Name-brand writers with true talent are an under-appreciated commodity in Hollywood. Thankfully, the Geffen Playhouse is here to offer employment to some of them in the 2010-11 season.

The company's upcoming season will include a few of the theater world's top scribes -- Jane Anderson, Neil LaBute, Lynn Nottage and Tracy Letts. Two of them will be offering world-premiere plays while the others will be presenting the local debuts of recent work.

Anderson's "The Escort: An Explicit Play for Discriminating People" (April 6-May 8, 2011) follows the relationship between a high-class call girl, her gynecologist and the doctor's 13-year-old son. The world-premiere production, which will be directed by Lisa Peterson, is the second Anderson play produced at the Geffen since 2007's "The Quality of Life."

LaBute will present his new play "The Break of Noon" (Feb. 2-March 6, 2011), which is being co-produced with New York's MCC Theatre. The play tells the story of a man who survives an office shooting and goes on a spiritual tour. Jo Bonney, a frequent LaBute collaborator, will direct.

As Culture Monster previously reported, the season will open in September with Nottage's "Ruined," which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama last year. Also on tap: the West Coast premiere of Letts' "Superior Donuts," which recently ran on Broadway.

Read the full story on the Geffen's new season, including an update on the company's financial health from founder and producing director Gil Cates.

-- David Ng

Related:

Nora and Delia Ephron play is headed to Geffen Playhouse

Photo: Neil LaBute, Los Angeles Times

It’s taken close to a century, but the ugliest man of Genoa has at last crossed the Atlantic. He is Alviano Salvago, who is also described as “an ugly hunchback, about thirty years old, with large shinning eyes.” He is stigmatized, branded, marked, drawn. He is weak and revolting in a society obsessed with physical pleasure. He also happens to own an island where there are all manner of nasty goings on from which he gets some sort of creepy vicarious thrill in the name of the classical pursuit of beauty.

He is the pathetic protagonist of Franz Schreker’s deliriously dissolute “Die Gezeichneten,” which Los Angeles Opera presented as “The Stigmatized” on Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. This was the first staging of any Schreker opera in our hemisphere. It was also the most ambitious work, and the most persuasively presented, thus far in the company’s “Recovered Voices” series.

“The Stigmatized” had its premiere in Germany in 1918 and proved a popular sensation in the German-speaking world for the next dozen years. But the composer, born to a Catholic mother and Jewish father who converted to Protestantism, was himself stigmatized, branded, marked, drawn by the Nazi racial laws. His works were banned under the preposterous general rubric of degenerate art.

Then again, “The Stigmatized” actually is, in a sense, degenerate art. Perhaps audiences retired to their coffee houses after performances for deep discussions about the nature of beauty, but the fact is this opera fit right in with its era’s preoccupations with sex, immorality and ravishing music.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago has long embraced adventuresome self-transformation, which has a lot to do with its progressive artistic flowering.

With Glenn Edgerton as Hubbard’s third artistic director, that growth continues: The 16-member company looked better than ever at its Saturday performance in the Ahmanson Theatre, a presentation of Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center.

Founder Lou Conte, whose Broadway career informed his own choreography, early on introduced his young troupe to the works of other dance makers, including a highly fruitful and noteworthy collaboration with Twyla Tharp. In its 33-year existence, Hubbard Street has evolved from a concert jazz-dance troupe into a sleek, contemporary ballet company, one with a special touch for European choreography.

The Hubbard Street repertory on view this weekend -- pieces by Nederlands Dans Theater’s Jirí Kylián, Johan Inger plus Batsheva Dance Company’s Ohad Naharin -- has been performed here previously by others. These dances don’t work without the highest level of committed athleticism. In the past, the Hubbard Street dancing was tentative and unconvincing. Edgerton, a onetime Nederlands  performer and artistic director, has raised the performances several notches, and the pieces glowed as though made specifically for this group.

 

Choreographer Shen Wei is at the point in his life (and career) when many of us experience an existential meltdown about the meaning of it all.

