Sure, Man on Wire deserved the hell out of last month's Best Documentary Oscar, but we as a nation still have many a reality-film inroad to pave. Let us not forget the criminally overlooked, Academy-snubbed 2005 docu-gem The Aristocrats, in which Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette cajoled dozens... More >>
Although Benjamin Britten was a notorious depressive and neurotic perfectionist, he managed to compose one of the funniest and most outrageous of all operas: Albert Herring , which the USC Thornton Opera Program presents this week in all its audacious glory. The work takes aim at two touchy... More >>
The folk and country-music blog When You Awake has been a stellar supporter of the classic-country and indie-roots scenes for a while they put on shows, sell mix tapes, give away tickets and spot vintage clothes for rabid collectors but these folks are also good-deed doers who... More >>
Austin's Alan Palomo is both young and restless. He's just made drinking age, and in the interim that's passed since he's been able to legally buy smokes, he's successfully launched three distinct outfits. While his now-defunct band Ghosthustler and ongoing VEGA project hew closer to... More >>
As punk rock scenes spontaneously erupted around the world in the late 1970s in such disparate places as Brisbane, Akron, London and the Lower East Side, punk bands simultaneously sprouted up all over Southern California, from Hollywood, East L.A. and the San Fernando Valley to the South Bay,... More >>
Any roundup of Crescent City talent guarantees an estimable earful, and tonight's brawl, with the sweet-hot jazz-funk wallop of sousaphone paragon Kirk Joseph, is more than enough to send you into orbit. The Dirty Dozen Band co-founder's gift for exploding the recognized role and limits of that... More >>
An elderly black woman, Jessalyn Price (Sloan Robinson) suffers from dementia in an upstairs bedroom in Chicagos South Side, circa 2000, where she lives with her caretaker son, Leo (Chuma Gault). The story of Jessalyns past, and of her impassioned, forbidden love, emerges through... More >>
THE BROWNING VERSION Though not as widely known or acclaimed as his contemporary British playwrights, Terence Rattigan was a superb dramatist and chronicler of human emotions. Here, Rattigans The Browning Version, the gloomy story of an aging schoolteacher crushed by failure and... More >>
The riveting theatricality of Bob Crowleys production design, climaxing in chimney sweep Bert (Gavin Lee) soft-shoeing straight up, then upside down across the proscenium arch, and culminating in a showstopping umbrella flight over the audience by the famous titular nanny, produces an... More >>
Harlem of the West: Jazz, Bebop & Beatnik features photographs of S.F.'s Fillmore district, which was home to many jazz clubs during the '40s, '50s and early '60s. More >>