Home Care In Hamburg, LA

A man of the church, not the theater, Bach did not write for dance. But dance was at his core. His instrumental suites, partitas and concertos, made of dance forms, can include some of the most profound music of this most profound of composers.

Bach did not write opera either. Yet drama too was at his core. His sacred cantatas and passions, and none more so than the “St. Matthew Passion,” include some of the most profound drama by this most profound of composers.

To dance to Bach comes naturally, as Jerome Robbins, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and many others have lovingly demonstrated. To stage Bach doesn’t come as naturally. But Peter Sellars, in particular, has powerfully proved it can be not just possible but essential.

In 1980, seven years after becoming the director of Hamburg Ballet, American choreographer John Neumeier staged the “St. Matthew Passion” as a balletic medieval passion play in the city’s St. Michael’s Church and then brought it to the opera house. In 1983, it was seen as avant-garde enough for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. By 2005, it had become a classic that suited the glitzy Baden-Baden Festival.

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Now, four decades after the ballet’s creation but still rarely seen outside of Hamburg, Neumeier’s “St. Matthew Passion” has reached Los Angeles Opera, raising the further question of where dance, sacred passion and opera intersect. To make matters all the more intriguing, Dance at the Music Center invited Hamburg Ballet to bring along its “Bernstein Dances” to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for two additional evenings.

Bernstein, it so happens, performed and recorded Bach’s Passion with the New York Philharmonic in 1962 in a what was seen then as a controversial approach and still is. Bernstein cut Bach to enhance the Passion’s theatricality and performed the German text in English. He treated the recitative narration of Christ’s last days as inescapably vivid drama. He brought to Bach’s big choruses and solemn chorales the grandeur of Greek choruses. He unleashed raw operatic passion in soul-searching arias rather than a churchly Passion.

Bernstein questioned everything. The “St. Matthew” was, for him, living, breathing, human theater. But its spiritual essence also got under Bernstein’s skin. That led to his direct confrontation with God in his Third Symphony, written in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, and then in his musically and spiritually transgressive 1972 “Mass.”

Neumeier doesn’t exactly put all this together. “Bernstein Dances” follows Bernstein’s career from his earliest dances and Broadway shows up to “Mass,” but only its “A Simple Song” and “Meditation 2” look at the spiritual side of Bernstein. Along with show tunes and small incidental piano pieces, the main orchestral music is composed of the violin concerto, “Serenade After Plato’s ‘Symposium’” and dances from “West Side Story.”

There are large projections on stage of Bernstein famously conducting with extravagant feeling, something the company’s conductor, Garrett Keast, aggressively attempts to match with a pit orchestra.

For “St. Matthew,” James Conlon more reverently ?— and more reasonably ?— conducts the L.A. Opera Orchestra and Chorus along with the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus. The vocal soloists come from the world of opera but sing from the pit.

Neumeier is sassier with Bernstein, more stylized with Bach; in “Passion” his dancers, dressed in pristine white, create pictures of elegantly considered classical movement. Bach’s wondrous contrapuntal complexity, full of numerical symbolism and mathematical purity, is mirrored on stage with the dancers assuming architectural set pieces of great beauty.

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In both cases, attempts at narrative work less well. Bernstein sits at his piano, tormented, ecstatic and much in between, dreaming of dances that come to life. In one blink-or-you’ll-miss-it instant, Bernstein throws himself on the piano, arms out as if crucified on the keyboard. It’s best to blink.

The incompatible difference between “Bernstein” and “St. Matthew” is the use of music, the main subject of both. In one there is a mishmash of Bernsteinian flair with two singers and pianist on stage, the mood, the method and energy always varied. In “St. Matthew” the music feels less free. The very constraints of dance mean that dancers have to learn choreography to certain tempos. Everything has to fit the movement on stage.

