The Farley Storage Building, on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock, is a great white block of a structure, sans windows or adornments of any kind—a building that gives nothing away. Walk in the front door today and you’ll find yourself in a small, blandly decorated foyer that resembles a doctor’s waiting room, with a sofa and magazines and a young woman stationed in a glass-enclosed office. She’ll direct you through a door to your right, beyond which you’ll find yourself in another world altogether.

Music blares, colored lights flash and spin in the darkness, and a booming female voice delivers enigmatic commentary through a cavernous space filled with jungle gyms, stuffed animals, a 30-foot junk sculpture, and portable toilets, while seven enormous video screens follow a 59-year-old man in a bonnet and diapers through the wilds of the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert.

This peculiar new addition to the otherwise placid Eagle Rock business district is “A Voyage of Growth and Discovery,” a collaborative project by Mike Kelley and Michael Smith. The jungle gyms and stuffed animals are classic Kelley—the building is, in fact, his former studio—and the creepily overgrown infant is one of performance artist Smith’s longtime characters, Baby Ikki. The installation premiered at Sculpture Center in New York last fall but West of Rome director Emi Fontana, who produced the project, is clearly pleased to see it returned to the site of its original conception. The piece had much less room in New York, she says, and the effect was more like a carnival or fun house. Here, the enormity of the warehouse space echoes the vastness of the desert, inviting a more ominous, existential dimension.

With flaming red hair, cool blue eyes and a slightly tentative Milanese accent, Fontana is a striking presence, elegant but unpretentious. In her work as well as her conversation and dress, she betrays a deep independent streak. She is effusive in her affection for the neighborhood—she herself lives in South Pasadena—and clearly proud of landing such a project so far from the purview of a museum or other such institution, giving the artists free rein and opening the results to the public free of charge. The opening on May 26 attracted around 1,000 people.

Smith remained in character throughout his week at Burning Man, Fontana recounts—an exhausting endeavor that affected his health for months after. Kelley himself didn’t go, apparently. “He was scared,” she says. She went—in characteristic style, it seems. A photograph on the West of Rome website depicts her weathering a dust storm alongside the perennially baffled Baby Ikki in sunglasses, gas mask, and leopard print bikini top.

West of Rome is one of the relatively new, feisty nonprofits that are supporting an interesting spurt in public art in SoCal; to read my longer piece on that development in Sunday's Arts & Books section, click here.

--Holly Myers

Photo: In "A Voyage of Growth and Discovery," video stills showing Michael Smith in the character of Baby Ikki at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Credit: West of Rome

By no means do I mean to sound self-centered, but when I interviewed Renée Fleming to detail the making of her first rock album, "Dark Hope" -- you can read the article here -- she said she was going to start consulting me about music. I was, she said, the rare person "tuned in to something I've been thinking a lot about lately -- the bridge between classical and contemporary music, and where one leads to another."

I don't know how rare I am for loving both classical music and rock.  And regardless of what listeners make of the opera singer's rendition of songs like "Endlessly" by British band Muse, "Dark Hope" sure does fire up the cultural shouting match between classical music and rock. While I have my opinions about how, in musical terms, the  genres should stay in their own corners, I wholeheartedly agree with "Dark Hope" producer David Kahne, who told me, "Anybody who thinks they're coming down from opera to an Arcade Fire song is full of it. People who are snobs don't understand there are people speaking out into the darkness, trying to express themselves, with a hell of a lot of talent, in every genre of music."

How true. Your emotions don't judge whether something that moves you is a concerto for orchestra (Bartok's is one of my absolute favorite pieces of classical music) or tortured guitar lines dancing with slashing beats (as with the Walkmen, one of my favorite recent rock bands). You just feel. And that, ultimately, is what any musician is after, on stage at the Disney Concert Hall or Spaceland.

-- Kevin Berger, from New York

Listen to "Endlessly" and a few more of the songs on Fleming's rock album.

"Today" -

"With Twilight As My Guide" -

"In Your Eyes" -

Photo Credit: Andrew Eccles.

Joseph Paul Stachura is a do-it-yourself kind of guy.

While working as an actor in L.A. in the late 1980s, he began making extra money by fixing up and selling houses. In the early '90s, he founded the Knightsbridge Theatre, which started in Pasadena and now is in Silver Lake. In both places, he renovated the company's 99-seat spaces himself.

