At the beginning of September, I brought my five-year-old daughter to an evening performance of “Le Carnaval des animaux” / “Carnival of the Animals,” by Camille Saint-Saëns. This seemed the perfect opportunity to introduce her to a masterpiece, with Gustavo

Told in rich and agile narrative shorthand, McCraney’s THE BROTHERS SIZE dramatizes a series of episodes about a pair brothers in a small bayou town in Louisiana. Ogun Size (Sheaun McKinney), earnest and responsible, owns a car repair shop. Oshoosi

ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN is the best exhibition I have seen about one of the most respected figures of contemporary art in Los Angeles. Co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art

In theory and dazzling practice, director Yuval Sharon has been instrumental in the contemporary renewal of opera—not as an end point but rather the ongoing cycle of rebirth, death, and rebirth intrinsic to the form. As the founder of the

In May 2024, Kraftwerk played a special album-by-album engagement at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. On the penultimate show of nine dates, the electronic music trailblazers performed one of their most iconic albums, “Tour de France Soundtracks”—the concert providing a

Everyone knows TURANDOT’s “Nessun Dorma,” one of the best-known tenor arias in opera. When sung by Russell Thomas (Calaf) in the current LA Opera engagement, the audience breaks out with enthusiastic applause, a rare gesture reserved for those truly magical

This hilarious, transgressive détournement of “Hamlet”—written by James Ijames and the recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize—shifts the play’s setting to North Carolina and replaces European angst with Black American joy. There is no theatrical experience in Los Angeles more

In Bertrand Bonello’s THE BEAST—an endlessly fascinating three-part puzzle—we first encounter Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) and Louis (George MacKay) near the end of the Belle Époque, strolling through a Paris vernissage, playing a parlor game of “do you remember?”

Since the beginning of his career, Cédric Rivrain has used the portrait as his principal subject of study whether he creates portraits of friends, family, or imaginary people. In that sense Rivrain’s artistic practice is very much anchored in the

I became a fan of alto saxophonist and composer Steve Lehman the very moment I listened to his music for the first time. His album with the Senegalese hip-hop band Sélébéyone, his opus with his trio and Craig Taborn, The