‘I want the sky to open up wide; Illuminate this fire inside; I want the sky,’ sings Pacific Palisades resident Lucy Schwartz in a song about ambition on her new album ‘Life in Letters,’ which will be self-released in August. Schwartz, 20, is certainly on her way to attaining her aspirations. The 2008 Palisades Charter High School graduate recently co-authored the song ‘Darling I Do’ for ‘Shrek Forever After,’ and penned the lullaby ‘Little One’ for the movie ‘Mother and Child,’ starring Samuel L. Jackson, Naomi Watts and Annette Bening. She has also written original songs for films ‘Adam,’ ‘Post Grad’ and ‘The Women,’ and contributed music to television shows such as ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ ‘Private Practice’ and ‘Parenthood.’ The songwriter grew up watching her father, David Schwartz (a TV composer for ‘Deadwood’ and ‘Arrested Development’) create music for scenes, so she finds that writing for television and movies comes naturally. ‘I always get excited; it’s like an assignment,’ Schwartz told the Palisadian-Post. ‘I write songs I wouldn’t have written otherwise.’ She explained that ‘songwriting is sort of like acting. You have to put yourself in the place of another.’ For example, Schwartz tried to convey motherhood when writing ‘Little One’ for ‘Mother and Child,’ which is currently in theaters.   ’Clearly, I have not had children, but I can imagine the feelings of love and pride and wanting the best for your child,’ she said. ‘The song is at the end of the movie and intended to rejuvenate the audience. The movie’s a tear-jerker, but hopeful too.’ Chris Douridas, a radio DJ at KCRW and producer of soundtracks, asked Schwartz to submit the song for ‘Shrek Forever After.’ Schwartz had worked with Douridas on ‘The Women’ in 2008. ‘She has a maturity and a consistency of writing quality songs,’ Douridas, told the Post. ‘I continue to be impressed by everything she turns out.’ Schwartz’s father introduced Douridas to the young artist. While out on a jog, David stopped Douridas outside his Pacific Palisades home in the Alphabet streets and asked if he would be willing to listen to his daughter’s self-released ‘Winter in June’ album, which she recorded at age 16. Douridas agreed, and, an hour later, a CD appeared in his mailbox. After listening to the album, Douridas found himself humming the song ‘Paper Plane,’ so he began playing it on the radio. He then asked Schwartz to write a piece for the ending credits of ‘The Women,’ produced by Mick Jagger and Victoria Pearman. ‘A few days later she turned it in, and I was blown away,’ Douridas said of ‘Count on Me.’ Douridas next mentioned to David that he was having trouble finding a track for the opening credits, so David suggested his daughter write another piece. Three days later, Schwartz submitted ‘Beautiful,’ which ended up being perfect, Douridas said. After that, ‘I knew that I had to keep working with Lucy,’ he added. Schwartz asked singer and songwriter Landon Pigg to write the duet, ‘Darling I Do,’ for ‘Shrek Forever After’ with her because she was a fan of his music. ‘I thought it was a really good collaboration,’ Schwartz said. ‘We combined both our ideas to make the best song we could. There was a spark between our approach.’ ‘Darling I Do’ plays during a fight scene between Shrek and Princess Fiona. ‘They are physically fighting with each other, but it’s a love scene,’ Schwartz said. She and Pigg decided not to use the word love in the song but rather convey all the ways love is expressed. On May 7, Schwartz performed the song on ‘The Tonight Show’ with her father playing bass.   ’I think that all my nervousness went straight to my foot,’ she said, explaining that she maintained her composure except for her right foot, which shook on the piano pedal. ‘It was pretty surreal. We played the song around 5 p.m., and I was on television at midnight.’ The next day, she filmed her first professional music video, for ‘Darling I Do,’ at Apogee’s Berkeley St. Studio in Santa Monica. ‘It’s about us meeting [in a studio] and connecting, while the world around us becomes more Shrek-like,’ Schwartz said. In the video, leaves start falling from the sky and flowers bloom around the piano. Schwartz abandons her casual attire for a silky green dress, and she and Pigg dance. Schwartz, who began playing the piano at 7 years old and has taken only a couple voice lessons, released an EP album titled ‘Help Me! Help Me!’ in January as a sneak peek of ‘Life in Letters.’ Her 22-year-old brother, Ian (who works for Prettybird, a film and commercial production company in Santa Monica), directed a video for the song ‘Help Me! Help Me’ at their Palisades home. She filmed another video for ‘Gravity,’ directed by her cousin, Cooper Roberts (a filmmaker), at Little Dolphins preschool in Santa Monica. Her mother, Jody Roberts, is a founding member of the preschool. Schwartz said ‘Life in Letters’ reflects her feelings about leaving Occidental College after one semester to pursue music. ‘It was a scary and exciting time,’ she said. ‘It was scary since most of my friends are in college, and I was going to go ahead with a career, but I don’t regret the decision at all.’ Schwartz plans to film a video for her new song, ‘Graveyard,’ under the direction of Sonya Tayeh of the television show ‘So You Think You Can Dance.’ She will also play at Lilith Fair in Portland, Oregon on July 2. The musician is still considering whether to join a major record label. ‘There are lots of good things about being an independent artist and owning what you write,’ Schwartz said. ‘But you can get a lot of help from the support of a label.’