It's no surprise, then, that when Stachura got an idea for a movie three years ago he and Knightsbridge decided to make the picture on their own. "We had the talent," he tells Culture Monster, "and now there's affordable technology that makes it possible to do high-quality stuff."

The result is the full-length feature "Redemption," a post-Civil War drama about a Southern family struggling to find a new life in California.

Doing a period piece was "a natural because ours is a classically based theater," says Stachura, the company's managing artistic director. "But the real spark was hearing about our current soldiers going through post-traumatic stress. We thought it would be interesting to tell the story of a Civil War soldier and his family who lose everything and try to start over."

The cast is made up of 11 Knightsbridge actors, all of whom are stage veterans but most of whom don't have a lot of Hollywood experience.

If you know how to use your imagination, it isn’t difficult to look at clouds and see all sorts of things.

It takes a bit more ingenuity to look at the rest of the world and see abstract silhouettes instead of people and objects.

And that’s exactly what John Baldessari’s new works at Margo Leavin Gallery do: invite viewers to imagine a world in which we do not immediately know what we’re seeing but have to piece together its parts slowly — like a kid sounding out words as he learns to read. It’s a fascinating exercise that makes everything slightly strange and significantly more interesting than business-as-usual.

Never a pedagogue, Baldessari makes lesson-obsessed Conceptual art fun. Each of his 11 printed paintings is an oversize flashcard. On gray grounds appear black or white silhouettes of objects and bodies. But unlike flashcards, which idealize objects by turning them into icons so that they can be easily identified, Baldessari’s home-brewed flashcards are based on the way things actually look in the world, where they are seen from odd angles, are partially blocked by other objects or are shrouded in shadows.

At the bottom of each image he has printed captions that identify the shapes depicted. In one horizontal canvas, two large black lumps and a single, somewhat smaller white blob are labeled “Three Overcoats (Ascending Stairs).”

Confession: I finally had my Achim Freyer fit. It was during the first act of the Los Angeles Opera's “Siegfried,” but for a moment I feared I might have taken a wrong turn that led me to some perverse Disneyland.

Donning a deranged yellow wig and your ordinary lavender-hewed muscle suit, Siegfried (John Treleaven) looks like the Incredible Hulk’s foppish younger brother. Meanwhile, this freakish Mime (Graham Clark), the dwarf who raised Siegfried in his plot to steal the ring from Fafner (Eric Halfvarson, sharing the role with a miniature dragon), was clearly banished from Snow White’s entourage.

The raked stage kept the movement slow and perilous, the light sabers suggested a video game and the flashing colors on the scrim lent the impression a fish tank. But before I continue in this vein, let me add that I was eventually won over.  Admittedly, the first 90 minutes were quite a struggle, and the idea of another seven or eight hours of this larky "Ring" was daunting. 

In "Supernova," playwright Timothy McNeil runs kitchen-sink realism through a post-millennial viewfinder. The results are remarkable, albeit still gestating, and remind us anew why the author of "Anything" is an invaluable theatrical asset.
 
Speaking of assets, McNeil has written wife, Bonnie McNeil, a corker of a role, which she inhabits with transcendent grace. As unappreciated Iowa homemaker Mabel Davies, McNeil is achingly real and elusively lyrical at once, recalling such Golden Age icons as Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley.
 
Mabel's surface dilemma is the Supernova, a high-end watch to give son Kip (Edward Tournier) on his 18th birthday. John (Tony Gatto), Mabel's sullen blue-collar husband, rejects the idea outright. Besides, disaffected Kip only cares about pot, booze, reactionary conspiracies -- and illicit canoodling with next-door neighbor Fran (an adept Gina Garrison).
 
Nevertheless, one night Mabel calls the watch company, and connects with Joe Strong (author McNeil, sweetly underplaying), a downtrodden graveyard shifter as isolated as she is. Their developing relationship features McNeil's best writing yet, bringing the title metaphor into touching bas-relief.
 
Lindsay Allbaugh stages this parabolic study with simplicity and point around designer Joel Daavid's bisected set. She benefits from a crack design team and an invested cast that includes Kelly Elizabeth and Joe Wiebe as Kip's miscreant cronies, and alternates Micah Cohen and James Pippi as Joe's supervisor.
 

Robert Rahway Zakanitch’s latest paintings remind viewers just how glorious it is to be alive.

