You probably know him as the grumpy dad of the Italophile bicycle racer in "Breaking Away." Or as Molly Ringwald's understanding dad in "Sixteen Candles." Or as the long-suffering dad who wa…
Ever since "Downton Abbey" creator Julian Fellowes won an Oscar for the 2001 film "Gosford Park," his professional dance card has been overflowing with suitors. On the heels of the "Downton"…
Imagine if you will: Arts supporters, dressed to the nines, gathered for a benefit in a grand old movie palace, listening to a chamber orchestra " and watching Disney cartoons. Last year, th…
When "The Little Mermaid" lands at the Hollywood Bowl for three nights beginning Friday, it's not just a chance to reimagine a contemporary Disney classic, one credited with reviving the …
Jess Thom has every reason to hate the theater. Thom has Tourette's syndrome, and her tics " randomly spoken words and muscle spasms " had kept her away from the hushed performance halls in …
You could make a Broadway show about the making of the musical "On the Town." It's got everything. Then again, no one would believe it. In 1944, a 26-year-old composer and a couple of theate…
Calixto Bieito is Catalan for Eurotrash. Not really. But Bieito is the provocative opera director who first comes to the mind of many worried about an art form sinking into Tarantino-esq…
I'm Carolina A. Miranda, arts and culture staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. Welcome to your weekly guide to everything happening in the arts in Southern California and beyond. Don't mis…
This week: Come and meet those dancing feet... again!... with the return of the mother-of-all backstage musicals. Plus, Shakespeare's back in season at Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga. Booty…
The best of times are now at the David Henry Hwang Theatre, where East West Players concludes its 50th anniversary season with an idiosyncratically endearing revival of "La Cage aux Folles."…
Harold Bloom subtitled his magnum opus on Shakespeare "The Invention of the Human" in recognition of the Bard's unprecedented ability to imagine the lives of others. The question I've…
Playwright Raymond J. Barry straddles the naturalistic and the mannered in "Foreclosure or Yelling at Women Walking Their Dogs," a new play closing this week at the Greenway Court Theatre in…
When Hamid Rahmanian says, "I'm kind of like a bulldozer," the artist means the tenacious way he enters any new project " long work hours, "begging" for funding, camping in rehearsal spaces.…
Suspend individual judgment in the blind service of an ideology, and the result is evil. That's the underlying theme of Jesse Mu-En Shao's "The End Times," now premiering at the Skylight The…
Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape," written in 1921, still has the tang of an experiment by a relatively young writer testing the frontiers of what the drama can do. Mixing brutal expressionis…
Celebration Theatre has landed a coup with the West Coast premiere of  "The Boy From Oz," and what a festive party it's throwing. A 2004 hit on Broadway, where it won Hugh Jackman a Tony …
It was a once-a-year day at the Alex Theatre on Sunday, when Musical Theatre Guild closed its 20th anniversary season with a triumphant staged concert edition of "The Pajama Game." Richard A…
Those resolute renegades at City Garage have been tweaking the Bard all season in a triptych project they're calling "The Winter of Our Discontent: Shakespeare in the Digital Age," which con…
Antonio Salieri, relegated by posterity to the shadows as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's journeyman contemporary, will always have Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" to augment his notoriety, if not his f…
Did it ever occur to film and theater director Herbert Ross that his 1993 production of Puccini's "La Bohème" for Los Angeles Opera "Â his first of an opera for anyone " would endure so f…
There is a galvanic moment in the new Broadway musical "Shuffle Along" when Audra McDonald, playing actress Lottie Gee, is trying to goose a new song, "I'm Just Wild About Harry," with a pro…
The 2016-17 season at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts will boast a prestigious international lineup, with recent productions by Simon McBurney and Peter Brook making stop…
Los Angeles Ballet's new production of Frederick Ashton's "Romeo and Juliet" is not only admirable. It's news. Ashton ranks among the three or four greatest ballet choreographers of the 20th…
It's fitting that Derek DelGaudio's new show began as an empty pair of brackets in the Geffen Playhouse's season preview catalog. The production, since christened "In & of Itself," is all ab…
As Thor Steingraber assesses the decision to build a 1,700-seat performing arts venue in Northridge, a word comes to mind: courageous. Filling all of those seats hasn't always been easy sinc…