For all you armchair adventurers out there, here’s a tip: sharpen your machete and hack a path down to the Ivy Substation in Culver City. There, the Actors’ Gang is mounting an extraordinary version of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness. Brian T. Finney has adapted the book and performs it as a one-man [...]

One of the pressing tasks of a modern opera company is to figure out how to put younger fannies into their seats as the Geritol generation gradually fades away. In the case of LA Opera, they can’t fail to notice that their elephantine competitor for entertainment dollars across town, Hollywood, has done pretty well attracting [...]

Playwright Mark St. Germain offers a fictional meeting between Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis in his two-character, 80-minute work, “Freud’s Last Session,” directed by Tyler Marchant and playing now through Feb. 10 on Santa Monica’s Broad Stage.
It is Sept. 3, 1939. Hitler’s invasion of Poland has just unhinged the entire world. Great Britain has this [...]

The new show at the Getty Villa, The Last Days of Pompeii, refers variously to an event, a book, and a rich history of mythmaking. The event, of course, is the A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius outside Naples that buried the prosperous Roman town. But if you come expecting to see a display of [...]

As one of the world’s best loved and most performed operas, there is no question that Mozart’s Don Giovanni is going to be enjoyable. Just how enjoyable is up to the production and the orchestra. LA Opera mostly delivers with its solid casting and James Conlon’s lambent orchestral performance, but I deduct some points for [...]

Gustav Klimt’s paintings, like his ornate and gilded “The Kiss,” are seemingly ubiquitous, printed on posters, mugs, notebooks, T-shirts. But we don’t really know his work, said Lee Hendrix, senior curator of drawings at the Getty Museum, where “Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line” opened on July 3 and continues through Sept. 23.
We can best [...]

With La Bohème, Puccini sought to write an opera in the fashionable verismo style that took as its subject everyday life and attempted to treat it in a realistic manner. While his opera dates from the mid-1890s, his source material was a series of stories written in the 1840s by Henri Murger, which depicted real [...]

Le Salon de Musiques magically transformed the fifth-floor banquet room at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion into an intimate salon space for sharing the joy of their special music on Sunday, Feb. 26.  Music Director Francois Chouchan combined Impressionists Gabriel Fauré and Francis Poulenc with an interesting variant from across the channel by English composer Sir [...]

Kathleen Turner is currently onstage at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles for the West Coast premiere of “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins.” David Esbjornson directs the one-woman show about the famous columnist and political commentator from Texas, which continues through Feb. 19.

“Red Hot Patriot” is a roaring salute to Ivins’ [...]

Beginning on Oct. 1, “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980” brings together more than 60 cultural institutions throughout Southern California to tell the story of the rise of the L.A. art scene and its impact on the art world. This colossal collaboration was initiated by the Getty Foundation, and the Getty Center has organized [...]