That’s as stale a cliché as can be, but in the New York painter’s talented hands it comes alive with so much vitality, vigor and sensitivity, not to mention frank, fresh fun, that it’s difficult to dismiss and even sadder to miss out on. And as is always the case with Zakanitch, whose best paintings marry animal simplicity and human sophistication — or lizard-brain decisiveness and conceptual refinement — these point-blank pictures of flowers, bugs and birds do wildly unexpected things.

Zakanitch, born in 1935, has filled the four exhibition spaces of Samuel Freeman Gallery with two dozen works from his ongoing series “From a Garden of Ordinary Miracles.” Six are gigantic gouaches on paper, all but one measuring 8 feet by 6 feet. No one else makes gouaches this big. The medium is more suited to sketchbook-size watercolors. And no one else makes them this gorgeous: joyous, free and delicate, just the right balance of crazy abandon and rigorous discipline.

Each is an explosion of color, a riotous firework display of eye-grabbing energy barely contained by its composition: an upward tumble of highly stylized flowers blasting out of elaborately patterned vases or showering downward like a cloudburst of loveliness.

 In a world of jet-setting maestros, it’s a rare music director who can stay with an orchestra for two decades. Most marriages, of course, don’t last that long. But conductor Carl St.Clair, who this season is celebrating his 20th anniversary at the Pacific Symphony, has created something uniquely enduring with this ensemble located in the heart of Orange County. Although just 31 years old, the Pacific Symphony has resided since 2006 in a glittery, acoustically resplendent concert hall, which would be the envy of most veteran orchestras. The structure and the Pacific Symphony’s sizable budget ($17 million) are proof of St.Clair’s wide community appeal.
 
He can attract big-name soloists too. Thursday evening at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, St.Clair led the Pacific Symphony in a dizzyingly eclectic program that starred Leila Josefowicz in John Adams’ Violin Concerto. The 32-year-old virtuoso and L.A. native made her debut with this orchestra at age 10 and has become an impassioned advocate for contemporary music, particularly Adams’ works. (Local fans will undoubtedly recall her performance of Adams’ “Dharma on Big Sur” earlier this season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.)  From the nebulous opening measures of Adams’ Violin Concerto to its playful finale, Josefowicz exuded utter commitment and confidence. In short, this concerto is a dynamic showcase for her musical athleticism and gift for subtle inflections.
 
Orchestral gestures weaving in and out of the solo line, St.Clair and the players were behind Josefowicz’s every note, at ease with the music’s polyglot vocabulary and mercurial moods. (In a few spots, however, the two electric synthesizers were too exposed.) At performance’s end, amid the ovations, it seemed a pity that the hall had so many empty seats.
 
For the rest of the program, St.Clair proved himself a conductor of grand gestures that sounded sometimes hollow. Mozart’s abbreviated Symphony No. 32 (K. 318), heard after intermission, came across as bold and lush but not historically informed or sufficiently interesting.
        

Each of Maxwell Hendler’s deliciously sensual paintings is a world unto itself that — mysteriously, magically, even miraculously — awakens your attentiveness to the most mundane elements of everyday life. It’s a heady, potentially mind-blowing experience that is as difficult to explain as why some perfume is unforgettable, some jokes are funny and some dishes do things to your palate that make mortal existence seem divine.

Ranging in size from 6 inches by 8½ inches to 4 feet by 3 feet, Hendler’s 23 monochromes at Manny Silverman Gallery are rectangles of supersaturated color or crystalline translucence, through which the grain of the underlying wood panel is visible. Each consists of one or two layers of opaque or transparent resin that Hendler has power-sanded to perfection, a labor-intensive process that can last a few months and leaves many rejects on the cutting room floor.

Born in 1938, Hendler has been working in this manner since 1990, when he turned away from his idiosyncratic brand of Pop-Realism, which featured low-relief pieces made of home-improvement materials; big paintings of words, logos and product labels; intimately surreal still lifes, and super-realistic oils.

The psychiatrist as detective is a familiar but irresistible conceit, from “Equus” to “In Treatment.” And, as Chris Nolan would say, a mind is the scene of a crime in Richard Martin Hirsch’s absorbing “London Scars,” now at the Odyssey Theatre. 

Inside London’s top mental hospital, Margaret (Ann Noble) asks fellow shrink and ex-lover Bronwyn (Imelda Corcoran) to treat Mary (Meredith Bishop) a traumatized young woman who may have been involved in the horrific London bombings of July 7, 2005. Bronwyn and Mary begin their uneasy dance, haunted by the ghost of bomber Habib (Anmar Ramzi) and government investigator Dowd (Rob Nagle).