Floating across the sand with crashing waves and the blue sky as a backdrop, Kimberly Cronin dances for a video camera at Will Rogers State Beach. Her choreographed three-minute dance, titled ‘Beauty Is Simplicity,’ won the state PTA Reflections contest in the dance category and was forwarded to the national level, where Cronin was one of three in her age group to receive an excellent award. The Reflections contest encourages artistic expression in six categories (photography, film production, dance, literature, music and visual arts) by students in kindergarten through high school. The contest starts at the school level with more than 500,000 entries, with winners advancing to district, state and national levels. Cronin, a senior at Palisades Charter High School, received $200, a silver-plated Reflections medallion, a certificate and recognition in the annual PTA Reflections online gallery. She had never participated in the contest, but her PaliHi dance teachers, Cheri and Monique Smith, told her she should enter. ‘They’ve been really inspirational and supportive, encouraging me to take [artistic] chances,’ Cronin says. ‘Cheri told me I should enter because there are not too many opportunities where people ask you to show your talents.’ After choosing the song ‘Comptine d’un autre ‘t’ by Yann Tiersen to dance to, Cronin asked a high school friend to videotape her. At the beach, she encountered a problem. ‘The noise from the waves and birds was so loud,’ she says, ‘I couldn’t hear the taped music. But I heard the music in my head and danced to it.’ Later, her brother Colin, who graduated from UCLA in December and was a drum major at PaliHi, added the music. Cronin, who has been in the PaliHi spring musical all four years, has the lead in this year’s ‘City of Angels,’ but now has a new problem: She fell at a college dance audition in March and tore several ligaments in her right foot while also fracturing several bones. ‘The bones have healed,’ says Cronin, who has been on crutches for several months. She graduated to a walking cast and one high heel in time for the senior prom on May 14. Hoping to be out of that cast before the musical opens on June 3, Cronin admits ‘It’s been hard watching my understudy in my role.’ Her character, Laura Kingsley, is supposed to be drop-dead gorgeous dame. The part, unfortunately, calls for high heels rather than crutches or casts. Since Cronin also participates in the PaliHi dance program, she faces yet another challenge: she may miss the spring dance recital on June 8. For an earlier assignment in dance class, she choreographed a piece that allowed her to do a dance sitting down, and she hopes she can do something similar for the recital. Cronin, who lives in Westchester, enrolled at Paul Revere as a sixth grader. ‘We went to the school for the music program,’ says Cronin, whose mother, Colleen, teaches music at a different elementary school every day of the week. Colleen knew that Revere’s music program was regarded as one of the best in the district and put her children in Revere’s lottery, where they won the right to attend the school. Cronin’s father, Patrick, is a contractor. Like many young girls, Cronin took her first dance class at a YMCA (in Westchester). When she was eight, her mother was asked to play piano for an upper-level ballet class. In exchange, Cronin was given lessons. ‘My mom eventually stopped playing, but by then I was hooked and kept dancing,’ says Cronin, who has taken ballet for 10 years. She now dances jazz, tap, lyrically, modern, hip-hop and West African. ‘I’m open to any styles and will explore any type of dance,’ says the vivacious teenager. ‘Ballet is where I developed my technique, and that makes it easy to adapt to another style.’ She has been accepted into the UCLA dance program, but says she might also look at physiology because she enjoys biology. ‘No matter what I do, I want to be dancing somehow,’ Cronin says. ‘Dancing on Broadway would be awesome, because you could also sing and act.’ To view Cronin’s dance, visit: www.ptareflections.org.

