14 SEPTEMBER 16- SEPTEMBER 22, 2021
NEWS
Pasadena Playhouse returns this fall with a party May S. RUIZ mayrchu56@gmail.com
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he Pasadena Playhouse returns this fall with its 20212022 season. Danny Feldman, producing artistic director, couldn’t contain his thrill to be coming back to the theatre with a live audience. And it wouldn’t be just your standard seated audience either. But I’ll let him tell you all about it. Speaking by phone on a recent afternoon, Feldman enthuses, “We’ll open our season in November with ‘Head Over Heels,’ a musical comedy adaptation of ‘The Arcadia’ by Sir Philip Sidney and is set to the music of the iconic 1980s all-female rock band The Go-Go’s. It’s huge and ambitious and is the only way to come back from a pandemic. “The world has changed. It is pretty unrecognizable to me right now and we want people to have that experience. So we’re completely reconfiguring the theatre – there will be no traditional stage and proscenium. The best way I can describe it is the show happens all around you. The story is about a royal family who goes on a journey to save their kingdom and discovers the joy of each other along the way. It is full of comedy, dancing, and great music, and the audience is coming along with them.” Except for next spring’s premiere of “Ann,” The Playhouse’s 2021-2022 season isn’t what was originally slated for last year. Feldman discloses, “Everything is going to be new because I took a different approach that is reflective of the world that changed. The Pasadena Playhouse takes great pride in the fact that though we’re a hundred-yearold-plus institution, we’re relevant, we’re responding to the moment. “’After ‘Head Over Heels,’ we’re staging a play that’s a Pasadena Playhouse co-production with two other theatres in two different cities, the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. and the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston. Again, this is a new model of creating work. The play is a teenage retelling of ‘Richard III’ with a rather racy title ‘Teenage Dick’ and it’s a pretty exciting
BeaconMediaNews.com
UCLA: COVID transmission risk increases during labor with patients’ heavier breathing
Danny Feldman | Photo courtesy of Pasadena Playhouse
new work by Mike Lew, an amazing young playwright. It sets Richard III in high school where he’s bullied because he has cerebral palsy and he’s running for senior class president. It’s a wild ride. I think it’s a surprising evening of theatre people will not forget for a long time.” Feldman says further, “‘Ann’ follows in the spring with the extraordinary Holland Taylor, the legend – this is her show. It’s a delightful evening celebrating Ann Richards. It gets into politics in a way that is appropriate for today, that is not trying to separate people or create division but bringing people together. Governor Ann Richards was an older divorced woman, single mother, former alcoholic, Democrat in Texas. And Holland just reincarnates her. She’s coming back alive on stage and you feel like you’re having a visit with Ann Richards. It’s a delightful, soulsoothing celebratory evening. “We close next summer with a party as well – ‘freestyle love supreme.’ This was created from the minds of Lin Manuel Miranda and his collaborators Anthony Veneziale and Tommy Kail who directed ‘Hamilton’ and another production we did with Nia Vardalos ‘Tiny Beautiful Things.’ This will be the first time that the Pasadena Playhouse has a show coming directly from Broadway. It’s a Special Tony recipient and it will be time on Broadway for the second time in October, and then it’s coming here next summer. It’s several things all at once – hip-hop, freestyle rappers, a band, an audience, and no script. The show will be made up every night using words and ideas solicited directly from the audience. It’s a wonderful way to round out a season that to me is exciting and pulsating and celebratory and creating a new path forward – different kinds of shows, different ways for audiences to engage with the work.” While The Playhouse won’t be opening until November,
Feldman stayed busy during the pandemic. He says, “We launched our digital platform PlayhouseLive where we had a full program which included commissioned work that was in response to George Floyd and the racial reckoning in America. We also did the Jerry Hermann show about the Broadway composer, which garnered attention all over the country. We offered a Broadway class with hundreds of people across the United States taking it. We expanded our footprint. We really worked on redefining what a theatre can be during that time – what it looks like when you’re not confined to four walls of a historic theatre. That was exciting and we’re certainly planning to continue some of our digital work.” Asked what he learned during the pandemic, Feldman replies, “I learned to slow down a little bit. I learned that in the absence of performing art, we realized how much we need it, and how much as humans we’re wired to come together and be together. It was an opportunity to understand the value of that in our lives and to make sure that when we came back out of that, that we do it wholeheartedly, we do it with intention, and we do it to create good in the world. Feldman ends with a call to action. “We had a year plus of absence of the performing arts. If any of the readers are like me, that was a part of the pain of the year. Now that we have an opportunity to come back, having community here that is full of rich cultural experiences is so important. It’s why I love living here. And the best way our community can come together to make sure that in this very uncertain period we can have a thriving scene and places to go, is to support cultural institutions. We need a robust audience to stand up and say, ‘We want this and we’re ready to come on a journey with you’ in order for us to be here for many years to come.”
| Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash
By City News Service
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ransmission risks for COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases rise during labor with patients' heavier breathing, according to a study released Tuesday by a UCLA-led research team which recommends that all health care providers in the labor and delivery room have access to proper personal protective equipment. Not all seemingly highrisk procedures require that health care providers have access to PPE, including N95 masks. Vaginal delivery, for example, is not currently considered a high-risk or
aerosol-generating procedure by the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. N95 masks are not currently recommended for health care workers in all labor and delivery health care settings. The study -- published in Obstetrics & Gynecology involving faculty at UCLA Health's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering - - is the first to show data describing respiratory emissions during labor and delivery
and how those emissions can travel faster and potentially farther than even a simple cough. "The research shows how quickly and far the respiratory particles produced during labor and delivery can travel," said Dr. Rashmi Rao, an assistant clinical professor of obstetrics-gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and corresponding author of the study. "In the next stage of research, we want to demonstrate that aerosols, which are infectious viral particles that can float or drift around in the air, are in fact present in these respiratory emissions."
Wistaria Vine
| Photo by Terry Miller / Beacon Media News
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It was merely recognized by World Guinness Records, which is as powerful as the World Beauty Pagent (sic),” declared one FB poster. Then there was this: “I promise this much. You. The city council, will roux (sic) the day you let the wisteria vine be cut down. This is heracy (sic)of the highest
order. You have failed here. You have failed the citizens of Sierra Madre. You have failed a 125-year tradition. You have failed the basic principle. Always protect the history of the town. I call on you know to right this wrong. Good luck.” Someone also posted photos of the alleged vine destruction and commented thus: “From these photos it
appears half the vine is gone, and that cut back may kill the rest of the plant. We no longer have the largest vine in the world I’d guess. So very sad what these people have done to the beautiful lady. When I heard the house had been sold I was so concerned they wouldn’t allow the yearly showing of the vine, but didn’t think of this!”