This Coffeehouse Production, played out on Stephen Gifford’s expansive, blonde wood office set, has a brisk intelligence, even when its staging errs. Director Darin Anthony and lighting designer Christie Wright overwork the shifts between Mary’s mind and her external reality, which can throw off the show’s rhythm. But crisp performances all around drive this literate script that occasionally belabors its plot. Nagle finds unexpected nooks and crannies in his G-man, and Corcoran has a bright attentiveness that keeps you engaged with her secret wounds as much as Mary’s visible ones.

--Charlotte Stoudt

 “London’s Scars” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 South Sepulveda Boulevard, Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends June 27. $30. Contact:  (310) 477 2055 or www.plays411.com/londonsscars. Running time: 2 hours.

Photo: Imelda Corcoran (left to right) and Ann Noble. Courtesy of Coffee House Productions.

Southern California in the summertime is famous for its pool parties, pool games and even its pool boys. But a pool opera?

In 2008, the Long Beach Opera debuted a production of Ricky Ian Gordon’s “Orpheus and Euridice” at the indoor Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool. The song cycle, which starred soprano Elizabeth Futral and clarinetist Todd Palmer, enacted the ancient Greek myth using a small boat that floated on the chlorinated "River Styx."

This week, the company is reviving the high-concept production with the same cast and an enhanced instrumental component -- a larger string ensemble plus a slightly expanded score by Gordon. The composer said he wrote about a minute of new music for the scene where Euridice disappears and the audience is left with an eerie and ghostly presence.

“I absolutely loved [the production] the last time, but the tricky part was that it was an unwieldy space,” said Gordon in a phone interview from Washington D.C., where he was working on a new stage piece, “Sycamore Trees.”

"We didn't realize that we needed sound design until late in the game. You couldn't even hear Elizabeth when she turned way."

“They Have Not the Art to Argue With Pictures” is a fantastic group exhibition that would be even better if it had only one artist in it. At Cherry and Martin Gallery, Robert Heinecken’s altered magazines are more than enough to introduce a new generation of viewers to his devious genius and to remind everyone else of just how far ahead of his times — and above the curve — Heinecken (1931-2006) was.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Heinecken turned Pop Art’s focus on the mass-produced imagery of the news and entertainment industries upside-down, inside out and around on itself. Picture a snake eating its own tail, with all the messy, painful deadliness that never appears in the tidy diagram of the ouroboros. This hints at the charge at the heart of Heinecken’s art, which is never pretty and always pointed, often vicious but never mean.

Four vitrines are packed with examples of all types of Heinecken’s reconfigured magazines. In some, he has used an offset lithograph process to print pornographic or horrific war photographs over every page of popular news magazines. In others, he has dissected hundreds of magazines, from every niche of the market, and re-bound their pages to create his own Frankensteinian hybrids.

Long before James Frey ticked off Oprah, Jerzy Kosinski excited controversy  with “The Painted Bird,” a novel that Kosinski slyly promoted as an autobiographical account of his own childhood in Nazi Poland.  When it was alleged that his “personal” experience was largely fabricated, Kosinski’s career was forever tarnished.  Accusations of plagiarism further plagued Kozinski, who committed suicide in 1991.

Was Kosinski liar or embellisher, literary thief or literary genius?  The continuing debate fuels Davey Holmes’ “More Lies About Jerzy,” now at the Hayworth.

Considerably shortened since its 2001 premiere, Holmes’ deft drama is a fictionalized look at a man who falls from grace for fictionalizing his own life – a neat meta-theatrical exercise that examines the sometimes cannibalistic nature of creativity.

Although Holmes has changed the characters’ names, the play roughly follows the arc of Kosinski’s pyrotechnical rise and sputtering fall.  Holmes’ thinly-veiled stand-in for Kozinksi, Jerzy Lesnewski (Jack Stehlin) is a newly famous author and voracious womanizer, a regular on the talk show circuit as well as in New York’s flourishing sex clubs, circa the early 1970s. When a formerly supportive journalist (Adam Stein) exposes inconsistencies in Jerzy’s work, the vultures circle.