This season, Shen is celebrating the 10th anniversary of his New York-based dance company. Later this year, he will turn 42. If ever there was a time for a midlife crisis, this would be it.

But the unflappable Shen appears to regard his milestone season with the same distanced, cerebral approach as he does his art. The choreographer said he rarely goes out to socialize and that his company would be working extra hard this year and next as part of their anniversary celebration. (In the dance universe, "celebration" is apparently a relative term.)

On Friday, Shen Wei Dance Arts will appear at the Orange County Performing Arts Center to present "Re- (Parts I, II, III)." The triptych is a complex work that takes viewers on a time-traveling journey that includes virtual stops in Tibet, Cambodia's Angkor Wat and contemporary China.

Though he often quotes or references ancient dance, Shen's style of choreography is distinctly modern in its preference for abstraction, dissonance and ordered chaos. His dancers -- who hail from a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds -- are often arranged on stage in a manner to deliberately deprive viewers of a single point of focus in favor of a multiplicity of writhing bodies.

International audiences got a brief taste of Shen's talents during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008. For that event, Shen had dancers use their feet and arms to draw on an oversized canvas in the Birds Nest stadium.

"Re-" is perhaps the ideal work for Shen's company on this anniversary season. With its themes of reflection and renewal, it provides an informal retrospective of Shen's many choreographic obsessions.

Read the full story in Sunday's Arts & Books section.

-- David Ng

Photo: members of Shen Wei Dance Arts perform from "Re-". Credit: Alex Pines / OCPAC

 Bob Irwin is full of surprises—which should come as no surprise, considering the art he’s made over the past 40-plus years. Plastic disks that seem to dematerialize, dissolving into the wall that supports them. Installations where panels of translucent scrim shift the proportions of a room without calling any attention to the change. A garden (at the Getty) of unfurling sensation: not just light and color but sound and motion, too.

At 81, Irwin is back in the studio, after decades of working as an itinerant sculptor of space. He’s created a new body of work using fluorescent tubes wrapped in colored theatrical gels and is showing them in his first gallery appearance in Southern California in 30 years.

The wall-mounted sculptures, at  Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, were made with the help of a studio assistant, another first for Irwin. Together, they’ve aligned fluorescent tubes in vertical groupings, using just three at a time or as many as 33. Flipping on and off different combinations of the lights gives the works elastic personalities.

The tubes wrapped in dark gray, for instance, “almost look like lead pipes or steel pipes,” says Irwin. “You turn it on and that pipe becomes light. It’s like alchemy.”

One second a sculpture looks crisp and industrial, and the next, diaphanous and sensual. Cool colors turn warm and vice versa. “There’s a moment of shock,” Irwin smiles.

Read the full story about Irwin’s surprising new work in Sunday’s Arts & Books section.

 --Leah Ollman

Photo: the artist in the gallery. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Three years ago I was sitting in a room in New York with some actors, a director, and a young Iraqi woman named Wassan who was going over an early draft of my play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” and helping the actors with the Arabic that is peppered throughout the script. Wassan went through the lines I had written out in English and translated them, and then helped the actors with the pronunciations and the phonetic spellings so they could go home and practice speaking in a different language. Wassan, a curator of Islamic art and architecture at the Brooklyn Museum, was volunteering her time and work to help me. She was born in Iraq, and I was moved and honored that she felt the play merited her attention.

The experience of working with Wassan, and with the other translators who have since helped me with the play, has been uniquely interesting to me, as the act of translation is at the core of “Bengal Tiger.” One of the central characters in the play is an Iraqi man working as a translator for the U.S. military, and there are several scenes in the play in which a person stands between two others and tries — sometimes in vain — to allow for communication and understanding. No subtitles are used during those scenes because it’s important to me that the audience sense the confusion and frustration of being unable to communicate while a situation becomes dire.

The play itself is an act of translation, in that I have never been to Iraq, I have never fought in a war and, obviously, I have never been dead or a ghost or a tiger or wandered through limbo. The play (which opens April 25 at the Mark Taper Forum) engages with all these things, and so I’m basically guessing my way through the territory, hoping it all coheres.

