Close Encounters of the Hair Kind at La Jolla Playhouse

 By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt.

 

Some of the artful braiders in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, in their Tony Award-winning costumes. (Photo by Ben Krantz Studio/Berkeley Repertory Theatre.jpg)

If you’re ready for a colorful, very unusual evening in theater, don’t miss the SoCal premiere of Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, an acclaimed Broadway production now onstage at La Jolla Playhouse that brought its opening night audience to their feet on May 22^nd.

Co-produced with Arena Stage, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Center Theatre Group and Chicago Shakespeare Theater, in association with Madison Wells Live & LaChanze, it brings a rare taste of Harlem to La Jolla.

Though the show didn’t have a long run on Broadway in 2023, it was subsequently nominated for five Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Direction, and won a Tony for Best Costume Design by Dede Ayite, whose early work included costumes for LJP’s 2016 production of The Last Tiger in Haiti. And a Special Tony Award went to Nikiya Mathis for her Hair and Wig Design.

Two of the coolest hair and wig designs. (Photo by Ben Krantz Studio/Berkeley Repertory Theatre.jpg)

But there’s more than a display of designer talent in this portrayal of a day in a Harlem hair salon where immigrant stylists create fabulous do’s for their local customers. There’s humor, music, and some emotional moments, plus a timely connection with current events.

Interestingly, although Jaja’s name is featured in the show’s title, she makes just one brief appearance in her salon, wearing a fabulous costume.

And there are not only women onstage. Various male characters show up in Jaja’s salon and though each was significantly different, we were lucky enough to be seated next to the brother of the one man who played them all and were able to photograph and chat with him afterwards.

 

Onye Eme-Akwari, posing with the Jaja poster after the show.

The Nigerian-born actor, producer, musician and educator was the male understudy on Broadway, and occasionally appeared onstage there. Here at LJP, he’s five different men every time. (Photo by Maurice Hewitt)

A final note: On opening night, it was great to be part of the diverse audience as everyone leapt up at once in a standing ovation for the show.

Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, written by Jocelyn Bioh and directed by Whitney White, with additional direction for LJP by Manna-Symone Middlebrook, will be at the Mandell Weiss Theatre through June 15. For tickets and information: lajollaplayhouse.org or phone (858) 550-1010.  

 

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.

Revisiting Art Alive 2025

 By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt. Photos by Maurice Hewitt.

Floral Designer David Root’s creation and his inspiration

Circle Blue-Violet by DeWain Valentine

We hadn’t been to see San Diego Museum of Art in full bloom for awhile…three days in late April when they become “a kaleidoscope of botanical and floral delights.”  That’s what happens when floral designers from all over our region face off with selected artworks from SDMA’s permanent collection  and come up with their own garden-grown interpretations.

 This time, we were there on the morning of the first day, Friday, April 25^th, for the Members’ Preview…and so were thousands of others. It seems to be one of the best-attended art events in the County!

 

The Rotunda Centerpiece.

This year’s theme was Art and Architecture, and the first thing we saw when we entered the Museum was the brilliantly architected kinetic centerpiece in the Rotunda, designed by Water Lily Pond, specifically Natasha Lisitsa and Daniel Schultz, an internationally renowned wife-and-husband team from San Francisco. The 40-foot-tall installation was inspired by the work of Norman Foster, a British architect known for his high-tech designs.

The Art Alive 2025 team chose the works of 72 artists to put on display throughout the museum and we made up our minds to discover every one of them, take photos, talk to a few of the designers who were present, and do it all as quickly as possible, before the real crowds arrived. We would choose our own favorites, and find out later that day who the prizewinners were, after all Art Alive viewers had turned in their voting ballots.

Above you’ll see our personal favorite, a piece by San Diego-based David Root, whose floral design roots go deep. He has spent over three decades designing and teaching, has won many awards, and  currently works with Pacific Event Productions. That evening we learned he had won second place.

The first-place winner was one of our favorites as well: Here’s the Basket Vendor by June Meehan, a member of the Crown Garden Club in Coronado, and her inspiration, an ivory piece crafted over a century ago.  

 Below are some of the others we most enjoyed seeing. Hope you enjoy seeing them now.

 

 Mary Lou Gibson and the camel that inspired her. “I’m a first-time designer here,” she said. “I’m a virologist, and I found this base 20 years ago in a thrift shop. It was too big for my kitchen table, but perfect for Art Alive, since everything had to fit on a 24-inch-diameter round table and be no taller than 36 inches high!”

