Julien Nitzberg and Puppeteer Robin Walsh Go Wild Creating For the Love of a Glove

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For the Love of a Glove, a wacky, weird, irreverent satire, is writer/director Julien Nitzberg’s alternative-reality tale about the once “King of Pop,” and the way in which an alien named Thrihl-Lha is contained in a sparkly glove and trying to overtake all of humanity.

Nitzberg is joined in this wildly comic adventure by globally renowned puppeteer Robin Walsh, and the talented actors who operate her puppets and star in the show. The puppets are life-sized and lush, and the show uses them well along its completely irreverent, zany, yet pointed path as it examines everything about Michael Jackson including his skin whitening, his sexuality, abuse accusations, and his religion – all in a defiantly ribald, non-p.c. way.

Far from an authorized biography, the production is an inventive cult-hit that features 20 puppets that are motion-filled, queer positive and drag-friendly works of art.  The puppets are just one part of a talented live cast including lead Eric B. Anthony.

From suggesting a relationship with Donny Osmond was the key to Jackson’s life to a cautionary tale about an aborted romance with Brooke Shields, the wild and crazy humor is just the means to an end: unveiling and dealing with issues ranging from racism and religious hypocrisy to abuse and cultural appropriation.

The inspiration for the musical began twenty years ago, Nitzberg relates. That was when he was “asked to write a Michael Jackson biopic for a cable channel. The production team was trying to figure out how to deal with all the controversy surrounding him. They had no idea how to deal with the allegations of child abuse and so many other controversial things. I had an idea that we could say his glittery glove was an alien who forced him to do all these bad things, causing trouble to ruin his reputation.”

Needless to say, the production execs didn’t buy this approach. “They laughed really hard and said it was the funniest pitch ever, but could I do a normal version?” Nitzberg recalls. “But there was no way personally that I could write a convincing story about Jackson without dealing with these areas of his life and the only way I could make sense of them was through this idea. So, cut to years later, and this idea came back to me as honestly the funniest ever, and I created the musical.”

Making a funny, highly political and satiric musical came naturally for Nitzberg, having written and directed a similarly themed piece, The Beastly Bombing, that played successfully in Los Angeles for over a year.

In For the Love of a Glove, the writer/director explains that there were some subjects that he absolutely wanted to deal with in the production. “One was cultural appropriation, another was racism, and another was being raised in a fundamental Christian Religion. While this is all pretty heavy stuff, you can deal with issues in a lighthearted way without people feeling like they are being lectured. They can learn and feel like they are having fun.”

Dealing with a story about aliens who look like gloves “naturally led to puppets,” Nitzberg says. “Not to mention in the first act, we needed to cover the Jackson Five years, and we certainly were not going to cast five kids in a show that’s honestly pretty filthy. So, it made sense to use puppets to represent the kids.”

He adds “Teaming up with the amazing Robin Walsh was phenomenal. She is a genius, internationally known puppet designer.”  Working together, it took close to five months working on different puppet prototypes to find what worked best for the production.

According to Nitzberg, “Something most people don’t know is that working with pupets can be dangerous. In Broadway shows like The Lion King, people get injured because the ppets are so large and heavy. We wanted to design puppets that are comfortable to wear and lighter, which is tough with life-size puppets.”

Describing the rewards of and challenges inherent in the production, Nitzberg says “One of the most rewarding things about working on this project is our cast. They are so funny and so great, and bring so much richness to the show every night. We are always having audience members tell us that their stomachs hurt from laughing so much. The cast gets standing ovations every time.”

While he calls the entire production experience “super fun,” there have been challenges. “When you add puppets, everything is a challenge. Most of our actors didn’t have previous experience working with puppets, so Robin did a two week puppet camp to explain and practice how to work the puppets and the psychology of puppets, the background of this art form, how they fit into theater history and all of that. Having written and directed a musical before, I knew it took a long time to rehearse and plan, but puppets very much expand that.”

The show features eleven actors and twenty puppets, with each puppet exhibition its own character and persona.  “They take on a life of their own and start to freak you out,” Nitzberg laughs.

Describing the show itself, he notes that “A lot of people assume its going to be like an SNL sketch, making fun of Jackson, but it’s actually about how a great artist goes astray. One of the biggest parts of it is exploring how being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness with their super restrictive sexuality affected him adversely. We try to understand and explain how becoming the most famous crotch-grabber in the history of the world comes out of that background. For us, the answer is that the glove made him.”