To read the full essay by Rajiv Joseph in the Arts & Books section, click here.

Photo: Kevin Tighe as the Tiger and Glenn Davis as Tom in last year's production of the play at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. Credit: Craig Schwartz / Center Theater Group

What do Thor, Xena, Hellboy and "X-Men's" Jean Gray all have in common?

Besides being popular superhero figures with big cult followings, they can trace their roots all the way back to 19th century composer Richard Wagner and his four-opera epic "The Ring of the Nibelung."

Wagner's 17-hour tetralogy is considered one of the most influential operatic works ever written, but its tentacles reach beyond plush concert halls and into the ink-stained studios of some of today's most prominent comic-books artists.

(Los Angeles Opera's first-ever presentation of the complete cycle kicks off May 29.)

P. Craig Russell, who has worked on numerous comic franchises such as Dark Horse's Hellboy, said that Wagner has been a source of inspiration for years. He said there's a clear evolutionary line from Wagnerian characters like Wotan to contemporary superheroes like Superman.

Perhaps the most influential of all of Wagner's creations is Brunnhilde, the Valkyrie protagonist who is typically portrayed wearing a horned helmet. 

 Wagner's intimidating she-warrior has inspired the creation of many modern female superheroes -- most notably Xena, the sword-wielding protagonist played by Lucy Lawless in the popular television series.

As more superheroes like Marvel's Thor make their way to the big screen, the time is ripe to look back and examine their twisted Wagnerian roots. 

Read the full story in Sunday's Arts & Books section, and be sure to check out the photo gallery too.

-- David Ng

Photo: The Mighty Thor. Credit: (c) 2010 Marvel Characters Inc. All rights reserved.

The Hammer Museum is providing an opportunity for anyone who wants to test out Carl Gustav Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious in a collective setting by hosting a night of public dreaming in the Hammer’s courtyard on May 1. Hosted by artSpa and Machine Project and a merry band of “artist-psychonauts,” participants will be assisted in recording, understanding and documenting their creative urges and nocturnal visions.

“Liber Novus” is the name Jung gave his autobiographical magnum opus — an illuminated manuscript filled with images of hissing snakes, dazzling mandalas, bloody battles, radiating beings and a German text describing a man’s loss and rediscovery of his soul — before abandoning it midsentence in 1930 on the 189th page. An epilogue handwritten by Jung in 1959, which also leaves off midsentence, describes a 16-year effort that he acknowledges may “to the superficial observer appear like madness,” but which he credits with saving him from “the overpowering force of the original experiences.” 

Now this volume known as the "Red Book" is on display at the museum; to read about other public events around the exhibition and more on the volume, read my piece in the Arts & Books section.

-- Susan Emerling

Photo: an image from the book. Credit: the Hammer.

Supporters of the “Ring” gathered for a cast party following the opening performance of “Götterdämmerung” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion last week.  The opera is the final installment of Wagner’s four-part epic, which the Los Angeles Opera will be presenting three times in its entirety beginning May 29.

Actors Michael York and Stephen Fry joined in the applause, as the opera’s general manager Plácido  Domingo introduced singers Linda Watson, John Treleaven, Eric Halfvarson, Alan Held and “Götterdämmerung's” other cast members, director/designer Achim Freyer and conductor James Conlon.

“I live for this. I live for Wagner,” said Conlon with enthusiasm. He then added, “Tomorrow, I live for Schreker.”

Richard Wagner, of course, is the man who created the "Ring” cycle. Franz Schreker is the Austrian composer of “The Stigmatized,” which opens Saturday at LA Opera.

Look for the full report in Scene & Heard in Sunday’s Image section.

-- Ellen Olivier

Related:

Opera review: 'Götterdämmerung' -- a new beginning at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

The Los Angeles Times Ring cycle and Ring Festival page

Photo: Plácido Domingo, from left, Achim Freyer, Linda Watson, James Conlon and John Treleaven.  Credit:  © 2010 Steve Cohn Photography.