Photographer Cheryl Medow’s new exhibition, ‘Wild Wings,’ continues her exploration of two passions: birds and the environment. ‘Wings’ runs through May 25 to June 19 at TAG Gallery, Bergamot Station D3, 2525 Michigan Ave. in Santa Monica.   In addition to Medow, new works by Peter Kempson and Gary Polonsky will also be on display. A reception for the artists will be held on Saturday, May 29 from 5 to 8 p.m. at the gallery.   In her latest work, Medow, a Pacific Palisades resident, presents idealized images of the wild birds she photographs in idealized environments to emphasize the interconnectedness of all creatures.   Medow travels from her backyard to other parts of the United States, Europe, Central and South America, and parts of Africa in search of just one more bird, one more photograph of the flying descendants of dinosaurs. Her images are initially captured in the field as photographs of birds, landscapes and sky, and are then melded in the studio through modern computer techniques to produce a final idealized image that is simultaneously hyper-real and hyper-artificial, reminiscent of the dioramas found at the Museum of Natural History.   A graduate of UCLA with a degree in art and design, Medow’s recent work has been published in ‘100 Artists of the West Coast II,’ NANPA Expressions magazine, and ‘Nash Editions: Photography And The Art Of Digital Printing.’

A collision of cultural extremes results in the mystery of a missing American teen in Wendy Graf’s latest play, ‘Behind the Gates,’ directed by David Gautreaux, now at the Marilyn Monroe Theatre at the Lee Strasberg Creative Center in West Hollywood through July 3. Graf, a Mandeville Canyon resident and a member of Kehillat Israel Reconstructionist Congregation, is best known for such works as ‘Lessons’ and ‘Leipzig.’ The PaliHi graduate returns with ‘Gates,’ a meditation on the perils of religious fervor, using Judiasm as a metaphor for dogma and the oppression of women in orthodoxy of any religion. The play opens in Los Angeles with 17-year-old Bethany (Annika Marks), a rage-filled, drug-using troubled goth teen, unleashing a profanity-laced soliloquy to the audience in which she explains that her adoptive Jewish-American parents”the Leibermans (James Eckhouse and Keliher Walsh)”are derailing her life by shipping her off to Israel for the summer to straighten her out. Bethany complains that she even got a job ‘bagging groceries at Gelson’s”not easy to get!’ Once in Jerusalem, we see Bethany the metalhead transform before our very eyes into a frum (‘devout’) young woman as she warms up to her new environs with its customs and rules, literally shedding her death-metal tee and black makeup for the modest clothes of one of the mavens of the ultra-Orthodox haredi community. ‘It’s kind of cool, they have values,’ Bethany, now ‘Bakol,’ tells the audience. By the end of her transformation, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. She wants to live in Israel among the haredi, never to return to America: ‘I’m not going back! They can’t make me!’ Then she goes missing. Rumor has it the newlywed had fled the religious community to escape her abusive husband. Act two consists of the Leibermans’ search for their missing daughter, in which they cross paths with Israeli private investigator Ami Dayan (Steven Robert Wollenberg) and the American Embassy’s Donald Stone. Along the way, the search for the missing Bethany strains the Leibermans’ marriage, as Mr. Leiberman opts to abandon the search and return to the U.S. The play’s surprise does not come with the inevitable if they find her but how they find her and whether or not she wants to come home and live her parents again. The stand-out, spot-on performance is delivered by Wollenberg as the bald investigator Dayan. Every time his character is on stage”with his mix of Israeli matter-of-fact seriousness and gallows humor”the proceedings perk up. (Perhaps partially because Graf, in real life, has 15 years of experience as a California state-licensed private investigator). Marks, as a vessel of exposition, does a formidable job carrying the bulk of the play’s themes on her back (although her voice was noticeably hoarse from previous performances). ‘Gates’ is a play about extremes, echoing the similarly themed book ‘Chosen by God: A Brother’s Journey’ by Joshua Hammer (a family member’s search for a relative sucked into an ultra-Orthodox cult). The underlying problem with ‘Gates’ is that, as is, the story is devoid of any nuances or positive images when it comes to the Orthodox Jewry. While it’s not to refute the fact that religious extremism and the repression of women exists in that community, to put it on the same plane as some of the radical Muslim circles seems far-fetched. In order to draw a parallel between extremism in the Jewish sector with that of other cultures, the Orthodox Jewish representations here are flattened. ‘Behind the Gates’ also stars Oren Rehany, Robyn Roth and Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper, each in multiple roles. All of the technical details are the minimalist set design of sheer white curtains and ‘Jersusalem stone’ (Stephanie Kerley Schwartz). (Graf and Schwartz”also a Kehillat Israel member”will discuss the play after a special performance on Saturday, June 5, at 8 p.m. For more information, visit kehillatisrael.org/readmore.php?id=2454) Behind the Gates, produced by Racquel Lehrman/Theatre Planners and presented by Hatikva Productions in association with the Lee Strasberg Creative Center, continues Fri.-Sat., 8 pm; Sun., 2 pm; through July 3. Tickets: $25. Marilyn Monroe Theatre, 7936 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood; 323.960.5772 or plays411.com/gates.