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By Maya Mackey
Picture this… you’ve just swiped right on a hot contender from your dating app of choice. They tell you they are new to town and they ask you to introduce them to some hot spots. You know exactly where to go.
Hollywood Park & Casino 2.0. has added two more establishments to their portfolio, gearing up to make one hell of a date night.
The first is The Meeting Spot, an outdoor patio sandwiched between the Cinepolis (the upscale movie theater) at Hollywood Park Casino and Cosm, the new live streaming venue. The Meeting Spot is a quaint but hip space to “eat, drink and meet” like-minded folks in the area. It serves as a social nook for residents of the Hollywood Park apartments as well as guests stopping by before hitting the main event of the night. The Meeting Spot promises to be a cute stop on date nights for the Millennial crowd and the cocktails will keep food and drink influencers coming for a visit.
You and your date can gather at The Meeting Spot for a fantastic cocktail like The Showtime which features a unique mix of gin, ube, coconut and lime or the modern classic, an espresso martini.
Mayor Butts declares, “We have the first movie theater in 45 years. We have Cosm—the only place of its kind in the United States of America and now The Meeting Spot. Beverly Hills doesn’t have anything on Inglewood!” (Except the prices to eat and play aren’t all that different, but I digress).
About 300 feet away, you and your date can enjoy an immersive musical theater at Cinevita. The swanky theater that teleports you to the Frank Sinatra era will bring live theater and opera to Inglewood with a twist. The shows at Cinevita will take the movies and music of a famed director and turn them into a live audience sing-along and immersion into iconic film scenes. The design of the Spiegel tent was brought over from Belgium and the concept of live film re-enactments was born out of “For the Record” shows, a concept that blends the likes of Universal Studio tours and Cirque de Soleil performances.
And certain to be one of a kind, the tent is mobile. The CineVita tours will literally go on the road along with its performers.
Open to the public in January, the shows on deck are (Quentin) Tarantino Pulp Rock (a rock show with live adaptations of scenes in Pulp Fiction), John Hughes & The Brats and Scorsese – Crime Requiem. While I do believe it’ll be nice to have a Vegas-like showplace here in L.A., I question the nobility of bringing CineVita to town with an exclusively white list of honorees. African-Americans’ experience with being theater patrons dates back to the Harlem Renaissance days. Semi-modern black musicals like The Wiz and Dreamgirls bring a je ne sais quoi that only Black people have to innovate time and time again from the scraps of resources left to our communities. There certainly exist Black people who would love a night out at the theater, who enjoy musicals and all of their merriment. But the Black theater crowd also deserves to see their classics mirrored back to them – The Wood, The Best Man series, Love & Basketball, Boyz N the Hood, Set it off. I certainly hope the minds behind Cinevita hope to honor the filmmaking of Spike Lee, John Singleton, Ryan Coogler and Ava Duvernay alongside their white counterparts. Given the founders list, however, this might be a dream deferred indeed.
I attended the Gala on December 5th – an open to the press viewing of their running Tarantino show which featured a cast of diverse singers performing melodies of some of the iconic music from his films – including a riveting rendition of the Django Unchained theme song. There were also performances in Spanish and French, so certainly a nod towards some sort of diversity. Nevertheless, CineVita is a beautiful space and if you enjoy excellent singing and the atmosphere of live theater, you may experience “the largest Spiegel tent in the world” starting January 24, 2025.