Playwright David Mamet pushes peoples' buttons for a living. So when it came to making an Internet video, it seems only natural that he would gravitate toward the world of sex and illicit behavior -- but tinged with that distinctive Mamet irony.

Here's a short humorous clip he directed, starring his frequent collaborators Ricky Jay, Ed O'Neill and Kristen Bell. And despite its title, the video is safe for work.

-- David Ng

Alicia Alonso accepted the sold-out audience’s adoring ovation at the Metropolitan Opera House from a central box seat before Thursday night’s American Ballet Theatre performance. But one sensed that this legendary ballerina, being saluted by the company with an evening to celebrate her 90th birthday, would find her way to center stage, and she did, culminating the boisterous, rousing event.

The performance featured three couples sharing the central roles of “Don Quixote” – a different pair for each act. The applause meter  had been in high gear all evening, and Natalia Osipova, the Bolshoi Ballet star appearing as a guest artist with ABT this season, inspired enduring bravos for the sensational, seemingly effortless, feats she tossed off in the final act.

Then it took a while, but the curtain rose once more, and Alonso walked out flanked by Kevin McKenzie, ABT’s artistic director, and José Manuel Carreño, the Cuban ABT principal dancer who partnered Osipova in Act Three and who trained and performed at Alonso’s National Ballet of Cuba (Ballet Nacional de Cuba). Wearing a silver version of her trademark snug headscarf to match her pewter and silver dress, she beamed happily and accepted a giant bouquet as the audience – many no doubt with numerous memories of her lengthy career – proved it still had plenty of applause left to give.

--Major sale: Claude Monet's 1906 "Nympheas" -- one of the artist's celebrated water-lily paintings -- is expected to bring up to $58 million at a Christie's auction in London that also will feature a "blue period" Picasso and works by Magritte, Klimt and Van Gogh. (BBC News)

--Creativity contest: June 9 is the start date of Bravo's new reality TV show that will pit 14 artists against each other in pursuit of $100,000 and a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. (Reuters)

--Broadway bound? The emo rock musical "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson," which premiered at Culver City's Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2008, has been extended three times at New York's Public Theater amid talk of a Broadway run. (Playbill)

--On the block: Lehman Bros., which filed for bankruptcy in 2008, plans to sell more than 400 pieces of contemporary art that could fetch more than $10 million. Proceeds would go to the investment bank's creditors. (Bloomberg)

--Battling a bug: Tony nominee Catherine Zeta-Jones reportedly is suffering from a viral infection that has forced her to miss five performances of Broadway's "A Little Night Music" in the last two weeks. (New York Post)

--Background questioned: Archaeologists and an Italian prosecutor want Christie's International to withdraw three Greek and Roman antiquities from a New York auction because they believe the works came from illicit excavations in Italy. (Wall Street Journal)

--Return engagement: Matthew Bourne's all-male "Swan Lake" will be back in New York this fall, more than a decade after the 1998 Broadway production won three Tonys and caused a sensation. (Associated Press)

--Provocateur: Designer and conceptual artist Tobias Wong has died at 35 in New York. (New York Times)

--Italian baritone: Giuseppe Taddei, who sang with Callas and Pavarotti and made an acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut when he was 69, has died at 93 in Rome. (AFP)

And in the Los Angeles Times: Theater critic Charles McNulty reviews "South Pacific" at the Ahmanson Theatre; Carrie Fisher's one-woman show, "Wishful Drinking," is heading to HBO; artist Nancy Rubins moves from colorful kayaks to aluminum canoes for a show in Beverly Hills; the late actress Rue McClanahan, best known as one of TV's "Golden Girls," also had an extensive stage career.

-- Karen Wada

Photo: Claude Monet's "Nympheas" at Christie's in London. Credit: Andy Rain / EPA

So what do you do after you bring home the mirrorball trophy on  "Dancing With the Stars"?

If you're Nicole Scherzinger, you join the cast of "Rent" at the Hollywood Bowl.

The lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls will play Maureen, a free-spirited bisexual performance artist, in Jonathan Larson's '90s rock version of Puccini's "La Boheme."

The fully staged production, directed by Neil Patrick Harris, will run Aug. 6-8.

Scherzinger will complete a cast that includes Wayne Brady, Vanessa Hudgens, Skylar Astin, Telly Leung, Collins Pennie, Gwen Stewart, Tracie Thoms and Aaron Tveit.

