He worked as an editor for a few years in his 20s, then devoted the next decade of his life to the theater (which he speaks about at length in this Sunday Calendar profile).  But recently, Walsh has returned to the world of cinema.  After the success of the film “Hunger,” which he co-wrote with director Steve McQueen, Walsh is under contract to write an adaptation of the children’s book “Island of the Aunts” and a Dusty Springfield biopic.

Walsh says writing for the screen is an entirely different process: “A play you write from the stomach, but the craft of screenwriting is all head.”  When Walsh writes for the stage, he says he writes for the characters (“I just let them have at it”) but when writing a movie, “I’m writing for someone else’s vision, I mean, of course, there are always strains of me in there; but ultimately, the balance of it should be for the director. It’s a director’s medium.”

 When asked if he would ever write a screenplay for himself to direct, Walsh (who is directing the upcoming production of his play, “New Electric Ballroom” for UCLA Live) says: “I might do that.  There’s a director, Pawel Pawlikowski, who made ‘The Last Resort’ and ‘My Summer of Love’, two brilliant films, and he works very organically — and that’s a very exciting way to work.  But you rarely get the opportunity to do that.  So meanwhile, I’ll just do what I do.”

--James C. Taylor

The New Mexico-born, Texas-raised mezzo-soprano Susan Graham has many fans. Among them is American housewife extraordinaire, Martha Stewart.

Photo credit: Peter Da Silva/For The Times

Has "Spider-Man" been rescued from its own financial mess?

On the heels of reports that the musical "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" faces significant financial obstacles and may not even open, promoters of the troubled Broadway production have announced a new producer as well as a leading man.

A Friday afternoon press release announced that rock impresario Michael Cohl has joined the team as lead producer. It also stated that Jeremiah J. Harris, who was already announced as a producer, has taken the role of second producer on the show.

Cohl is a veteran producer and promoter in the world of rock music who has long been associated with the Rolling Stones. But he also has some Broadway experience. He was a producer of David Mamet's comedy "November" and his TGA Entertainment produced the hit Monty Python musical "Spamalot."  

In 2008, Cohl stepped down as the head of Live Nation, one of the world's largest concert promoters.

The press release said "Spider-Man" is set to open in 2010 but did not specify an official opening date.

It's unclear how much money Cohl is bringing to the table and if it is enough to make up for the budgetary shortfalls that have plagued the production. Yesterday, The Times reported that the production still needs to raise as much as $24 million for the show, whose budget is said to be around $52 million.

Producers for the musical stated in the press release that "full financing for 'Spider-Man' is expected to be in place shortly.  Once this happens the show will resume full production."

Cohl said in a statement: "I want to 'turn off the dark' on all the wild speculation about the show -- it's moving forward!”

The show's full production team now consists of Cohl, Harris, Hello Entertainment/David Garfinkle, Marvel Entertainment/David Maisel, and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

"Spider-Man" will be directed by Tony winner Julie Taymor and features songs by Bono and the Edge.

Perhaps of more interest to Spidey fans is news that the production has found its leading man. Reeve Carney, a rock musician, has been cast in the role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man. The announcement comes after a lengthy, multi-city casting call. Carney will join Evan Rachel Wood and Alan Cumming, who were announced earlier this year.

Carney recently filmed a role in Taymor's movie version of Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

-- David Ng

Photo: Reeve Carney, who has been cast in the title role in Broadway's "Spider-Man." Credit: Boneau / Bryan-Brown

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The stage musical “Louis & Keely: Live at the Sahara” has been a runaway hit with critics and audiences since opening in Los Angeles more than a year ago. It extended its run seven times at the Geffen Playhouse and is scheduled to go on a national tour next year.

But one key person is not happy with the show.

The widow of legendary Las Vegas crooner Louis Prima has come out against the biographical musical, saying that the production is “almost 100% falsehoods” and a “totally untrue, disrespectful, hatchet job” of her late husband.