Music requires less expression to let dance have more. That robs personality from the singers, who remain in the pit, hidden to many in the audience. At the March 12 opening, Susan Graham came closest to capturing a palpable depth of feeling in the fervid alto aria, “Erbarme Dich” (Have mercy). Ben Bliss proved a penetrating tenor through it all. But Kristinn Sigmundsson, a worthy Jesus on recording, floundered as bass soloist. Soprano Tamara Wilson sounded lost in the long Passion’s first part but rose more to the occasion in the second.

In the recitatives, in which the Evangelist narrates the Passion and Jesus exclaims in the first person (Joshua Blue and Michael Sumuel, respectively), the singers boomed to make their presence felt if not seen. Nothing can keep down the opera’s magnificent chorus, although placing it behind a scrim upstage, far from Conlon and the orchestra in the pit, reduced its effectiveness.

All of this puts a huge weight on the dancers’ shoulders. Ironically for opera, anyway, they are most emotionally effective when least expressive. When they move with a Bach-directed grace, they could make you believe they were God-directed, and the Passion takes on a gracious spirituality.

But Neumeier’s attempts at symbolism and narrative can also achieve the unfortunate opposite. The dancers are not at their best when they are shown, in one scene, as shackled or required to maintain a saintly disposition while posed as if on the cross. Jesus seated cross-legged as the Buddha in meditation, however, registers as an interesting alternative. Upended benches, the versatile main stage properties that hold the character of Jesus captive, make him look as though he is in a phone booth calling heaven. Chest-beating and bedlam at Jesus’ death has less power to tear at your heart than Bach’s music.

Jesus may proclaim that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. For Neumeier, the flesh is never weak, and the spirit isn’t always willing.

And that just might be the choreographer’s great secret. For all his mixed messaging, Neumeier creates a ritual that over four hours grows into a spectacle of ceaseless, rich imagery and movement. Dancers with the stamina and grace to sustain slowly become agents of astonishment. With further performances, the musicians may feel a little freer.

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Fight Neumeier if you must. Gripe all you like that a Bach Passion has no place on the lyric stage. Bach wins. This “St. Matthew” winds up being special when it has the right to be and, miraculously, when it doesn’t. St. Lenny doesn’t get off so easily.

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: “Bernstein Dances,” 7:30 p.m. March 19; “St. Matthew Passion,” 2 p.m. March 20 and 27, 7:30 p.m. March 23 and 26

Tickets: “Bernstein,” $38-$138; “St. Matthew,” $19-$292

Info: musiccenter.org, (213) 972-0711

Reporting from Hamburg, Germany —

At the tender age of 8, I knew the Beatles were extraordinary. In their appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” they sang and played effortlessly, their timing perfect despite rarely looking at one another.

Like thousands of others, I basked in that black-and-white glow on that Sunday night in February 1964, but when it was over, I had a burning question: How did they do that?

I recently had the chance to find out. On a business trip to Germany, I spent three days in St. Pauli, the Hamburg district where the Beatles became really good before they became really, really famous.

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My expert guide: Peter Paetzold, a bearded 68-year-old with the street cred of a chain-smoking rock drummer, well versed about St. Pauli’s music scene of the 1960s. He grew up around the corner from the Indra club, one of four venues the group played.

In August 1960, when the Beatles arrived, the Indra was a seedy strip joint complete with a neon-lighted elephant beckoning passersby. The band’s contract required the five of them (John, Paul, George, drummer Pete Best and bassist Stuart Sutcliffe) to perform for 30 hours, six nights a week. Each one received the generous sum of 30 Deutsche marks a week, about $51 in those days.

“We had to learn millions of songs because we’d be on for hours,” George Harrison later said. “Hamburg was really like our apprenticeship, learning how to play in front of people.”

The Indra’s owner provided the group free lodging. On my private tour, Paetzold and I crossed the street to the entrance of those accommodations, the back door of the Bambi, a movie theater. The Beatles slept behind the screen in two dark, dank, cramped storage rooms with small beds, folding cots and a couch. The nearby men’s room, where broken toilets sometimes overflowed into their rooms, served the group’s personal hygiene needs.

