes, while the Bard’s best-known themes and characters have occasionally surfaced as country song fodder.
Taylor Swift’s hit “Love Story” may be the most recent example, one in which the young singer-songwriter cast herself and her would-be love as Shakespeare’s star-crossed couple. Except she added a happy ending.
Romeo, save me, they’re trying to tell me how to feel.
This love is difficult, but it’s real.
Don’t be afraid, we’ll make it out of this mess,
It’s a love story, baby, just say, “Yes.”
Country group Diamond Rio scored a Top 20 hit back in 1993 with it’s wittily titled “This Romeo Ain’t Got Julie Yet.” That same year, Dolly Parton even threw in a bit of Shakespearean language in her playful single “Romeo,” which envisioned a woman on the dance floor looking for her ideal of romantic perfection:
Hey Romeo where art thou
Get out here on the floor
I want to dance you darlin’
‘Til you forget wherefore
In 1968, just as Jerry Lee Lewis was reviving his career with a long string of country music hits, he played the scheming Iago in “Catch My Soul,” a rock musical version of Shakespeare’s “Othello” staged in L.A. Lewis’ performance, by most accounts, was the highlight of the production.
The life of idiosyncratic producer, engineer and country songwriter Cowboy Jack Clement was explored in the 2005
documentary “Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan,” a film in which Kris Kristofferson likened Clement to Shakespeare’s larger-than-life jester Falstaff. Clement, as it turns out, also happens to be a big Shakespeare fan.
Former Columbia Records talent scout and producer and ’50a TV show host Mitch Miller, who helped launch Tony Bennett’s career by persuading him to sing Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart,” once said he thought Williams’ music could reach far beyond the country audience because “he had a way of reaching your guts and your head at the same time. No matter who you were — a country person or a sophisticate — the language hit home.”
Just like William Shakespeare.
In an essay from the early 2000s, “Country Matters: Shakespeare and Music in the American South,” writer Robert Sawyer noted significant parallels between the lives of Shakespeare and Williams and cited a number of country songs that referenced the playwright or his works.
“Like the barbed fences that separate the livestock from the farmland so often evoked in songs from the American South,” Sawyer concluded, “arbitrary barriers between country music and Shakespeare are constantly being overrun, torn down and rendered useless.”
Written by:
Randy Lewis
Photo:
Luis Galindo as the Gravedigger from Independent Shakespeare Co. production of “Hamlet”
Credit: Ivy Augusta
Opera review: ‘Barber of Seville’ in Santa Barbara
Rossini is hot in the international opera world. Imaginative musicians, directors and scholars are rediscovering the striking originality and inventiveness of his operas. There are dozens, most unjustly ignored, that are being freshly reinterpreted, which typically means scandalously provocative productions.
For its annual opera production at the Granada Theatre, Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West stuck with the Rossini chestnut “The Barber of Seville.” Sunday afternoon, at the second of two performances, the academy, which includes a famed vocal program run by the great mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, played it very, very safe.
This proved a “Barber” with an aesthetic that would have ruffled no feathers during the Eisenhower years. A parochial production enticed bright young talent into making opera hopelessly irrelevant to its generation, to anything whatsoever related to real life or what is going on in any of the opera houses that matter. Still, the Granada was full and the audience appeared to be enjoying itself very much.
It wasn’t only the stage and its business that was fusty, but the performance as well. Warren Jones, a pianist who is best known as an accompanist (or collaborative artist) to big-name singers, conducted. However animated in the pit or expert in supporting singers, he brought out little of the sparkle or wit of Rossini. As if Donnell’s heavy-handedness wasn’t enough, Jones indulged his singers in their belted-out arias and flippant long-held high notes. It was a big day for adrenaline.
Julia Dawson, who portrayed an airhead Rosina, is a soprano who can release roulades of coloratura with a torrent of shimmering sound. José Rubio was a hammy Figaro with an impressively booming baritone. After warming up, tenor Marco Stefani proved a warmly amiable Count Almaviva.
But all acted like such annoying brats on stage that that one’s sympathy naturally went to the ludicrous Dr. Bartolo, Rosina’s lecherous guardian, who schemes to marry her. DeAndre Simmons, a baritone who is an alumnus of the academy voice program (and was left out of the program book), played the part; he became the afternoon’s class act. Julienne Walker could have been a knockout Berta, the maid, had she not tried so hard to be a knockout Berta nor overplayed the sneezing. Brandon Cedel was the bumptious music master Don Basilio.