The show opened ran briefly in 2020, was shuttered by the pandemic, relaunched this February, and has had its run extended four times, including for the next two weeks.

For the Love of a Glove runs Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. June 23/24, and June 30/July 1st at the Carl Sagan-Ann Druyan Theater at the Center For Inquiry West (CFI), at 2535 W. Temple Street, Los Angeles, 90026. A Pride Month Price Drop special offers general admission seating in these final weeks for $30, and front row bean bag seats for $80.

Go see this almost indescribable, insanely incandescent show before it dances off into the future.  It’s a real “Thriller.”

  • Genie Davis, photos provided by the produciton

 

 

Entering the Spiritual Realm of Where Earth Becomes Aether at Wonzimer

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There is both the mystic and the mythic in Where Earth Becomes Aether, curated by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanovic now at Wonzimer in DTLA through June 30th. Viewing this immersive show is a spiritual experience, both literally revealing the Zen-like soul of the art, and in its cathedral-like presentation.

The gallery’s soaring walls and ceiling create the exhibition’s own canvas, and the curators and artists have worked together to create many site-specific pieces that shape the space into a true church of awe-inducing art.

The group exhibition of 13 artists include works from both Radovanovic and Jenn, as well as Marthe Aponte, Francesca Bifulco, Adrienne DeVine, David Hollen, Aline Mare, Rosalyn Myles, Catherine Ruane, Nancy Kay Turner, Cheyann Washington, Christine Weir, and Sean Yang.

Thematically, the art looks at the “elemental nature of art making, constructed by earthy resources and inspired by ethereal ideas.”

The artists use everything from paper to plants, rock, metal, and clay, inviting viewers to enter a space that the curators describe as both “physical and emotional, the ephemeral and eternal, and the material and immaterial.” Aether refers to a divine substance, one that according to ancient Greeks, served as a connector between the earthly and the celestial. In short, the exhibition is one every bit as sacred and ethereal as its intent.

The viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to the backwall of the gallery, whose height is often overpowering in other exhibitions. Here, it’s fully utilized by co-curator Jason Jenn. Mixed media and acrylic paint are the materials used for “Interconnected: the Sky Serenades, the Earth Dances,” a site-specific installation available for re-creation.  Blue above and brown below, the serendipitous combination reveals both sky and ground, with elements that include a swirl of gilded metallic leaves, bones, and rock.

The piece is the physical backdrop and backbone of the exhibition, leading beautifully to works on either side of it and in the center of the gallery, where curatorial counterpart Vojislav Radovanović’s work serves as the exhibition’s all seeing if splintered eye.

To the left, some pieces mounted in soft dirt, are the lustrous ceramic and clay works of Sean Yang. There are four separate installations: “Filial Piety,” gives us resin cast gloves forming a kind of lei, draped off a wall-mounted chair; in pale sea green “Four Noble Truths” and “Noble Eight Fold Path,” are a perfect poem of ceramic and porcelain; while hands in a variety of oceanic shades protrude from the aforementioned soil display in Earthly Delight, an installation that contains ceramics, porcelain, and raku glazes. With a Madonna-like bearing, a female form contains two heads, one devilish, one peaceful in “Hanya,” which uses ceramics, Nara porcelain and metal oxides in its creation.

Rising just beside Yang’s work, and powerfully linked to Jenn’s in its swirl of leaves,is a virtuoso work from Catherine Ruane. Her vast “Vortex” encircles what appears to be the inside of a tree stump, or perhaps a magical black hole. Graphite, charcoal, white paint, and photo collage on rag paper make up this magnificent and vast profundity of delicately constructed black and white leaves. It is a tree in a snowstorm, a tree from Heaven, a cyclonic force as seen from above, embracing and encompassing. Here, Ruane’s work glows with the opalescence of her white paint, the delicacy of her leaves and her visceral accuracy of form, incandescent with a contained life force.

To the right of Jenn’s back-wall work, there are two delicate, ephemeral, fairy-like female figures rising within Aline Mare’s photographic works printed on glass. There is the luminous female form contained within the autumnal colors of “Anubis Head,” and the meltingly green and white fecundity of “Butter.” These beautiful works are as soul-soothing as they are slightly witchy, a heady brew.

Next to it is a tornado of site-specific smoke curling upward like a magician’s experiment from the curved natural sculptural forms created by Francesca Bifulco in “Wound Over the New Ground. ” Here, burnt burlap and wood with hand-stitched cotton thread is used along with a found palm frond and custom-built metal climbing spikes. It is plant and fire, smoke creature arisen from a jungle detritus, magnificent and fearsome.

