Vegetable matter has recently joined raw meat in Victoria Reynolds' repertoire of still life subjects, but the addition of flora to fauna has not lessened the carnal hedonism at work in her oil paintings. If anything, Reynolds' foray into fruits, vegetables and flowers has upped the ante.

Her third solo exhibition at Richard Heller Gallery includes 15 oils and three works on paper (pencil, charcoal and watercolor), most made since last year. The luxurious depictions of meat and animal innards contain almost Surrealist allusions to portraiture. Bits of raw flesh do double duty with faces and body parts.

In one, an intricate net of off-white reindeer tissue suspended parallel to the picture plane even suggests the miraculous apparition that appeared on Veronica's veil, after the mythical saint wiped sweat from the face of a brutalized Jesus as he made his way to Calvary. No actual face is recorded in Reynolds' painting, but human features nonetheless seem to dart in and out of sight.

Reynolds' fleshy, flashy pictures play with a still life's inherent metaphors of "dead nature." Sometimes she adds a florid baroque picture frame to a painting of sirloin or raw brisket. The frame's rhyming shapes of carved foliage, often highlighted with rubbed color, and painted marbled meat might have inspired her recent addition of flora as pictorial subject matter.

Cherries, strawberry preserves, edible hibiscus flowers and more are shown in extreme closeup, swimming in an ooze of cream and syrup. Reynolds isn't choosing staples or necessities to paint -- not when lusciousness can be had. Fertility and mortality are her focus, and a garden is always preferable when it overflows with earthly delights.

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Richard Heller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through March 19. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.richardhellergallery.com

Photo: Victoria Reynolds, "Cream Cascade," 2010, oil on panel; Credit: Richard Heller Gallery

Agnieszka Brzezanska, who is based in Warsaw, has a captivating Los Angeles solo debut (she's been in at least one group show here) with a suite of manipulated ink-jet prints, three paintings and two drawings. The diverse works layer familiar artistic images associated with spiritual yearning -- whether the free-form dancing of Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan, the ecstatic starry night of Vincent van Gogh or the dematerialized pure abstraction of early 20th-century art-- onto the scientific awe of a Hubble telescope's intimate views of galactic outer space.

At Michael Benevento Gallery, Brzezanska tops it all off with an infectious Debbie Harry-meets-Bruce Conner projected video; a trio of colorfully silhouetted female nudes becomes a dance-club "three graces" for a post-MTV generation. Saturating their shifting, slithering forms with intense color, the punningly titled "Blue Movie" brings us back to Fuller's Belle Epoque roots, when the simple girl from suburban Chicago took Paris by storm by dancing in voluminous folds of silk as beams of colored light played across them.

The paintings create night skies mostly by spattering creamy, off-white paint onto deep indigo surfaces formed by swirled strokes made with a wide brush. In one, the rudimentary outlines of a man and a woman hover amid the stars, like something from a message plaque affixed to a 1970s Pioneer spacecraft.

Those were the first man-made objects to leave the solar system; just in case an extraterrestrial found them, the plaque's drawing might help explain what a human is. The same goes for this work.

The spatter paintings and Photoshop prints, which merge exuberant dancers with explosive Milky Way photographs, possess an outwardly naive, almost childlike quality -- although in fact they are anything but. Deeply informed by art's distinctive modern history, Brzezanska makes the human spirit a quirky but physical manifestation of mind.

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Michael Benevento Gallery, 7578 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 874-6400, through March 12. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.beneventolosangeles.com

Photo: Agnieszka Brzezanska, "Starry Night," 2009, oil on canvas; Credit: Michael Benevento Gallery

Julian Hoeber's eight new paintings (one composed of eight small panels) push further into straightforward abstraction than much of his earlier work did. Yet the deeper they go the more objectified they become. In Hoeber's work, abstraction is not something separate from concrete realities or specific objects.

The paintings at Blum + Poe have many antecedents, but none seems more relevant than Frank Stella's so-called "black paintings" from the late 1950s, which helped launch Minimalism. Stella filled his canvases with methodical stripes whose patterns derived from the paintings' physical structure, emphasizing the artist as someone engaged in useful work rather than inspirational escapism.

Hoeber's stripes do something similar -- with a twist. For him, escape also seems useful.

The pattern in "Execution Changes 16" splits the canvas down the center, a length of string (suggestive of a carpenter's snap-line) making the visual division physical. From there, the inch-wide gray stripes follow the painting's contour to the outer edge, becoming darker as they go. Split in two, the pattern pushes your eyes apart, as if intent on contradicting their tendency to converge and forcing a two-point perspective.