In May, Scherzinger and her partner, Derek Hough, defeated Olympic skating gold medalist Evan Lysacek and his partner to win the 10th season of ABC's "Dancing..."

Scherzinger and the Pussycat Dolls, a burlesque troupe turned vocal group, crossed over onto the pop charts with their 2005 debut album "PCD" and the mega-hit "Don't Cha," followed by the album "Doll Domination." She also has pursued a career as a solo artist.

"Rent" opened on Broadway in 1996 and ran for 5,124 performances. It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and four Tonys.

--Karen Wada

Photo: Nicole Scherzinger. Credit: Toby Canham / Getty Images

Related:

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

Vanessa Hudgens to star in 'Rent' at the Hollywood Bowl this summer

Wayne Brady will join the cast of 'Rent' at the Hollywood Bowl

 

Last week I visited Nancy Rubins during her installation of two massive new sculptures at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills for a show that opens Thursday night. She is working with boats as her not-so-raw materials, as she did for Las Vegas CityCenter and the the plaza of Lincoln Center before that.

(For an idea of how much work it takes to make boats float mid-air, check out Michael Rudnick's video of her New York installation online.)

This time, she decided to work with only aluminum vessels like canoes. "I was getting more and more colorful in the work," Rubins said. "But instead of going in a painterly direction, I really wanted to do something more sculptural."

She says she likes aluminum because it is industrial but also natural. "It came out of the Earth and carries a certain energy."

For the full story, click here.

--Jori Finkel
www.twitter.com/jorifinkel

Photograph by Erich Koyoma. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

 

The Geffen Playhouse's production of "Love, Loss and What I Wore" will have a casting change June 10 and the theater has just confirmed the new set of actresses for the production that was written by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron.

Justina Machado and Nancy Travis will join the previously announced Conchata Ferrell, Rhea Perlman and Lucy DeVito. The new cast members will have two preview performances June 9 and will officially open June 10. They are set to run through July 3 at the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theatre.

Both Perlman and DeVito performed in the New York version of "Love, Loss and What I Wore," which also is playing off Broadway.

Machado was previously seen at the Geffen in a production of Neil LaBute's "Some Girl(s)" in 2007. Travis, whose most famous movie role was in "Three Men and Baby," was in the Geffen's production of Rebecca Gilman's "Boy Meets Girl" in 2003. 

Ferrell is starring on the CBS comedy series "Two and a Half Men." She, Machado and Travis are making their debuts in "Love, Loss."

The Geffen's production of the play, based on the Ilene Beckerman book, began with a cast of Rita Wilson, Natasha Lyonne, Carol Kane, Caroline Aaron and Tracee Ellis Ross.

-- David Ng

Photo: Nancy Travis in the Geffen's production of "Boy Meets Girl" in 2003. Credit: Los Angeles Times.

The opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific" at the Ahmanson Theatre proved to be an enchanted evening for old-school musical buffs and teen and twentysomething "Glee" fans alike.

Wednesday's celebrity guests included stars of the 1958 movie -- Mitzi Gaynor, John Kerr and France Nuyen -- as well as Shirley Jones and other members of the original  Broadway production, which opened in 1949.

Outside the Ahmanson, an eclectic assortment of names passed before the cameras including Adrian Grenier, Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter, Eva Marie Saint, Jane Kaczmarek, Eric Idle and Bruce Vilanch.

The most-anticipated arrival, however, was "Glee" heartthrob Matthew Morrison -- Will Schuester, who leads the William McKinley High School show choir. Morrison originated the role of Lt. Joe Cable in the 2008 Lincoln Center Theater revival of "South Pacific," which launched the current national tour.

Gleeks waving cellphone cameras rushed forward as soon as he appeared. Sporting a big grin and one of the orchid leis given to each VIP, Morrison signed autographs even as he was hustled inside when the overture began.

Culture Monster caught up with Gaynor, resplendent in blue sequins, at intermission. "This night is so emotional for me," the film's Nellie Forbush said, dabbing away tears. "The whole idea of having been a part of this is so beautiful."

Backstage, Gaynor joined the current show's director, Bartlett Sher, and stars including Carmen Cusack (Nellie), Rod Gilfry (Emile) and Anderson Davis (Joe Cable) as well as cast members and friends from 60 years of "South Pacific.". 

Click on the jump to see more photos

--Karen Wada

Related:

Theater review: 'South Pacific' at the Ahmanson Theatre