Around 11 a.m. on a recent Saturday, the first of five work-in-progress comedy shows began to unfold onstage at the Elysian Theater. The audience was encouraged to provide feedback. And between the five hourlong productions, bagpipe music filled the Echo Park space.
For performers Sarina Freda, Natasha Mercado, Charlie James, Miles Woods and Griffin Kelly, this “Edinburgh Fringe Percolator” was a chance to test material before they journey to the famed Fringe festival in August. For Los Angeles audiences, it’s an opportunity to experience the Fringe without actually traveling to Scotland.
The annual Edinburgh Festival Fringe is billed as the largest performing arts gathering on Earth, with tens of thousands of performances held in about 250 venues across the entire month. Before the talent arrives for the spotlights, they’re often refining their work — in L.A., that’s in places such as the Comedy Store in Hollywood, the nearby Kookaburra Lounge in the Ovation complex or the Lyric Hyperion in Silver Lake.
Griffin Kelly workshops the production of “Two Cats on a Date” at Elysian Theater.
(Chris Ungco)
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The 2-year-old Elysian Theater is trying to establish itself as an Edinburgh artists community, a spot to share ideas, via its Frogtown home and its Facebook group. The nonprofit is hosting Edinburgh run-throughs of Rachel Kaly’s mental-illness-minded “Hospital Hour” on July 15 and “Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip” on July 14 and 16. Natalie Palamides is scheduled to perform her Edinburgh-bound “Weer” five times this month. “Avital Ash Workshops Her Suicide Note,” part of the 2023 Fringe, gets revived by Ash on Tuesday.
Toni Nagy presented “Grape Culture” with Sarah Buckner five times at the unrelated Hollywood Fringe Festival in June in preparation for her Edinburgh debut. Nagy will have a second title in next month’s festival, the cathartic parenting journey “Go to Your Womb,” in which she stars with her daughter, Adelia Aldrich.
“I’ve had to take an unconventional approach to my career because everything I make tends to push against the status quo,” Nagy said. “Bringing two shows to my virgin Edinburgh Fringe may seem like a bold move, but … they complement each other thematically, and if I can get through rehearsing and performing with my 13-year-old daughter, I can do anything.”
Toni Nagy’s “Grape Culture” performed during the Hollywood Fringe Festival in preparation for Edinburgh.
(Aletheia Lane)
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Jay Light’s vagabond “Wrong! A Dark Comedy Game Show” started at Alamo Drafthouse in Los Angeles and went on to tour in New York, Chicago and Austin, Texas, before settling in the Comedy Store in October. Three comics compete in committing “cancel-able offenses” and making “questionable decisions” in the show, which plays July 22 in the Comedy Store’s Belly Room before it moves to Edinburgh.
At the Ovation complex, formerly known as Hollywood & Highland, Fielding Edlow’s “Gaslighting Is My Love Language” promises “a brutally honest, unapologetically explicit, and immensely entertaining hour of comedy” July 25 in the Kookaburra Lounge.
A crop of Edinburgh shows also in previewing at the Lyric Hyperion, including Natasha Mercado’s “#1 Son” on Saturday, Milanka Brooks’ “Mum and I Don’t Talk Anymore” on Monday, Kym Priess’ “Loser Lion Party Bus” and Jackie Skinner’s “Beautiful Night” on Tuesday, Catherine McCafferty’s “(Not) That Bad” on Wednesday and Alex Kern’s “Thank You So Much for Coming” July 13.
Kyle Ayers brings his “Hard to Say” back to the Lyric Hyperion on July 22. The show centers on Ayers’ trigeminal neuralgia, a chronic pain disorder, so the comedian’s goals in Edinburgh feel as personal as they are professional.
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“I’m most looking forward to just the supreme chaos of it all,” Ayers said. “I will be well outside of my comfort zone. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever done before, and I am trying to embrace that aspect. I want to see shows I never thought I’d see, meet people I never figured I’d meet, and perform for people who otherwise may never see my show.”
The Elysian runs workshops and discussions for confirmed Edinburgh talent and the “Fringe-curious” alike. “Opening night is important,” Kelly cautioned at one Saturday session, noting that early reviews carry weight. But the pressure persists, as comedy gatekeepers and tastemakers can pop up at any point in the marathon of nightly sets.
Naked Comedy producer Sam Varela said one trend is crowdfunding. “This year everyone is just more broke,” she says, citing the Hollywood labor strikes and dearth of jobs.
So much time and effort goes into making an Edinburgh show a success. For L.A. audiences, previewing the work provides a glimpse of that process.
“The first time I did Fringe, it really made me appreciate and understand the DIY comedy approach that has exploded in the last few years,” Light says, noting the collective development that was required to get his show to the stage, “It took two years to make it good enough in front of a crowd as it was on paper.”
A former executive at Live Nation, the world’s largest live entertainment company, is suing the company, alleging that he was wrongfully terminated after he raised concerns about alleged financial misconduct and improper accounting practices.
Nicholas Rumanes alleges he was “fraudulently induced” in 2022 to leave a lucrative position as head of strategic development at a real estate investment trust to create a new role as executive vice president of development and business practice at Beverly Hills-based Live Nation.
In his new position, Rumanes said, he raised “serious and legitimate alarm” over the the company’s business practices.