An optical illusion of stepped space is also quietly interrupted by small eruptions of intense surface color -- crimson, turquoise -- plus dense black, which bursts from the thickly painted stripes. They hint of dense under-painting, a sensuous but unobserved life hidden beneath the surface.

Logic begins to fray. Hoeber elaborates the theme in other works, including one that features brightly painted sides of the canvas stretcher bars, causing a reflective red glow on the inside of the work's shadow-box frame.

Underscoring the bracing tensions between physical and optical, labor and thought, Hoeber has built a long, segmented garden bench from plywood, its cantilevered slats rubbed with pigments that move from black to white in groups of 14 slats. It's a logical place to sit a moment and think -- even though it too is a painting that ought to be looked at and not touched.

A physically and perceptually disorienting Hoeber sculpture is also on view (through Feb. 27) at the UCLA Hammer Museum, as part of its Projects series.

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT 

Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-2062, through March 12. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.blumandpoe.com

Photo: Julian Hoeber, "Execution Changes 20" and "Execution Changes 16," 2011, acrylic on panel; Credit: Blum & Poe

To claim that "Camino Real" was Tennessee Williams' best play, as former New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes once did, is like saying you prefer a band's deep tracks to its hits: It marks you as a hard-core fan.

Less-committed viewers have had a tougher time embracing Williams' experimental reverie -- now being staged at Boston Court Performing Arts Center -- which debuted on Broadway in 1953 to confusion and annoyance. On a dead-end street in some Latin American police state, characters drawn from literature and history (Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron) as well as Williams' imagination (Kilroy, a former boxing champ with a heart problem) struggle to understand their destiny, connect and escape — or at least avoid the Street Sweepers who carry off the dead. Their fragmented efforts proceed with the logic of a nightmare through 16 “blocks,” or scenes, announced by the despotic overseer of their misery, the hotel manager Gutman. 

Ahead of its time, “Camino Real” won admiration as audiences caught up, but it remains daunting to produce.

This collaboration between the Theatre@Boston Court and the CalArts School of Theater, directed by Jessica Kubzansky, approaches the challenge with great brio. Always generous to actors, Williams crammed his play with star turns, and many of the performers here — an ensemble of 21 students and professionals — shine.

Matthew Goodrich embodies the sweet, pugnacious über-Southern boy Kilroy so naturally that the role could have been written for him. Cristina Frias plays the Gypsy as a chatty, good-natured cynic; as her daughter, the prostitute Esmerelda, the stunning Kalean Ung is a powerful mixture of innocence and temptation.

Ten recent sculptures by Patrick Nickell include some of the best the artist has made. Since his 2003 survey at Cal State L.A.'s Luckman Fine Arts Gallery, he's continued to mine modest, handmade territory that's light-years away from the over-produced fabrications often encountered these days. The result is a seductive mix of intelligence and charm.

The absent-minded form of drawing called a doodle has long been an inspiration for Nickell's work -- a way to empty out rational or preconceived logic and let in an element of serendipity and play. In the sculptures at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, overtones of discovery, sudden insight and unexpected knowledge wrestle with familiar form.

The sculptures are made from simple tables of painted wood that hold aloft an irregular interlace of  painted plaster over a metal armature. Like Brancusi, Nickell pays close attention to both the sculptural object, conventionally considered, and its pedestal or base. Like Picasso, Julio Gonzalez or David Smith, he makes a linear drawing-in-space that occupies three dimensions.

Like Lynda Benglis, he endows a pure abstraction with the subtle presence of a human body -- in this case, the roughly thigh-high tables functioning as sturdy legs, the organic squiggles of animated color above slyly juxtaposed with a viewer's torso. And, like Kenneth Price, he employs bright, irrational color to effortlessly smudge presumed distinctions between art and craft.

Eurydice looked back.  So did Lot's wife. Followers undone by feminine curiosity, they met doom because they violated husbandly orders. 

Alceste, the heroine of B. Walker Sampson's “Alceste,” now in its world premiere at Theatre of NOTE, is poured from a more heroic mold.  As in Euripides' “Alcestis,” the play upon which Sampson's play is loosely based, Alceste boldly sacrifices her own life to spare her husband from death.

Euripides hedged his bets with “Alcestis,” which mingles comedy with tragedy -– or vice versa, depending on which scholar you consult.  Sampson displays no such dramaturgical ambivalence, approaching his source material with tongue wedged firmly in cheek. 

Alceste (Lorianne Hill) and Adamet (Trevor H. Olsen) are little changed from the original. From there, Sampson goes a bit wild. Apollo has osmosed into Man With Blazing Necktie (Lynn Odell), bent on lechery and mischief.  Hercules is now Frigga Brenda (Julia Prud'homme), a superhero in the Marvel mode. A sardonic Ferryman (Ezra Buzzington) stands in for Thanatos, while a Vargas pin-up temptress (Jennifer Flack) struts her stuff and clownish portraits-come-to-life (Cat Davis and Rick Steadman) function as a chorus.