In a statement issued Friday, Gia Maione Prima said that the musical, which depicts the stormy relationship between Prima and singer Keely Smith, gets certain facts wrong, including the manner in which Prima met Smith and the nature of his death in 1978.

She also said she thinks the show contains racist language toward Italian Americans and depicts her husband in a lewd manner.

Among her points of contention is the musical’s depiction of Prima dying alone after years in a comatose state. “There was never a time during those three years that visitors were restricted from seeing Louis,” said Maione Prima.

She also objects to the show’s portrayal of Prima as “crude” and “uneducated.”

“He was well-educated and he spoke beautifully,” she said.

Sarabeth Schedeen, one of the show’s producers, responded to Prima’s criticism by saying the musical is a celebration Prima and Smith’s lives and that certain elements were dramatized to tell a compelling story.

“We are not telling the life story of the great Louis Prima, but only a slice of that life,” said Schedeen in an e-mail.

Speaking by phone from her home in Florida, Maione Prima acknowledged that dramatization is common in biographical shows and films, but said that “Louis & Keely” crosses the line.

“When it gets to the point when it changes the integrity of his character, I feel it’s time to speak out,” she said.

Maione Prima said she has not been to L.A. to see the musical; she based her opinion on the CD cast album of the Geffen production, which she said sufficiently conveys the music and some of the dialogue.

“Louis & Keely” first opened at the Sacred Fools Theaterre in L.A. in June 2008 and later transferred to the Matrix Theatreer in Hollywood. Jake Broder and Vanessa Claire Smith play the title characters and co-wrote the script.

In March, the show transferred to the Geffen Playhouse under the direction of Oscar-winning filmmaker Taylor Hackford, who also re-wrote portions of the script. The show is scheduled to end its run at the Geffen on Sunday.

A publicist for Hackford said he was in China and was not available for comment.

Prima, who is often called the king of the swingers, was married to Smith from 1953 to 1961. The duo performed at the Sahara Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, where they became a popular lounge act. Prima married Maione, a singer who was his fifth wife, in 1963. They had two children before Prima died at 67 in New Orleans.

Prima’s widow manages Prima Music LLC and other bodies that license rights to the singer’s music. She said that “Louis & Keely” does not have any licensing agreements or relationships with the estate.

The show licenses music from the Great American Songbook, producers said.

Maione Prima said that she was sent an early draft of the “Louis & Keely” script but refused to give her blessing because of due to what she perceived as the show’s many inaccuracies.

“Louis & Keely” is set to go on a national tour in 2010, though producers have yet to announce cities.

People close to the show have said that there are plans to take it to New York but there has been no official confirmation.

Maione Prima said she has received offers to make motion pictures and stage shows based on Prima’s life. She also said that she is working with a co-author on a “biography-memoir” about Prima.

When asked if she intends to see “Louis & Keely” when it is on tour, she replied, “No, I do not.” But she added: “I am watching what they’re doing.”

-- David Ng

Photo: Louis Prima and Keely Smith, in the 1950's. Credit: File photo / Los Angeles Times

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The real test will be this weekend, when City Opera has to get down to business and earn its audience back with two productions of full operas, “Esther” on Saturday night and “Don Giovanni” on Sunday afternoon.  The “People’s Opera,” as the company is sometimes called, has had a rough two years.  It lost its high-profile European artistic director (Gerard Mortier, who bolted to head Opera Real in Madrid), a significant chunk of its endowment (as much as $23 million, some reports say) and besides a concert performance at Carnegie Hall last January, hasn’t staged a full opera in a year and a half.

The two-hour gala on Thursday night, titled “American Voices,” tried to sprinkle stardust over these harsh realities facing City Opera — and it was somewhat successful.  Despite some boring speeches, misguided stunts (Rufus Wainwright singing “That’s Entertainment,” looking and sounding like Dean Martin after four martinis) and general gala dinner stuffiness, the evening sent this audience member home convinced City Opera has a reason for being.