Ernesto Caivano draws with a light touch. But there's nothing lightweight about his intimate works on paper at Richard Heller Gallery. Combining the crisp precision of architectural diagrams with the gentle whimsy of romantic daydreams, each of the New York-based, Madrid-born artist's 27 drawings and five collages gives viewers a glimpse into a world mellowed by melancholy yet suffused with a fondness for the textures and rhythms that give life's little pleasures their resonance.

Caivano is no one-trick pony. Nor is he unduly concerned with coherence, with working in a signature style that ensures  nervous viewers he is focused and serious.

His drawings in "Relics Where ... " drift freely in subject, style and genre, deriving as much charge from what they leave out as what they include. Imaginary landscapes intermingle with exquisite still lifes. Birds, hands and tree stumps appear frequently. Mysterious packages wrapped in boldly patterned fabrics turn up, as does the silhouette of a Brancusi sculpture.

The Industrial Revolution did many things, not least of which was to make room for an abundance of tchotchkes. Across Europe and the United States, wage-laborers allayed the drudgery of their workaday regimens by collecting cheap trinkets and handcrafting singular mementos.

At Patrick Painter Inc., Liz Craft's new sculptures – in bronze, yarn and fiberglass – slam together the impersonal nature of industrial production with the touchy-feely uniqueness of specially made treasures. Titled "Death of a Clown," her fifth solo show in Los Angeles is a volatile cocktail that plays fast and loose with distinctions between individuals and industries. It makes a place for contemporary art in a post-industrial world in which it's hard to tell the difference between public and private, sincerity and sarcasm, intimacy and anonymity.

Three funky clown faces hang on the walls. Each is made of a 5-by-4-foot steel mesh panel to which Craft has welded cast-bronze serving dishes, vases and candlesticks. These household items serve as the clowns' eyes, noses and mouths. Thick and fuzzy lengths of brightly colored yarn stand in for hair, beards, makeup and tears. Craft's oddly cobbled clowns have the feel of industrial-strength macrame, misbegotten hybrids that are out of place everywhere.

Shakespeare is all the rage.

Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Keanu Reeves -- and other notable celebs — added the star touch to "Much Ado About Nothing" Monday night at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica. And Friday night the kids over at Nevin Avenue Elementary School in South Central L.A. are offering their youthful touch to Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

A group of second- through fifth-graders, also known as “The Shakespearites,” will be reciting the words of an icon in literature — a daunting task for even the best of English speakers. So for these students, whose first language is Spanish, performing the words of the Bard is a feat.

“The Shakespearites” has received support from the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, which produces unique programs and events designed to make Shakespeare accessible to all, has loaned set pieces and invited the children to participate in workshops and attend performances.

--Yvonne Villarreal

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Friday, 6 p.m. Free. Nevin Avenue Elementary School, 1569 East 32nd St., Los Angeles. (323) 232-2236

Cowboys Gene Autry, William S. Hart, Tom Mix and Roy Rogers are returning for an appearance at The Autry National Center. On April 17, the United States Postal Service plans to release the “Cowboys of the Silver Screen” stamps, featuring the four performers who helped make the American western a popular form of entertainment.

An official unveiling will take place at the Autry, where the postal service will be hand-canceling stamps with the official first-day-of-sale postmark.

A lobby exhibition, with artifacts relating to all four screen legends, is planned, focusing on different aspects of their film careers, which covered the silent era through the singing era.

Guest speakers will include Jackie Autry (Gene Autry's widow), Cheryl Rogers-Barnett (daughter of Roy Rogers) and stamp artist Robert Rodriguez of Monrovia, who based the stamp illustrations on vintage film posters.

The ceremony is free and open to the public.