Excellent design elements -– Naomi Kasahara's set, Michael Roman's lighting, Ryan Brodkin's sound and Takashi Morimoto's costumes –- contribute to the ambience of a fever dream. Director Darin Dahms and a sterling cast rein in the excesses of Sampson's episodic text in a rigorous staging that underscores the piece’s delightful weirdness.

--F. Kathleen Foley

“Alceste,” Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood.  8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays.  Ends March 12. $22.  (323) 856-8611.  www.theatreofnote.com.  Running time:  2 hours, 15 minutes.

Photo: Ezra Buzzington and Lorianne Hill. Credit: Nicholas Sayaan.

History repeats itself in "The Cradle Will Rock" at the Stella Adler. In fact, it tops itself. This exceptional Blank Theatre Company revival of Marc Blitzstein's 1937 landmark play not only justifies revisiting the past, it reminds us why theater matters to begin with.

The company scored with its 1994 "Cradle," yet director Daniel Henning, an ace creative team and a pitch-perfect cast aim beyond mere replication. When invaluable musical director David O first enters designer Kurt Boetcher's bare-bones setting, the house lights still up, we sense that this staging will nail the tricky mix of agitprop angst and satiric glee, and, boy, does it ever.

Set in mythical Steeltown, USA, Blitzstein's didactic libretto pits capitalist oligarchs against labor unions.  Naila Aladdin Sanders' period costumes and JC Gafford's surreal lighting are sleekly effective, but stark comment, personified in Blitzstein's restless, Brecht/Weill-inspired score, is the raison d'être, which everyone clearly understands.

Peter Van Norden's saturnine tycoon and Rex Smith's ingratiating organizer are ideal poles of conflict. Tiffany C. Adams' streetwalker and Jack Laufer's pharmacist exude unaffected intensity. Rob Roy Cesar, Christopher Carroll, David Trice, Jim Holdridge, Roland Rusinek and Matthew Patrick Davis make a formidable sextet of distinguished hypocrites. Gigi Bermingham's droll Mrs. Mister and Adam Wylie and Meagan Smith's outré kids feel definitive, while the wonderful Lowe Taylor's late-inning arrival as activist Ella Hammer stops the show. Will Barker, Mikey Hawley, Matt Wolpe and Penelope Yates complete a remarkable ensemble.

The current-day acuity they achieve reminds us anew why federal authorities locked the theater on "Cradle's" legendary opening night. When the worst thing you can say is that the final placards need even more 21st century targets -- Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and various media monopolies and pundits, for instance --- the show's triumph is inescapable. Simply put, this "Cradle" rocks. Go.

 -- David C. Nichols

"The Cradle Will Rock," Stella Adler Theatre, 6773 Hollywood Blvd., second floor, Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends March 20. $30-$34.99. (323) 661-9827 or www.theblank.com. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Photo:  Matthew Patrick Davis, from left, Rob Roy Cesar, David Trice, Roland Rusinek, Christopher Carroll and Jim Holdridge in the Blank Theatre Company's production of "The Cradle Will Rock." Credit: Rick Baumgartner.

Paris isn't available for transport.

Too bad. That city lent enchantment to the 1958 created-for-film musical "Gigi," its leafy parks and grand fountains providing glamorous backdrops to Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's tale of a young couple at the dawn of the 20th century who fall deeply and genuinely in love despite the careful instruction of their libertine fin-de-siècle elders.

But the City of Light -- along with much of the rest of the magic -- was missing from a 1973 stage version that, in the prevailing opinion, was a pale copy of its original when presented in Los Angeles by Edwin Lester's Civic Light Opera, then went to Broadway, where it ran for just three months.

Undeterred, the musical-revival specialists of Reprise are poking around this dubious property. They approach the material with enthusiasm and, as they've been doing lately, they've found another underseen but captivating female lead. To Alexandra Silber in "Carousel" and Stephanie J. Block in "They're Playing Our Song" they add, as Gigi, Lisa O'Hare. Still, the results are wan. A faint glow of nostalgia gets smothered in an overall atmosphere of "eh."   

The stage version contains four songs incorporated since the movie, and for the Reprise production, director David Lee tracked down script and lyric improvements that Lerner made for a 1985 production in London's West End.         

Establishing a sense of place, a considerable task, rests largely on Tom Buderwitz's set, with its Art Nouveau filigrees and Alphonse Mucha-like paintings of women in languorous repose, and Kate Bergh's period costumes. Beyond a series of arches, conductor Steve Orich and 20 musicians can be glimpsed, as if they were the house orchestra at one of the story's posh nightspots.