As we stood outside the back entrance of the Bambi, Paetzold removed a photo from an envelope, a black-and-white image of John Lennon taken in 1960 at the theater. The singer is reading a newspaper and wearing only a cap, sandals and white briefs. It marked one of my “oh-my-gosh” moments in St. Pauli.

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There were many more OMG moments the previous night.

It’s hard to imagine anyone in Hamburg more effusive about the Beatles than Stefanie Hempel. She conducts walking tours, performs the group’s music on a ukulele and is a cultural ambassador for the city. She is organizing a celebration in September of the “Abbey Road” album with a band and orchestra.

Hempel vividly remembers the moment — she was 9 — when she first heard “She Loves You” on a cassette tape her father had acquired surreptitiously in the 1980s because rock music was verboten in East Germany. “It was the moment of my life,” she said.

She often is asked what it was like for the Beatles playing small, noisy, smoke-filled clubs in Hamburg.

“It was a very tough time for them, but it was the wildest time of their lives,” she said, an allusion, I think, to the musicians’ introduction to prostitutes and “prellies,” the nickname for Phenmetrazine, a stimulant.

“They were never again as free as they were in Hamburg,” she said. “As John Lennon said, ‘We could try anything and the audience liked it, as long as it was really loud.’ ”

I joined Hempel and 30 others on her weekly Saturday evening musical tour, more magical than mysterious, through St. Pauli’s red-light district. Her clients have included Bob Dylan, Steve Winwood and John Lennon’s half-sister, Julia.

Hempel’s three-hour excursion, now in its 15th year, includes a stop at the site of the Star-Club, where the Beatles and other musical icons, including Bill Haley and Jimi Hendrix, performed in the 1960s. The venue closed in 1969; it was destroyed 18 years later in a fire.

After leading us in a robust sing-along of “Twist and Shout,” Hempel walked us to Beatles-Platz, a circular plaza with five metal silhouettes, a tribute to the pre-Fab Four. Names of their songs (in English), from “My Bonnie,” recorded in Hamburg in 1961 with singer Tony Sheridan, to “The Long and Winding Road,” are incised in the ground representing the grooves of a record.

The plaza is the city’s only public recognition of the group, and I wondered why Hamburg had not capitalized on this extraordinary musical legacy,

“They spent their time in a very sleazy area, and it is still that way,” said British radio broadcaster Spencer Leigh, author of “The Beatles in Hamburg.” “If Hamburg were to clean up the area, they presumably would be turning away profitable enterprises ... a real conundrum.”

Carsten Brosda, head of Hamburg’s office of culture and media, contends the Beatles’ legacy lives on in the annual Reeperbahn Festival, four days in September when rock, pop, folk, soul and jazz abound in clubs and blocked-off streets. The name refers to the half-mile main boulevard in the heart of the red-light district.

“It’s grown to become one of the most important European music festivals,” Brosda said. “So you could say that the lively music culture in this part of town is one of the best commemorations of the Beatles and the long tradition of music around the Reeperbahn.”

That lively culture extends beyond the Reeperbahn. A short walk led me to the waterfront district where the promenade along the Elbe River is filled with locals and tourists. The crowd was almost shoulder to shoulder on a Sunday morning as they converged on the Hamburg Fish Market, which dates back more than 300 years.

I was not shopping for cod, flowers or fresh fruit and vegetables. Rather, I was admiring the street artists and buskers, some of whom may have their sights on this year’s Reeperbahn Festival (Sept. 18-21).

Another St. Pauli tradition, although not three centuries old, is the Flohschanze, a Saturday flea market that was a 15-minute walk from my hotel. With my “find,” an Art Deco picture frame from the 1920s, I strolled around the corner to two more Beatles landmarks.