-- Liesl Bradner

Photo: The "Cowboys of the Silver Screen" stamps. Credit: United States Postal Service 

The name, Recovered Voices – the ongoing Los Angeles Opera effort to perform German, Austrian and Czech composers whose works were suppressed by the Nazis – is an American name. It was chosen after much discussion with the L.A. Opera marketing department, music director James Conlon said Thursday night at UCLA, “because Americans want to hear good news.”

Conlon’s remarks were part of his keynote address that closed a two-day Recovered Voices symposium and concert, sponsored by the OREL Foundation (an invaluable online information source about Recovered Voices composers that Conlon helped found) and the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, and organized by Kenneth Reinhard. So here’s some good news: Scholars from near and far are actively involved in a process of mining a rich source of neglected music, making surprising discoveries that occasionally also lead to surprising cultural insights.

Given the academic industry this subject inspires and given a growing interest in the music of such composers as Franz Schreker, Erwin Schulhoff and Alexander Zemlinsky by a new generation of performers, the recovery process appears to be well along. A short concert of gripping chamber pieces by Schulhoff Wednesday night in Schoenberg Hall featured violinist Daniel Hope, pianist Jeffrey Kahane and members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. The OREL Foundation’s calendar listings for April shows that nearly every day this music is being performed somewhere.

At Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, three potent videos by Stanya Kahn deliver more tragedy and comedy than can be seen in most multiplexes on any given day. Think of the L.A. artist's first solo show (after parting company with her collaborative partner, Harry Dodge) as a one-woman film festival. Each of its 30- to 40-minute videos is its own riveting journey into the suffering and bravery of three unsentimental women.

"It's Cool, I'm Good" steals the show. Projected on a wall in a large, darkened gallery, the longest of the three videos features Kahn. Her head, hands and feet wrapped in bandages, she lies in bed, talks on the phone, sits on the beach, stumbles around town on crutches, eats fast food, rides a dirt bike through the desert and generally behaves as if her injuries don't deserve a second thought.

Composer/conductor/pianist Thomas Adès  – no longer the wunderkind of British music, but not quite a grizzled old-timer at 39 –  made his annual visit to Walt Disney Concert Hall Thursday night.  There will be a lot more to come next April in the form of an “Aspects of Adès” festival, with a new Adès work for orchestra, Messiaen’s massive “Éclairs sur l'au-delà,” and another big work by Gerald Barry, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” among the main attractions.

This gig with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, though, was one of Adès' less-ambitious ones – no extended residencies, no entirely new pieces to unveil, no trying to do everything possible short of sweeping out the hall.  It amounted to a pit stop, a time to take stock and review – and in one case, renew – previously surveyed territory, plus have some fun with a rowdy 20th century showpiece.

First came a couple of souvenirs from what is already being regarded as Adès' flaming youth.   “These Premises Are Alarmed,” which Simon Rattle did with the Phil at the 2000 Ojai Festival, bristled and glittered in Disney Hall’s highly detailed acoustics in all of its irrepressible four minutes.

The renewable item was a short suite from Adès’ first opera, “Powder Her Face,” with the orchestration expanded in 2007 from 15 instruments to a full symphony orchestra.  In essence, the inflation of means and the satirical sleaze of the music is the equivalent of fellow Brit William Walton’s orchestral suites from his youthful chamber piece, “Facade” – and it works just as well.  In contrast to the new EMI recording by Paul Daniel and a crack British youth orchestra, Adès stretched almost every rubato as far as he could, which heightened the sleaze deliciously.

Matthew Morrison, the centerpiece of "Glee," is more than just TV's latest heartthrob (though female audiences definitely seem to feel he has that working for him!). In a story in Sunday's Calender section you can find all about the rising 31-year-old star.

Broadway mavens have long appreciated Morrison's skill set of singing, acting and dancing (on the TV show his nickname is "Triple Threat").

With "Glee" returning to Fox on Tuesday, we thought we'd revisit some of Morrison's memorable stage turns.

Most recently Morrison performed a number from a Broadway show he wasn't in but would have been great at. During the Mel Brooks' segment during December's "Kennedy Center Honors," Morrison offered up a terrific take on the comic ode "Springtime For Hitler." In the video above, watch, especially, Morrison's extension on his side kicks when the line of dancers forms and the athleticism he shows in doing a to-the-floor split that he then bounces back up from.

