Live Performance

At no point was the reputation of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lowlier than the time a certain rich Hollywood husband (Meshulam Riklis) greased the wheels of the organization’s membership to maximize the chances of his young actress wife (Pia Zadora) winning a Golden Globe. (She did.)

Per a a recent item by Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist Norm Clarke, lo these many years later, Zadora has moved to Vegas, married a cop and found a hankering for old standards. At a weekend Sin City charity event, the 58-year-old Hoboken, NJ native talked to Clarke about her upcoming July 27-28 Vegas performance at The Smith Center:

Zadora has put together a cabaret show featuring the standards that Frank Sinatra suggested for her when they worked at the Riviera. A year in the making, her show caught the eye of Myron Martin, president and CEO of The Smith Center, while she was performing in San Francisco’s Hotel Nikko Rrazz Room.

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Recently, Charlie Sheen indicated via Twitter that he was most definitely planning to attend a night of La Ronde, the adults-only LA theater experiment set for July 18-22. Not bad for a pilot production most people around town have yet to learn about.

“I was definitely thrilled to be re-tweeted by Charlie,” La Ronde director and Anger Management co-star Michael Arden tells FishbowlLA. “He’s such a good guy who takes a vested interested in everyone he works with, I’m not surprised he tweeted it. It’s hard to say how much impact the re-tweet had, given the mysteries of the Internet. But I have a feeling we got a few more glances at our Kickstarter page than we would have gotten, otherwise.”

That Kickstarter page is the key. The select group of people who helped Arden reach his $6,000 not-for-profit goal and an equal amount of VIPS such as Sheen are the only ones who will get to watch the intimate couples dramatics, based on 1900 source material by Arthur Schnitzler. Attendees will receive nightly instructions to show up at various Hollywood locations, without knowing who’s in the various playlet elements or where the action might lead them.

“What drew me to staging this piece as a promenade-style production was that in LA Ronde, the sexual encounters between people are almost like a baton-relay,” Arden explains. “I wondered what it would be like if the audience was passed through the story, like a baton. I was also very inspired by several productions by the theatre company Punchdrunk, an English immersive theatre group. I love the idea of voyeurism in this play and setting it in such an intimate environment.”

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In this 50th anniversary year of Marilyn Monroe’s death, the Hollywood icon is apparently being engineered to appear in the same way that the late Tupac Shakur did at Coachella. Per a report in the June 8 print issue of The Hollywood Reporter from senior writer Eriq Gardner:

The Hollywood Reporter has learned that a “live” Monroe concert is being planned to take place before year’s end with the working title “Virtual Marilyn Live – A Musical Celebration of the Birth of the Pop Icon.”

The concert, which has yet to secure a venue (organizers also plan to stream it on the web), will feature the projected blond bombshell singing and interacting alongside live music stars. Becky Altringer, managing director and co-founder of Digicon Media, the company doing the planning, says the event will employ the technology used at Coachella.

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Mention the words “The Laughing Cow” and most people think of a cartwheel of tasty, mid-priced soft cheese. But presently, at least through May 20, this is also the name of a play being performed at the Meta Theatre on Melrose.

Hollywood Patch guest editor James F. Mills caught up with the work’s author, Jessica Abrams. Formerly an assistant on the Disney lot, she sourced her experiences at the Mouse House for a comedy set at fictional Gurnsey Studios, where a gay attorney gets in trouble for writing a pamphlet:

“I first got the idea when working at Disney,” said Abrams, a New York City native who was raised in Chapel Hill, NC. “I was walking back to my car and this idea came to me. I felt like it was a way to express a lot of the frustration I had working there and the weirdness all around.”

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KCET is back on the national radar for the first time since going rogue and breaking away from the PBS umbrella. The station just announced that Your Turn to Care, hosted by Holly Robinson Peete, has landed a national syndication deal with American Public Television–the first major syndication deal of KCET’s solo era. The show, which focuses on the true life stories of baby boomers caring for elderly family members, will be seen on more than 70 stations throughout the country.

In case you were out, here’s Jimmy Kimmel‘s monologue from the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

How do you think the ABC late night talk show host did? There were some awkward moments at times but Kimmel pulled no punches.

Politico.com’s Patrick Gavin traveled to LA this week to talk to Jimmy Kimmel ahead of the talk show host’s weekend assignment as MC of the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Kimmel says he checked in with several of the event’s previous hosts including Seth Myers and Stephen Colbert. Everyone has told him that the key to success is getting the President to laugh. As goes the POTUS, so goes the crowd.

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One of the great things about Jason Reitman‘s “Live Read” series for Film Independent at LACMA is that the all-star sessions are never filmed or recorded for Internet posterity. It’s all about the audience surrendering to a live-performance moment. To bring that point home last night, curator Elvis Mitchell donned a pair of sunglasses and jokingly warned that anyone caught using a Smartphone in the audience would get a painful, personal visit from Laurence Fishburne.

Fishburne (pictured), seated center stage, was riveting as Mr. White, cranking out the first pair of Reservoir Dogs reading highlights: the injured-partner-in-the-car scene with Mr. Orange (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and the soulful significant-others discussion with jewelry store heist organizer Joe (Chi McBride). Bookending the all-black cast last night was Reitman, stage-left, who reads the script scene set-up info, and his Young Adult co-star Patton Oswalt, stage-right, who donned several comic relief hats as a radio DJ, policeman and more.

Terrence Howard put his own, seductive spin on the role of psychopath Mr. Blonde, played so memorably in the film by Michael Madsen. He also got one of the biggest laughs of the night when he came to page 59 and, in response to Reitman’s stage direction, told the audience, “I wasn’t ready to die yet.” Reitman quickly adjusted, expanding Quentin Tarantino‘s words to indicate a longer, drawn out death scene.

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On February 5, stand-up comic, actress and reality TV personality Suzanne Whang will open her one-woman show Cracked Open: Let Go & Let Gook at Beyond Baroque in Venice. As is customary with these sorts of things, she is trying to drum up some excitement and ticket sales with an advance press release that includes some heady praise:

Jim Vallely, co-executive producer and writer of Arrested Development: “This is the most powerful piece of theatre I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Tom Bergeron, Dancing with the Stars and America’s Funniest Home Videos: “Bold, funny, and committed on stage. Actually, she should probably just be committed.”

Tracy Newman, founding member of The Groundlings: “Here’s how funny, beautiful and smart Suzanne Whang is: She has cancer and I’m jealous of her.”

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Fun story today in Texas regional newspaper The Monitor by Brandon R. Garcia.

His subject is former local Tanya Saracho, who went on to garner acclaim as a playwright in Chicago and whose work El Nogalar is about to open in LA. Garcia recounts how Windy City folk thought Saracho was “loco” to turn down an opportunity four years ago to to meet with west coast reps for a major cable network, to discuss writing for a TV series.

Instead, Saracho held firm that she needed to continue working on her writing in Chicago. Only her tarot card reader was with her, and four years later, it has all lined up with as predicted:

“My señora told me, ‘Don’t worry … it will come back around again,’ said Saracho. Last week, Saracho left McAllen-Miller International Airport after a holiday stay in the [Rio Grande] Valley on a plane bound for Los Angeles, where she’ll be for at least the next few months…

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