I would be happy to hear any of this young crew again. But this is the time in their development for them to be pushed, stretched, made musically and theatrically sophisticated, exposed to their art form’s depths. Instead, they have here been instructed in the art of mindless frivolity and musical mediocrity.
Such a conventionally sophomoric “Barber” prepares these singers for nothing outside the most provincial North American opera houses. If they have big-time real-world Rossini ambitions, they may be in for a shock, and the sooner it comes the better.
Written by:
Mark Swed
Photo:
from left to right, DeAndre Simmons (Bartolo), Brandon Cedel (Basilio), Julienne Walker (Berta), Julia Dawson (Rosina), José Rubio (Figaro and Marco Stefani (Almaviva). Credit: David Bazemore/Music Academy of the West.
Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy
The tug-of-war between the classical and the topical shows up in the marketing of Anna Deavere Smith on tour, as she performs her latest series of interview-based monologues,Let Me Down Easy, at Santa Monica College‘s Broad Stage, in association with Arena Stage of Washington, D.C.
“Let Me Down Easy explores the human side of the health care debate,” proclaims the PR headline. Leaving the theater after the show, audience members remarked that the performance had almost nothing to do with the health care debate, though this was said with no consternation about the event itself.
Smith is the same performer who created a shattering series of monologues, also based on interviews, in the wake of the riots following the Rodney King verdict, calledTwilight: Los Angeles, 1992. That piece was indeed topical, an entry into larger social and human concerns about injustice and bigotry, latent and overt, in a city where ethnicities rub up against each other all the time, and occasionally crash into each other and burn.
But to describe Let Me Down Easy as pivoting on health care is as much beside the point as calling Waiting for Godot a theatrical discussion of poverty.
Smith herself is largely culpable in the false branding of her show. When it was announced that a revised version of the piece (which has been performed at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn.) had found financing and a theater off-Broadway in 2009, Smith told The New York Times, “It’s a substantial revision of what I did before, focusing far more on health care than the previous productions. Signs seem to suggest we will soon be in a vigorous national debate over health care. The piece not only looks at the human body as both resilient and vulnerable, but also health care as a practical part of that.”
One of her characters is rodeo bull rider Brent Williams, continually getting smashed up in his profession. He argues that a military-style flat-rate health care system is the only system that makes any sense.
One in a string of very moving portrayals in the work’s midsection is Dr. Kiersta Kurtz-Burke, working at New Orleans’ Charity Hospital, describing how simple it can be to treat patients with caring. Her observation is mingled with disgust and muted rage about the abandonment of the hospital by FEMA during Hurricane Katrina, and how its patients, the city’s poorest, understood so clearly that wealthier patients in private facilities had been helicoptered to safety even as the levees had been opened onto the poorer wards in order to protect the wealthier areas.
But the linkage of our health care system to social injustice is a marginal aspect of Smith’s 20-character meditation on mortality — the same theme for which Margaret Edson won aPulitzer Prize in 1999 for her play Wit. That play was about a female scholar of English poetry, a specialist in the sonnets of John Donne, facing down death and revealing her professional passion and her personal loneliness through the ordeal of ovarian cancer. This is not an idea that anybody would call marketing-friendly, and yet the play’s classical and decidedly anti-topical virtues not only prevailed, they were awarded and subsequently embraced with multiple productions of the play.
The only reason the marketing of Let Me Down Easy and of Smith’s own remarks to The New York Times is worth comment is how it reveals the belief of an accomplished artist and her publicists that if a work of theater isn’t somehow connected to newspaper headlines, it won’t be considered important enough to sell. Which raises the question of what, exactly, is important, and its relationship to what, exactly, is enduring.
Smith is something of a cross between an impersonator and a conjurer, aiming to capture the essences of the people she interviews through idiosyncrasies such as Tour de France cyclist Lance Armstrong scratching himself, or the way the words of heavyweight champion boxer Michael Bentt stall and backtrack before pushing their way forward to the completion of a sentence. And yet, despite these signposts of individuality, the overarching voice is singularly Smith’s — throaty and weighty, capable of careening from a joke in which ABC movie critic/cancer patient Joel Siegel denies an afterlife into the dying man’s solemnity, as though in a battle between the wry and the grave.
The piece opens and closes with seminarians — from Professor James H. Cone of the Union Theological Seminary in New York to Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard. What transpires between these bookends goes from stricken athletes testing the limits of their body, and thereby aiming to defy the inevitabilities of biology and mortality, to the experiences of doctors and patients facing down death, to Trudy Howell, director of a South Africanorphanage ushering children with AIDS through the end of their young lives.
