Lewis Whittington writes about the performing and film arts for many publications. He is a renegade dance, theater and opera queen, a jazz-head and a civil activist.
Television
The new 7-part BBC America series The Vice starts off looking like a Prime Suspect knock-off. With pounds of lurid exposition and character baggage, it quickly becomes a tug of war between "gripping" storylines and arrested character development. This ...
Books & CDs
If James Gavin's biography Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker was fiction, it would have a shot at being the great American novel. The bootstrap story of a poor trumpeter (with missing teeth) who couldn’t ...
Film
The Mysterious Death of General Sikorski DVD The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (2003), Tom Standage From the first ...
Books & CDs
One of the most fertile partnerships in all of ballet wasn't seen on stage, but was danced behind the scenes - the collaboration of composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer George Balanchine. Both Russian artistic emigres to the West, together ...
Books & CDs
Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam (2002), David Kaufman Charles Ludlam was a man of the theater with the ego of no less personages than Moliere, Shakespeare and Wilde.As ...
Television
Last seen in the Hamptons attending the straight wedding of ex-gay cabaret entertainer Bobby Fine (Nathan Lane) and aging socialite Bitsy Von Muffling, the heroines of HBO’s Sex and the City are now starting up their 6th and final ...
Film
There is a famous story about the making of the film adaptation of Tennessee William's notorious Suddenly, Last Summer that starred Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn, as Violet Venable was so obsessed with her dead son, Sebastian, ...
Television
There’s an old saying that goes "the dead can’t hurt you," but in the case of the new Showtime series Dead Like Me they certainly have the power to bore you to death. After the runaway hit Queer as ...
Film
Even though a nosebleed epidemic threatened or killed most of the characters in the closing episode of last season's The League of Gentlemen, many inhabitants did in fact survive to return for the new season about to be unleashed ...
Music
Ottorino Respighi Academy of Vocal Arts (AVA) Philadelphia, PA Conducted by Christopher Macatsoris Perelman Theater in the Kimmel Center Jan. 23, 24, 27, 2009 http://www.avaopera.com/season/lafiamma/ The Academy of Vocal Arts (AVA) performed Ottorino Respighi’s opera ‘la Fiamma‘ in a ...
