"They was helicopters," claimed a Midwestern farmer repeatedly on an audiotape I heard back in 1986. Who knows what he thought about being hypnotized to reconstruct his alien abduction, much less what he went through that day in his field -- but if w...
Japanese porn embodies a wild and rigid dichotomy: On one hand, there's the softcore mainstream, legally prohibited from showing genitalia and, until recently, pubic hair and intended to be consistent with the country's image of modesty, tact and low...
The bel canto superstar urges the music of her madness toward its climax; she takes aim at the stratospheric E-flat on which much of her renown rests, scores a bull's- eye; the audience, its own blood throbbing to every nuance in that climactic buil...
Mikhail Baryshnikov, father of four. Baryshnikov, who has lived 10 years with the same woman, Lisa Rinehart. How is it that the paparazzi (even the dance-magazine paparazzi -- benign, persuasive) have not leaped upon him through the bushes of his h...
With Elton John's music in Disney's The Lion King, followed by Barry Manilow's musical, Harmony, and Paul Simon's score to the upcoming Cape Man, a renewed fusion of pop and show tunes is breathing life into both forms -- hearkening back to half a ce...
John Dos Passos opened his U.S.A. trilogy of novels with a freewheeling inventory of what made up the United States ("a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins, a lot of men buried in thei...
It may well be true, as a colleague pointed out in last Sunday's L.A.Times, that the Beethoven glut has reached the point of absurdity, that the hundred-or-so available recordings of the Fifth Symphony are 95-or-so too many. It is equally true, howev...
Kirk Douglas Theatre's Three Solo Shows Are Respectable But Don't Push the Envelope
In his absorbing solo show, St. Jude, at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, gay-Latino writer-performer Luis Alfaro talks sincerely about himself, about growing up in California's Central Valley, and about his… More >>
On a blazing Sunday afternoon, the interior of downtown's Union Station provides a cool refuge from an early-September heat wave. But on this particular day, cool takes on its other… More >>
Theater @ Boston Court's program to its production of R II — what might otherwise be called William Shakespeare's Richard II — makes a point of not referring to the dramatist's work as a… More >>
GLOW Festival in Santa Monica: The Trials of Creating an Art Show on the Beach
A gas-fueled fire ring, held up by specially built scaffolding that rises over Santa Monica sand, will light up on Sept. 28 at sunset, as if capturing and keeping sunlight… More >>
Questioning Authority in Ah, Wilderness! and Prometheus Bound
In his program note to his elegant and fervent staging of the 5th-century Greek tragedy, Prometheus Bound director Travis Preston writes, "The dramaturgy of Prometheus Bound asks us to question… More >>