Pat Crisafulli's display above and the Seated Bodhisattva that inspired her.

Ikebana artist Armando W.M. Argandoña with his larger interpretation of the small Plaque (Landscape) to his right. Like other Ikebana artists who participated in this exhibition, he had to create his piece on site.

Rick Spear, from the Point Loma Garden Club, with the piece that inspired him: #46, by Karl Stanley Benjamin.

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net

Shirley Tse Sculptures: From Stakeholders to Zero Impact

 by Patricia Frischer

One of my favorite Shirley Tse art works from the Artic Circle experience
was blocks of ice on skating blades. Tse explains that the
ice is tired of being skated on and it wants to skate away to escape.

In this live lecture by Shirley Tse as part of the UCSD Guest Lecture series (now archived so you can watch it yourself), we are shown work from 2019 to 2024. During this period, Tse is working with 1000 lathe turned  wood components with 3-D printing connector pieces shown in the Venice Biennial and in Hong Kong. But her more recent work pushes toward art made with existing materials with as little carbon footprint as possible.

The metaphor for the stakes of all sorts of different shapes and sizes is an exploration of stakeholders. In essence it is the relationship of one element/person to another. Is it unequal? Is it collaborative? Does it create conflict? Is there an opportunity for added value? The set of elements she creates can be assembled to be site specific and crawl from inside to outside and from floor to ceiling.

A variation on this type of construction was the quasi-badminton shaped sculpture. Particularly interesting was the shuttlecock which Tse actually called a shuttle pod. The ball front is rubber and the feather actually vanilla pods. This points toward her family’s history with rubber and vanilla plantations.

Tse decided it was time to teach a sustainable art class. She spoke of how greed is the major cause of the big three problems that are important to her: the unjust economy, climate change and health concerns. The wars, environmental problems and prejudice are interrelated. To solve one, you need to solve all.  One simple decision was to start to only re-use existing objects. Another was to try to cut down on storage and transport cost.

She was surprised to be accepted to an Artic Circle Residency in 2023 because her application was  Do Nothing. Climate change in this region is 6 time more evident than anywhere else. This becomes a jump start for her search of a Zero impact sculpture. Her idea was to be present, with less making and filming and more observing. She only used a cell phone to record, but brought tools to observe like sound enhancing gear. The resulting film has large segments of simple white subtitles on a black background. This again is a throwback to her early family life when she had to have subtitles on all the movies. For her having no images full fills a fantasy of not missing anything. The art becomes the narrative and not a documentary.

There were 20 artists in the residency and since she was doing nothing, she volunteered her time and equipment to any of them that wanted to take advantage.  She actually ended helping 6 of them with a yoga practice. She has such an interesting take on the breath. When we breath  in, we are not taking in air. Instead, we are creating a space and the universe puts air into that space. She expands that concept of oneness stating that the idea of each of us as a separate person is an illusion. It turns out that moving away from the notion of an individual artist and into a space of collaboration is all part of zero impact sculpture.  

She and her two children went to the Orkney Island in Scotland where the sun does not really set in the summer.  This sculpture was made while discovering her son’s need for a soccer ball. It  could be covered in some tissues her daughter was using for a project and the result was her very own Orkney moon. Once it was kicked around a bit and the tissue skin removed, it made a perfect low-tech foldable, fit in your pocket, no shipping cost sustainable sculpture to take home.

How do you charge for zero impact sculptures in a gallery setting. Shirley Tse  is lucky to work with Shoshana Wayne Gallery who agreed to price each one the same percentage of the value of her total time. In this case it was $3,300. 

A Walk on the WOW Side: Our Favorite Things at WOW Festival 2025

 By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt. Photos by Maurice Hewitt. 

 

Entering the WOW Festival.

WOW! It’s a cool acronym for Without Walls and is a now-annual event initiated in 2013 by La Jolla Playhouse. The idea is to take performances outside conventional theater and into unexpected spaces around the county, offering audiences a chance to interact with artists in unusual ways.

Maurice and I have been WOWing since the beginning, and we’ve always had our favorites, like that first year’s Seafoam Sleepwalk, NYC-based puppeteer Basil Twist’s much-larger- than-life-size Aphrodite rising from the sea at La Jolla Shores.

While 2025 didn’t have anything as grandiose as that, we had two definite favorites during our hours walking around this year’s festival--back on the UCSD campus again--and weaving in and out of many varied performances. Our two favorites were complete opposites, and we’ll give you a sense of them here. 