Musik Rotthoff is crammed to the ceiling with Gibson, Fender and other brands of guitars. Claus-Dieter Rotthoff is the third-generation proprietor of this family business. In 1961, his father sold Paul McCartney the stylish violin-shaped Hõfner bass guitar the singer played in concert and in recording studios throughout the 1960s.

The shop is adjacent to Hotel Pacific, where in December 1962 the four Beatles, now with Ringo Starr on drums, stayed two weeks, each with his own room. The group closed its pre-Beatlemania Hamburg run, which totaled more than 1,100 performance hours on five trips from Liverpool, with a New Year’s Eve show in 1962.

Eleven days later, “Please Please Me,” which record producer George Martin accurately predicted would be the group’s first No. 1 hit, was released in Britain. A little more than a year later, the Beatles played “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

The best way to Hamburg, Germany

From LAX, Lufthansa, KLM, Air France, Austria, British, United and Delta offer connecting service (change of planes) to Hamburg. Restricted round-trip fare from $1,070, including taxes and fees.

Telephones

To call the numbers below from the United States, dial 011 (the international calling code), 49 (the country code for Germany) and the local number.

What to do

Peter Paetzold, [email protected]

Hempel’s Beatles-Tour, 6 p.m. Saturdays, April-November. About $40 for a 2½- to three-hour tour.

Where to stay

Ibis Budget Hamburg St Pauli Messe, 64 Simon-von-Utrecht-Strasse, Hamburg, Germany; 40-31765620. Doubles from $94, breakfast included

Hotel Pacific, 30-31 Neuer Pferdemarkt, Hamburg, Germany; 40-4395095. Doubles with private baths from $100.

Arcotel Onyx Hamburg, 1a Reeperbahn, Hamburg, Germany; 40 2094090. Doubles from $170 a night.

Where to eat

Captain’s Dinner Restaurant and Cafe, St. Pauli Landungsbrücken, bridge 3; Hamburg, Germany; 40-312121. Lovely waterfront setting overlooking the Elbe River; several fish entrees. Dinner for two from $80.

Freudenhaus St. Pauli, 7-9 Hein-Hoyer-Strasse, Hamburg, Germany; 40-314642. Elegant dining just off the infamous Reeperbahn. Nice array of veal, pork and other “sinful meats.” Dinner for two, $100.

It’s Like Kandie, 16 Wohlwillstrasse, Hamburg, Germany. Specializing in dessert waffles; a two-minute walk from the John Lennon “doorway,” featured on the cover of his 1975 “Rock ’n’ Roll” album.

To learn more

Contact the Hamburg tourism office.

[email protected]

@latimestravel

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A hidden neighborhood gem, Koreatown’s Tokyo Hamburg offers all-day cheap oysters and drinks, sizzling hot stone dishes and plenty of Japanese comfort food.

In Los Angeles, the land of astronomically high rent, the fact that a Taiwanese boba shop and a Japanese yoshoku spot are conjoined twins should surprise me less than it actually does. Still, it’s amusing to enter through Chun Feng Sugar in search of Tokyo Hamburg, a casual Koreatown eatery specializing in the Western-influenced branch of Japanese cuisine, whose origins date back to the late 19th century, when the country opened its ports to foreign trade. Hidden, like a speakeasy in plain sight, the restaurant also offers an array of customizable milk teas from its sibling shop, as well as dollar oysters (a downright rarity these days).

Open since 2016, Tokyo Hamburg has become catnip for Asian American foodies in search of #content, from the now cliché cheese pull executed using cheese katsu to the ASMR-like hiss of the rib-eye katsu on hot stone. In more than one Instagram post, you’ll see diners teasing apart molten mozzarella threads with mouths agape in feigned wonder. I don’t know what compels any of us to endlessly reproduce heavily staged self-portraits of consumption and leisure and post them online. I only know that Tokyo Hamburg’s less picturesque namesake dish is the must-order item, arriving at your table as a slightly raw pink ball of high-quality ground meat and cooked by yourself on hot stone.