As a result, he says, he was “unlawfully terminated,” according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
“Rumanes was, simply put, promised one job and forced to accept another. And then he was cut loose for insisting on doing that lesser job with integrity and honesty,” according to the lawsuit.
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He is seeking $35 million in damages.
Representatives for Live Nation were not immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit comes a week after a federal jury in Manhattan found that Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary had operated a monopoly over major concert venues, controlling 86% of the concert market.
Rumanes’ lawsuit describes a “culture of deception” at Live Nation, saying its “basic business model was to misstate and exaggerate financial figures in efforts to solicit and secure business.”
Such practices “spanned a wide spectrum of projects in what appeared to be a company-wide pattern of financial misrepresentation and misleading disclosures,” the lawsuit states.
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Rumanes says he received materials and documents that showed that the company inflated projected revenues across multiple venue development projects.
Additionally, Rumanes contends that the company violated a federal law that requires independent financial auditing and transparency and instead ran Live Nation “through a centralized, opaque structure” that enables it to “bypass oversight and internal checks and balances.”
In 2010, as a condition of the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, the newly formed company agreed to a consent decree with the government that prohibited the firm from threatening venues to use Ticketmaster. In 2019 the Justice Department found that the company had repeatedly breached the agreement, and it extended the decree.
Rumanes contends that he brought his concerns to the attention of the company’s management, but his warnings were “repeatedly ignored.”
At the centre of Madhuvidhu directed by Vishnu Aravind is a house where only men reside, three generations of them living in harmony. Unlike the Anjooran household in Godfather, this is not a house where entry is banned to women, but just that women don’t choose to come here. For Amrithraj alias Ammu (Sharafudheen), the protagonist, 28 marriage proposals have already fallen through although he was not lacking in interest.
When a not-so-cordial first meeting with Sneha (Kalyani Panicker) inevitably turns into mutual attraction, things appear about to change. But some unexpected hiccups are waiting for them, their different religions being one of them. Writers Jai Vishnu and Bipin Mohan do not seem to have any major ambitions with Madhuvidhu, but they seem rather content to aim for the middle space of a feel-good entertainer. Only that they end up hitting further lower.
After more than two and a half years of research, planning and construction, Dataland, the world’s first museum of AI arts, will open June 20.
Co-founded by new media artists Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, the museum anchors the $1-billion Frank Gehry-designed Grand LA complex across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. Its first exhibition, “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” created by Refik Anadol Studio, was inspired by a trip to the Amazon and uses vast data sets to immerse visitors in a machine-generated sensory experience of the natural world.
The architecture of the space, which Anadol calls “a living museum,” is used to reflect distant rainforest ecosystems, including changing temperature, light, smell and visuals. Anadol refers to these large-scale, shimmering tableaus as “digital sculptures.”
“This is such an important technology, and represents such an important transformation of humanity,” Anadol said in an interview. “And we found it so meaningful and purposeful to be sure that there is a place to talk about it, to create with it.”
The 35,000-square-foot privately funded museum devotes 25,000 square feet to public space, with the remaining 10,000 square feet holding the in-house technology that makes the space run. Dataland contains five immersive galleries and a 30-foot ceiling. An escalator by the entrance will transport guests to the experiences below. The museum declined to say how much Dataland, designed by architecture firm Gensler, cost to build.
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An isometric architectural rendering of Dataland. The 25,000-square-foot AI arts museum also contains an additional 10,000 square feet of non-public space that holds its operational technology.
(Refik Anadol Studio for Dataland)
Dataland will collect and preserve artificial intelligence art and is powered by an open-access AI model created by Anadol’s studio called the Large Nature Model. The model, which does not source without permission, culls mountains of data about the natural world from partners including the Smithsonian, London’s Natural History Museum and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This data, including up to half a billion images of nature, will form the basis for the creation of a variety of AI artworks, including “Machine Dreams.”
“AI art is a part of digital art, meaning a lineage that uses software, data and computers to create a form of art,” Anadol explained. “I know that many artists don’t want to disclose their technologies, but for me, AI means possibilities. And possibilities come with responsibilities. We have to disclose exactly where our data comes from.”
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Sustainability is another responsibility that Anadol takes seriously. For more than a decade, Anadol has devoted much thought to the massive carbon footprint associated with AI models. The Large Nature Model is hosted on Google Cloud servers in Oregon that use 87% carbon-free, renewable energy. Anadol says the energy used to support an individual visit to the museum is equivalent to what it takes to charge a single smartphone.
Anadol believes AI can form a powerful bridge to nature — serving as a means to access and preserve it — and that the swiftly evolving technology can be harnessed to illuminate essential truths about humanity’s relationship to an interconnected planet. During a time of great anxiety about the power of AI to disrupt lives and livelihoods, Anadol maintains it can be a revolutionary tool in service of a never-before-seen form of art.
“The works generate an emergent, living reality, a machine’s dream shaped by continuous streams of environmental and biological data. Within this evolving system, moments of recognition and interpretation emerge across different forms of knowledge,” a news release about the museum explains. “At the same time, the exhibition registers loss as part of this expanded field of perception, most notably in the Infinity Room, where visitors encounter the 1987 recording of the last known Kauaʻi ʻŌʻō, a now-extinct bird whose unanswered call becomes part of the work.”
“It’s very exciting to say that AI art is not image only,” Anadol said. “It’s a very multisensory, multimedium experience — meaning sound, image, video, text, smell, taste and touch. They are all together in conversation.”