Amidst this spirited and spiritual procession come celebs with trite insights who have been included for obvious reasons but have a scant relationship to the eternal verities that appear to be the work’s reason for being: The trivial contributions of model Lauren Huttonand author-activist Eve Ensler demean Smith’s larger purpose and provide the kind of bloat that gives the piece the appearance of multiple endings, masking the profound circularity of Smith’s literary design.
Director Leonard Foglia stages the work on Riccardo Hernandez‘s set of white divan and broad desk with chairs, against a backdrop of five mirrors in which the performer sometimes is reflected in alternate angles — far more theatrical than the de rigueur video projections used so frequently, and frequently so pointlessly.
Smith performs in costume designer Ann Hould-Ward‘s white blouse and black trousers, an outfit that becomes a kind of rack for sundry jackets, ensnaring different essences of different characters.
Written by:
Photo by:
Amy Graves
LA Asian Pacific Film Festival premieres Christopher Woon’s ‘Among B-Boys’
Most people tend to associate B-boying (a.k.a. break-dancing) with African-American or Latino cultures. So how is it that a community of Hmong people found themselves smack in the middle of such a peripheral form of cultural expression?
Documentarian Christopher Woon will tell you how. After all, he has studied this subject for more than seven years, and his documentary “Among B-Boys” is proof that the act of B-boying has spilled over into many cultures and continues to have a strong influence on the lives of young people.
In 2004, Woon was a UCLA student who began working on a documentary short through the Asian American media arts center Visual Communications’ Armed with a Camera fellowship program. He had decided to focus on a dance crew in the California Central Valley known as the “Velocity Crew”.
Woon, a fifth generation Chinese American, was eager to begin his work. However, like any good filmmaker who is going to chronicle real life, he had to first win the trust of those people he intended to film. Being accepted by the Hmong people was his first step on his filmmaking journey.
The Hmong people in the United States have an interesting, and in some ways, a heartbreaking background. For centuries, the Hmong people lived a mostly agrarian life in the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. However, during and after the Vietnam War, many of the Hmong in Laos were aligned with the United States. As a result, our government accepted them into the U.S. as refugees.
With their newfound freedom, also came culture shock. Like the millions of immigrants who had come here before, the Hmong would be faced with many daunting issues. Would they be expected to jump into the “melting pot”? And at the same time, how much of their own heritage could or should be preserved?
As Woon would soon witness, many of the young Hmong were eager to embrace elements of popular U.S. culture, while many of their parents frowned upon their children’s new interests. Yet for the young people, Woon explained that b-boying would serve as a means “of asserting their own indentity, as well as, defining what it means to be Hmong.”
It didn’t take long for the Hmong community to embrace Woon. So too, in the process of making his documentary short, he discovered that there was much more to the story he had started to tell. Thus, in 2006, he would receive another fellowship that would enable him to further develop his film into a full-length documentary.
Whereas in the early days, many of the b-boys in the Merced crew did get involved in gang activity, those that followed their older brothers onto the dance floor took a decidedly different approach. Woon’s film highlights some of the positive outcomes that these young people experienced as a result of b-boying.
During the course of his journey, Woon who directed and also edited the documentary, spent countless hours at work. What’s more, when some members of the Merced crew moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma in search of a better financial future, Woon followed them halfway across the country.
Eventually, when it was time to begin editing, Woon’s feat was monumental. How do you take numerous hours of footage, acquired over a considerable amount of time, and cut it down to a film with a running time of fifty-eight minutes? Add to this, Woon’s commitment to telling a truly reflective story that portrays his subjects with the utmost genuineness, and it is not surprising that he sometimes became disheartened.
Interestingly, however, his subjects, whom Woon now considers his friends, were the ones who often urged him on. They told Woon, “What we’re doing is good. It’s a message to the Hmong Community.”
Woon, who’s been nominated for best director in the film festival, said the b-boys’ encouragement reminded him just how important the project was to him.
“(Their words) Renewed my dedication and helped me get to the finish line,” Woon said.
(The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival runs from April 28-May 7 at the Directors Guild of America, Laemmle’s Sunset 5 Theatre, and CGV Cinemas, amongst other venues. “Among B-Boys” will be shown on Wednesday, May 4 at 9:15 p.m. at CGV Cinemas-Theater 1. The theater is located at 621 S. Western Avenue, Los Angeles 90005. Click here to purchase tickets.)
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From the documentary “Among B-Boys”