Performative awe-inducing menu items aside, the Tokyo hamburg is the restaurant’s best, and simplest, entrée of all its various Japanese comfort foods. Each order is served with a pair of sauces, lightly dressed coleslaw and a bowl of warm rice. While the patty itself doesn’t have much seasoning, each bite of freshly seared meat and rice is deeply cozy, filling and, when dipped in soy and sweet red chili, flavorful. The sizzle of juicy hamburger meat, of course, only adds to the dish’s sensory pleasures. The more deluxe rib-eye katsu, delicious as that cut of beef can be, deprives you of the ability to smash hamburg meat on hot stone, a deeply satisfying tactile experience.

If you’re the type of person to preview your meal ahead on social media, perhaps you’ve found Tokyo Hamburg posters lovingly gazing down at the restaurant’s “cream” udon, one hand outstretched with a chopsticks’ grasp of noodles unearthed from underneath fluted swirls of mashed potato. While delightful to look at, the cream udon—essentially a curry udon upgraded with potato topping—runs extremely mild (even bland) and slightly sweet.

Elsewhere on the menu you’ll find izakaya fare available after 4pm, a more traditional hamburg-style Salisbury steak with demi-glace and plenty of crunchy appetizers in various delicious shades of light brown, including tempura, deep-fried gyoza and takoyaki. In addition to Chun Feng Sugar drinks, Tokyo Hamburg also offers steeply discounted beer, sake, soju and makgeolli (sparkling rice wine), with an “all day everyday” happy hour menu that includes the dollar oysters. You’ll likely find the service efficient, casual and refreshingly to the point, meant for quicker workday lunches and weeknight dinners. With the inexpensive alcohol and drinking snacks involved, however, it’s easy to see Tokyo Hamburg could also double as a fun pregame dinner spot for groups on their way to a longer night out in K-town.

The vibe: With an industrial interior full of Japanese decor and a small patio area painted with cherry blossoms and Daruma dolls, Tokyo Hamburg is informal, cute and bright.

The food: A meat-centric menu of inexpensive Japanese comfort food, including DIY hot stone plates, various katsu-fried things and plenty of shareable crunchy appetizers.

The drink: Steeply discounted Japanese beer (Sapporo or Kirin) and rice-based wine and spirits, as well as a full menu of milk teas from Chun Feng Sugar. You’ll also find green tea, Ramune and a few other non-alcoholic drinks on the menu.

Time Out tip: Order your Tokyo hamburg with scrambled egg, which cooks right on the skillet as you cook the sizzling pieces of patty on hot stone.

The writer-director of Why Him? talks his signature comedic style and the importance of a sense of place

It’s been about six years since Hollywood multihyphenate (director, writer, producer, etc.) John Hamburg’s last cinematic portrayal of the hijinks—both emotional and physical—that define relationships with in-laws and extended families. But given his proclivity toward the subject matter (Hamburg penned all three films in the Meet The Parents trilogy, in addition to now classic comedies like Along Came Polly, Zoolander and Zoolander 2), it’s no surprise that family dynamics are front and center in his latest release, Why Him?, which stars Bryan Cranston and James Franco and hits theaters this Friday.

Watching Hamburg’s new movie expertly navigate roads his work has gone down before, one begins to wonder if the filmmaker has struggled with his own trouble in in-law paradise. “I’ve been lucky. I haven’t had traumatic experiences,” he assures with amused conviction. “[Only] good experiences.” Upon further discussion of Hamburg’s oeuvre, he reveals the common denominator among his films is not familial ties; it’s discomfort.

“As a comedy writer I like writing about awkward, tension-filled moments,” he says. “Whether it’s a guy making his first real guy friend in I Love You Man—awkward—or bringing somebody new into a family dynamic, like in Why Him?. Both [scenarios] are very writhe with tension.”