According to the Getty Trust's new online blog, The Iris, which launched on Monday, few museums in Chile were seriously damaged by the devastating magnitude-8.8 earthquake that rocked the country in February.

"Only the O’Higgins Museum in Talca and the National Museum of Natural History in Santiago were damaged structurally," said a post, which includes a decidedly horrifying photograph of a crumpled gallery inside the O'Higgins. (The photograph here shows a stairway on one side of Santiago's Fine Arts Museum, damaged by a fallen cornice.) Apparently the Chilean Museum of Precolumbian Art in Santiago suffered only minor problems.

What's notable about the post, which represents the possibilities for a venture that is a bit late to the burgeoning realm of art museum blogs, is its source. The report comes from Lina Nagel, a Santiago-based translator working for a far-flung Getty project that catalogs art information internationally.

The Getty's reach is vast. That makes the potential for the new blog to be an insightful source of art news similarly substantial.

--Christopher Knight

Photo: Santiago's Fine Arts Museum on April 1. Credit: Roberto Candia / Associated Press

Follow Times art critic Christopher Knight at KnightLAT on Twitter.

Vanessa Hudgens, the heroine of Disney's "High School Musical," will star in another mega-fan favorite, Jonathan Larson's "Rent," which will run Aug. 6-8 at the Hollywood Bowl.

Hudgens will play Mimi, the HIV-positive exotic dancer in the award-winning '90s rock riff on Puccini's "La Boheme."

No other casting has been announced for the fully staged show, which will mark the musical directing debut of actor Neil Patrick Harris, himself a star of "Rent's" 1997 L.A. production and national tour.

Hudgens, 21, became a pop idol as sweet and brainy Gabriella Montez -- the love interest of Zac Efron's jock Troy Bolton -- in the 2006 Disney Channel movie "High School Musical" and its two sequels. She has recorded a pair of albums and pursued a post-"HSM" film career that includes the 2009 "Bandslam" and the upcoming "Beastly"-- a modern take on "Beauty and the Beast" --and the action flick "Sucker Punch."

After a sold-out run at the New York Theatre Workshop, "Rent" opened on Broadway in 1996. The tale of a troubled group of East Village squatters won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and four Tonys, racked up 5,124 performances and drew legions of new fans to musical theater.

By staging "Rent" -- and casting Hudgens -- the Bowl also is expanding the audience base for its annual Broadway show. Last summer, it brought in another young Hollywood star to sing and dance -- with actress Jessica Biel playing Sarah Brown in Frank Loesser's "Guys and Dolls."

-- Karen Wada

RELATED:

Dudamel, Williams, Connick and 'Rent' set for 2010 Hollywood Bowl season

Neil Patrick Harris to direct 'Rent' at the Hollywood Bowl

Photo: Vanessa Hudgens. Credit: Craig Barritt / Getty Images

 

 

When producers announced last year that Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth were going to star in a new stage adaptation of "The Addams Family," theater audiences applauded the dream casting and producers geared themselves for a box-office bonanza.

What a difference a year makes.

On Thursday, "The Addams Family" finally limped onto Broadway following a tryout run in Chicago that was plagued with rumors of cast misery, rewrites and other forms of backstage drama. Jerry Zaks was reportedly called in to salvage the production, which was initially staged by experimental theater artists Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch.

Based on the Charles Addams cartoons that ran in The New Yorker (and not the TV series or the two feature films), the musical stars Lane and Neuwirth as Gomes and Morticia, the heads of the macabre Addams household. Rounding out the cast are Jackie Hoffman as Grandma, Zachary James as Lurch and Kevin Chamberlin as Uncle Fester.

Despite negative word of mouth, "The Addams Family" appears to be an audience hit so far, with robust ticket sales reported for preview performances at Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theater. 

The critics, however, are another matter entirely.