Next to her piece is a series of conjoined and delicate works from Nancy Kay Turner, “Lethe: River of Forgetting.” Despite the title, her mixed media on parchment scrolls are not only memorable but evoke the idea of memory, as does her “Ghosts and Unintended Consquences Series,” offering mixed media including found photographs on wood panel. At the base of both series, which form a primarily blue, white, and brown nexus on the center wall, is “Pilgrimage,” 28 vintage wooded shoe lasts which evoke the fallen or the forgotten. It is a haunting, massive series of works that fits together like pieces of the same, heart-rending puzzle.

Cheyann Washington’s “Conjunction” creates the appearance of human figures arisen from the earth or sky. Using natural mineral pigments on oak-mounted fabric and an extension rope of woven dried plant material, she seems to be shaping her own Adam and Eve with sweeping, strange, grace.

Working in delicate perfection, Marthe Aponte shapes a sphere and a shield that seem like the perfect potential defense for Washington’s figures. Using picote, paper, mirrors, beads, and velvet, her two works here,  both “Reflexion/Reflection (Sphere)” and “Shield as Spatial Dialectics, ” also recall and celebrate the vaginal nature of birth, both physical and spiritual .

In the center of the gallery, powerfully reflecting Jenn’s back-wall piece as well as Bifulco’s, and others in the gallery, is a spill of mirror pieces that co-curator Vojislav Radovanovic uses like a pool, from which arises an incredible installation that resembles a church window in the heavens. Irridescent, luminous, and a simply vibrating mix of color, his “Painting for a Liminal Sanctum,” is a soaring song of mixed media on canvas. On the backside, wood shapes, plastic, and concrete forms support, both physically and emotionally, this rich glowing rainbow, a vision into an unseen universe embedded with small, delicate drawings within its hypnotic glow. It’s an enormously powerful piece that epitomizes the title and the intent of the exhibition as a whole.

Work by Christine Weir, “Override,” “Progenitor,” and “Emergence No. 2,”are each graphite on clay board, and tie into the heavenly ethereality of Radovanovic’s work and make a beautiful form and color match to Ruane’s work in the exhibition. Weir’s pieces here are their own vortex, their own celestial window, flowers or stars exploding in space.

Adrienne DeVine’s mixed media installations and wire art mobiles sing of the earth, if the earth were given wings to spin. Her mobiles are accompanied by rocks and palm leaf sheaths – which speak to Bifulco’s work directly across the gallery. The largest piece is “Serenity in the Garden of Mother Earth and Father Time,” which is surrounded by her other works, including the magical motion of “Dance For Mother Earth.”

Forming a kind of temple is David Hollen’s precise and absorbing “Ordered Heap,” a geometric gem constructed of hemp rope, stainless steel, and rubber, in earthy beige.

Acting as a kind of curatorial companion to Hollen’s spiritual building is the blue and gold work of Rosalyn Myles who offers both an astral map of fabric and dried flora, individual linocut prints, and a site-specific installation, “Stellar, “which seems to be a space pod ejected from the mother ship, replete with throw-back record player. It is squarely aimed outside the gallery, at a window to a street, and our present-day, pedestrian earth, a world which this viewer found it difficult to re-enter, after spending a wonderful afternoon taking in the celestial wonder of Where Earth Becomes Aether.

To say don’t miss the exhibition is an understatement. Just go. On June 30th, the gallery will host its closing event, a curator walk-through and film premiere from 6:00 PM 7:30 PM. The film is a visual scape for a music album by Joseph Carrillo entitled “Sanctuary Songs,” and it should serve as a delicate adjunct to this intensely beautiful show.

Wonzimer is located at 341-B S Avenue 17, Los Angeles, CA 90031 and is open from 12-7 every day but Monday and Tuesday.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis

Unspoken Dreams a Commentary on the Works of Theodosia Marchant by Aimee Mandala

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                                   This is a guest post from artist, curator, and arts writer Aimee Mandala

A safe space and maybe even a safe word, Theodosia Marchant’s Unspoken Dreams, a solo show located at Great Art Space in Beverly Hills and curated by Olivia Niles, captures the fantasies, vulnerabilities and essences of feminine desires at their core. Socially and historically the female relationship with sexual freedom has been marred—our desires, needs and objective pleasures have often been sacrificed and safekept deep inside the softest and maybe sweetest parts of ourselves— never to escape the confines of our minds. This collection of work— bold, seductively engaging and powerful— challenges that truth.