Courtesy of John Hamburg

Why Him? sets an ideal stage for uncomfortable comedy, as Midwestern dad Ned Fleming (Cranston) travels with his family to Silicon Valley to meet his daughter’s eccentric—not to mention loaded—boyfriend, Laird Mayhew (Franco). The generational and financial gaps between the two are a strain on their ability to connect the way Laird so desperately wants. Hamburg says that his return to the subject of merging families was not due to familiarity, but rather his compulsion to explore what he saw as a shift in stereotypical relationships.

“In the years since making Meet the Parents, I’ve witnessed all these power dynamics shifting. You have an entire generation of younger people really becoming quite successful and making tons of money and doing cutting edge things. And it felt like they had all the power, whereas when I was growing up it felt like our parents had all the power.”

Hamburg’s distinct style weaves broad humor with smaller, blink-or-you-miss-them relatable moments. It’s these plausible absurdities that give Hamburg his true comedic power. “I’m preying on everybody’s fears,” he explains. “I don’t have sharks and stuff like that; I have a guy walking into a bathroom when you are conducting your business. But sometimes you do need certain bigger moments where you can have the entire theater laughing. I like to balance the smaller awkward moments with the bigger, more physical scenes, while always trying to make [both] real.”

Courtesy of John Hamburg

In addition to uncomfortable encounters, a sense of place, or “home,” as it relates to one’s family is often de rigueur in Hamburg’s films. The stark change of scenery Cranston’s character experiences upon arriving in Silicon Valley is something Hamburg admittedly relates to: The native New Yorker still remembers his first visit to California as a ten year-old. But, unlike Ned Fleming’s, Hamburg says his was not nearly as big a shock to the system. “We went to Venice, in Los Angeles. I was like, ‘Holy shit!’ It was in the ‘80s, and everyone was on roller skates. I was like, ‘I want to live here.’”

Courtesy of John Hamburg

In time, Hamburg made the move, and has since fully ingratiated himself into his West Coast home. Now firmly settled, the Why Him? writer-director shares his picks for the best L.A. has to offer, which should go a long way toward preventing any Ned Fleming-related culture shock among those who find themselves in the City of Angels.

Cup of Joe: Go Get ‘Em Tiger, on Larchmont Boulevard. The iced almond macadamia latte is ridiculous.

Power Lunch: Sticking with the theme, I have to say Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese. They make the best sandwiches. I’m partial to #3: the Soppressata Salami, on a baguette. Delicious.

Cocktail Hour: The Varnish, a speakeasy in the back of Cole’s restaurant. You can’t go wrong with some kind of Manhattan variation. Or anything with tequila. Or gin (I’m not a rum guy).

Retail Therapy: OK the Store has the coolest jewelry, coffee-table books and little objects. It’s a wonderful place to spend large amounts of money in a short amount of time.

Field Trip: I love taking my five year-old daughter to the Natural History Museum. There is a case with live rats in the basement, which is great immersive therapy for a New Yorker with a terrible fear of that particular animal.

Date Night: I’m not a vegan but I love the food (and drinks) at the restaurant Crossroads. My favorite dish is the Scaloppini Parmesan. I have no idea what the hell is in it, but it tastes just like, well, veal—without the whole eating a calf thing.

Don’t Miss: Venice—from the canals, to the boardwalk, to Abbot Kinney Boulevard. I fell in love with the place on my first visit as a ten year-old. Maybe it was because the entire town put on roller stakes at sundown and started boogying (or at least that’s how I remember it from the ‘80s). I set a lot of my movie I Love You Man there, so it holds a special place in my heart.

Hidden Gem: It’s not so hidden, but Domaine LA, in a strip mall on Melrose Avenue, is my favorite wine store. The owner, Jill, puts together a relatively small selection of amazing bottles at good prices. Is this guide becoming all about drinking? I’m a writer-director of Hollywood movies. It can be stressful. Please don’t judge me.