Green Memories.

Shahrokh Yadegari before the first showing.

This surround-sound-and-visual collaboration by UCSD professors Shahrokh Yadegari (composition, electronics & direction) and Memo Akten (visuals) was shown in a small room at Qualcomm Institute, where interdisciplinary teams can come together and use cutting-edge technology to address 21^st century challenges.

Our still shot of one of Memo Akten’s moving images.

 The piece was inspired by a poem written in the 1950s by one of Iran’s most revered poets, Forough Farrokhzad. Poetry is considered the highest art form in Iran, Shahrokh’s native country, and she was the first female poet to be honored. Both he and Memo, who comes from Turkey, think poetically, and wanted to do something together. When they finally had a chance to share some of their work, Memo started showing a few of his short films and the music Shahrokh had brought with him amazingly seemed to fit with the images, which were made algo-rhythmically and processed with AI techniques.

 A fiery image.

Green Memories is a meditation on what is happening to our natural world, offering attendees the option of reclining on a Persian carpet for the 25-minute experience.

Here are the first lines of the poem, which is even more relevant today.

I Pity the Garden by Forough Farrokhzad

No one thinks of the flowers
No one thinks of the fish
No one wants to believe
that the garden is dying
its heart swollen under the sun
its mind draining of green memories…

There’s no green in Green Memories, which begins in black and white and moves into fiery colors. But there is the hope that audiences will feel like part of the earth’s reincarnation and realize--as Shahrokh says--"that we and the earth are one and the same.”

We found the piece very moving. Sharokh said they are calling it a workshop version and are definitely planning to go forward with it. We can’t wait to see its next incarnation.

On our way out of the QI building, I saw an intriguing sign: The Skeuomorph.

The Skeuomorph.

 The guy at the desk said it was an AI piece, and though I have mixed feelings about AI, I thought I’d give it a try.  There was a small metal object on a stand in an otherwise empty room, and for the next ten minutes I had an incredibly interesting conversation with this female-voiced object that was one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time. I then learned it was not part of the WOW Festival but was a separate creation by artists Mendi and Keith Obadike, and would be on view Monday-Friday, 12-5 p.m., through June 6^th. Look for it on the first floor of Atkinson Hall.  https://galleryqi.ucsd.edu/the-skeuomorph/ 

Performers and audience members onstage.

Back to our second WOW favorite: Burnout Paradise  

This was an incredibly active interactive performance onstage in the Price Center Ballroom by Pony Cam, a group of performers from Australia who never stopped moving for over an hour… and they were on treadmills the whole time.

From the WOW description: “Four performers mount their treadmills and the challenge begins… an increasingly frenetic…love letter to the reckless labor and euphoric optimism before burnout. A desperate and hilarious attempt to create a series of escalating tasks that challenge the performers’ bodies, spirits, and minds….it is a spirited realization that overachievement is no mere spectator sport. It relies on the kindness of strangers.”

Never before have we seen such audience participation! Each time volunteers were requested, audience members responded, coming onstage to do things like shave a performer or brush another one’s teeth or apply lipstick to the one female performer…all while the four kept on treading. They also shot hoops, formed a group to play Bingo until someone won, and two women volunteered to eat and review a three-course meal prepared by a guy on a treadmill! (They liked it.)

 More audience participation, and blackboard with completed challenges crossed off.

Others rushed to find a number of Easter eggs hidden around the ballroom and there were even responses to performers’ requests for local funding and housing! Each of these things had to be accomplished within a specific, very brief time limit, and they all were, with no let-up of energy and lots of humor, by performers and audience alike. I was uncertain about all the frenetic-ness at first but couldn’t help being wowed by their charm.

 We expected to see the Animal Cracker Conspiracy puppet parade afterwards, since we usually enjoy them, but they must have passed by while we were in Pony Cam Paradise.… so we ended up joining a parade of shiny gold-and silver-caped folks all marching to the Epstein Family Amphitheater, and the last, presumably greatest event of the day, which had now turned into night: Firebird.

Arriving at Firebird.

This musical and visual extravaganza, inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, was presented by Touki Delphine, an arts collective from Amsterdam, and included illumination from over 600 recycled automobile tail-lights. But it turned out to be far less thrilling than expected: this Firebird never took flight, and after what seemed a long time, we joined the parade of audience members leaving before whatever the ending might be.

Still, we left with happy thoughts of the things we enjoyed at the WOW Fest… and we’ll surely be back for more in 2026.

 

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net