Marchant acknowledges this series was not created in solitude. It was built on trust, conviction and certitude of women willing to share their otherwise protected sexual reveries. It is simply glorious to witness a woman light up, sharing her deepest, even darkest desires in a circle of women— open, completely at ease and so ready at the tip of her tongue— the delight, the absolute glee as it exits her mouth and enters the eager air around us. I know immediately— this is a gift. This bravery, this unwavering and unabashed acknowledgement of fragility that went from a whisper in her soul to a confident declaration that moved through Marchant with a steady hand, paintbrush to canvas.

Each confessed truth, whether purely sexual or possessing underlying psychological undercurrents, is interpreted by Marchant and subsequently transformed into captivating visual explorations. While style and form consistently ring true to Marchant’s signature figures and forms, these alluring, vivid and even mind-tangling works encourage the viewer to meander scenes where each piece tells a story of it’s own. And for an exquisite moment, we are taken into this world where these Unspoken Dreams become a verbalized and downright pronounced reality.

The exhibition ran at Great Space in Beverly Hills April 29 through May 26th. The gallery is located at 9465 S. Santa Monica Blvd.

  • Aimee Mandala, Artist /Curator /Arts Writer; photos provided by Aimee Mandala 

 

Want to Just Sail Away?

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Almost everyone finds getting out on the water an alluring idea. Whether it’s a leisurely sail, a fast ride on a jet ski or motorboat, or a luxurious cruise on a yacht, floating fun doesn’t have to be just an idea anymore.

GetMyBoat has established a mission to make the joy of boating accessible to amateur sailors and fishing fanatics alike, becoming the number-one app for both boat rentals and charters. Calling the company the “Airbnb of Boats,” company rep Val Streif says, “While boating in Los Angeles is often considered an exclusive experience, you can find yacht charters at affordable prices on GetMyBoat.”

In short, if you’re looking for a captained experience or a rental you can float yourself, the company works simply by allowing customers to connect directly to boat owners and captains and then book a secure cruise online.

Boating experiences are available at Marina del Rey, Newport Beach, Redondo Beach, and Long Beach among other locations. In fact, if you’re going out of town on vacation, many destinations with a waterfront location are a part of GetMyBoat’s rental map.


From a relaxing afternoon sailing around Balboa Island to a celebration with a group of friends, pretty much any on-the-water experience is possible. There are options such as a zero-emissions electric boat, a Duffy boat perfect for an afternoon gathering in the Marina, making the perfect setting for a birthday or anniversary. Seating as many as six passengers, the boat has a shady full canopy and offers a relaxing 5 m.p.h. sail.

If seeing nature up-close is more what you’re after, there are a bevy of whale watching tours available, including a luxurious 38-foot yacht complete with an experienced captain. Offering a sail off Dana Point in Southern Orange County, passengers will get the chance to cruise near dolphins and whales. Plus, they can enjoy two staterooms, two bathrooms, an enclosed bridge, and an open–air aft deck, as well as complimentary triple fudge brownies.

There’s a classic wooden cruising boat available along with hercaptain in Huntington Beach, holding up to 12 passengers. A wide range of wind-powered sailing charters are also available, including a gorgeous schooner with red sails launching from Newport Harbor. You can even have a lesson on handling the tiller yourself. Or perhaps you’re into a faster ride: if so, you could take a spin on a Chapparal Powerboat with a 25-foot deck, capable of carrying 9 passengers including the boat’s captain, right out of Marina del Rey.

In short, whether you’re looking for a relaxing seafaring afternoon or a terrific setting for a celebration on the water, booking a boat experience has never been so easy. GetMyBoat offers a simple and safe solution to securing your own ultimate water experience.

There’s nothing like the fresh sea air, the cry of gulls and cormorants, and the soothing sound of those ocean waves. Get ready to relax on a serene sail or for an afternoon of summer fun while zipping around the harbor on a jet ski. Whatever water experience you’re looking for, GetMyBoat is the place to turn for sensibly priced rental experiences by the hour or day. Some renters can even offer overnight water adventures.

So, if it’s time to say “Ahoy, matey” and get onboard with some ocean-going quality time, check out the wide range of SoCal rentals available and “sail away, sail away, sail away.”

– Genie Davis; photos by Get My Boat