Classical music doesn't often inspire passionate pile-ons on Twitter -- at least not on the Justin Bieber or Kim Kardashian level. So we're happy to note a popular Twitter trend, viewable at #BudgetClassical, in which users riff on the titles of famous classical pieces by re-imagining them as low-budget versions of themselves.

The trend has been seen on Twitter in the past, but it was revived this week and has inspired a number of creative tweets.

L.A.'s own classical radio station KUSC (91.5 FM) has also gotten into the act, taking time out from its pledge drive this week to tweet its own "budget" classics such as Berlioz's "Eggs & Benedict Overture" (after "Beatrice and Benedict") and Bela Bartok's "Picokosmos - Etudes for Casio Keyboard" (after "Mikrokosmos").

Here are some recent #BudgetClassical tweets that are especially witty:

@mahlersoboes: The Abduction from the Seedy Strip Club (after Mozart's "The Abduction from the Seraglio")

@violinscigars: Adagio for String (after Barber's "Adagio for Strings")

@stravinskyite: The Merry Wives of Winston-Salem (after Nicolai's opera "The Merry Wives of Windsor")

@ellisrobbie: Short Ride in a Toyota Celica (after John Adams' "Short Ride in a Fast Machine")

If Charlie Sheen leaves “Two and a Half Men,” CBS may want to scout “Wrinkles,” Paul Kikuchi’s slick comedy now at East West Players. This mature sitcom — and I mean that in every sense — features a smooth single guy with a vigorous interest in chicks. He just happens to be a grandpa.

Widower Harry (Sab Shimono) lives in Pasadena with divorced daughter Nancy (Amy Hill), a lawyer, and her teenage son, Jason (Ki Hong Lee).  Their lives are predictably aspirational, a feeling effectively conveyed by set designer Alan E. Muraoka’s middle-class home, impressive enough to deserve its own MLS listing.  But all is not as it appears. A Trader Joe’s bag turns up containing something other than Joe’s O’s, and its youthful owner soon arrives (Elizabeth Ho), attired in what can be termed only as Early “Pretty Woman.” It seems Harry is an Internet sensation, and not for biting anyone’s finger. He is indeed big in Japan, where elder porn generates millions as the hottest new twist on adult entertainment.

Don’t wince: There’s nothing in “Wrinkles” that would offend your average Sunday school teacher. The appeal of this slight but good-natured comedy lies in Kikuchi’s light touch with matters sexual and the charm of the players. The excellent Hill conjures a Tiger Mom attorney with killer timing, and Shimono has an unapologetic directness that makes his purported stardom credible. 

Get your spirit fingers ready. The stage musical "Bring It On" is set to begin its national tour in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson Theatre in November. The musical, which boasts a prestigious creative team that includes Tony Award winners Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tom Kitt, recently had its world premiere at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta.

"Bring It On: The Musical" is loosely inspired by the 2000 cheerleading comedy, which starred Kirsten Dunst, and its sequels. The musical will run at the Ahmanson from Nov. 1 through Dec. 11, with an official opening set for Nov. 11. Other cities on the tour will be announced at a future date.

The musical features a libretto by Tony winner Jeff Whitty ("Avenue Q"), music and lyrics by Miranda ("In the Heights"), music by Kitt ("Next to Normal") and lyrics by Amanda Green. Andy Blankenbuehler, also a Tony winner for "In the Heights," directs and choreographs the musical.

"Bring It On" tells the story of Campbell, a star cheerleader at Truman High School, who finds herself in unfamiliar territory when she's reassigned to a new school.

Laurel Nakadate's recent videos are suggestive enough to bring out some stern maternal instincts in just about any viewer. Couldn't you cover up with a sweater or something? Don't look at him that way. Don't you have some homework to do?

So it might be reassuring to know that Nakadate, a young-looking 35, is a video artist and photographer who has followed her exhibitionist impulses all the way to a major museum survey ("Only the Lonely," now at PS1 in New York). But watching her rub up against erotic content in her Standard Hotel video program, now on view in the lobbies of both the downtown and Sunset Strip locations in L.A., is still likely to trigger bouts of feminist empathy, male lust or both.

In her best-known series, Nakadate turned her camera on lonely men -- typically strangers who tried to pick her up on the street. She went home with them and asked them to do socially awkward, pseudo-intimate things like dance with her to Britney Spears or throw her a birthday party. In Artforum, critic Jeffrey Kastner recently called her work "dangerously smart, dangerously bold (and frequently just plain dangerous)."