Much of this was provided by the evening’s sole moment of fully staged opera, a scene from Carlisle Floyd’s 1955 opera “Susannah.”  Julius Rudel, who’s been conducting at City Opera since 1944, led the orchestra and chorus through the church revival scene; and Sam Ramey, the venerable baritone who began his career at City Opera in 1973 sang the role of preacher Olin Blitch.  The performance was more captivating than your usual gala fare due to Ramey’s conviction and the sense of history on display: Rudel conducted the New York premiere of “Susannah” in 1958, as well as the opera’s sole studio recording.  Combined with house diva Lauren Flanigan’s passionate rendition of a Samuel Barber aria from “Vanessa,” the evening made a brief but strong case for the legacy of 20th century American opera.

The question is: with its Lincoln Center neighbor, the Metropolitan Opera (whose general manager Peter Gelb was in attendance) moving in on the repertoire City Opera used to specialize in (Baroque, 20th century, etc.) can the company under its new intendant George Steel stand apart as something unique?  The only hint of an answer was an aria from Wainwright’s new opera "Prima Donna," which Gelb and Co. passed on.  (Once scheduled to debut at the Met in 2014, “Prima Donna” bowed in Manchester, England, over the summer). The number, titled “les feux d'artifice t'appellent” (sung by Amy Burton) was beguiling. One or two new works by younger American composers like Wainwright could be City Opera’s saving grace -- provided the operas are of quality and they don’t let the composers do vaudeville routines on stage).

The night was also about marketing (showing off the renovated theater, burnishing the company’s "beta brand") but the real focus was clear by the end: good singing.  This point was literally brought home by Joyce DiDonato.  Singing a song from Leonard Bernstein’s 1976 musical, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” DiDonato (who made her NYCO debut in 2002) is exactly the type of American singer City Opera exists to showcase.  From Regina Resnik to Beverly Sills to Flanigan City Opera has been a place where young American artists have grown and flourished. The name of the Bernstein number was “Take Care of This House."  Gorgeously sung, with a crystal tone and clear diction, DiDonato (who will sing Rosina at LA Opera’s “The Barber of Seville” next month) cut through the pomp and pageantry and reminded the black-tie crowd that opera, at its core, is about expressive singing.  You didn’t need the supertitles to know exactly what she was articulating: for the next generation of American opera artists, take care of this house.  Indeed.

-- James C. Taylor

Above: Singer and composer Rufus Wainwright, who appeared at the City Opera gala. The program included an aria from an opera he wrote, "Prima Donna." Credit: Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images for The New Yorker

But now that the media feeding frenzy has somewhat died down, and he has been away for three weeks, Dudamel has returned to Disney for a month of relatively normal music making. However, relatively normal is, for this young energy source, something devilishly deep and ambitious about every program.

Nor have those three weeks since we’ve seen him been exactly uneventful. Dudamel appeared in Europe and Canada with his Simon Bolívar Youth Orchestra, was named a Chevalier of arts and letters in Paris, selected as 2010 recipient of MIT’s Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts and picked up the Glenn Gould Protégé Prize in Toronto. He also celebrated his Mahler First, recorded live at his opening L.A. Philharmonic concerts, topping the Billboard classical charts.

Expectations, thus, keep rising, and Verdi’s Requiem does not make a small statement. Moreover, this is a work to which Dudamel is relatively new. He has yet to conduct a Verdi opera, and his first Requiem performance was only last May with his Swedish orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony.

But Thursday, Dudamel already seemed an old Verdi hand. He led the grand and intricate 90-minute score for four vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra from memory. He gave a wonderful Italianate shape to Verdi’s vocal writing. He found the source of the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s radiance. He achieved remarkably expressive and vividly dramatic playing from the orchestra.

Verdi was a man of greasepaint, not God; his Requiem is not religion. Its spiritual glow is stage-lit. The dead quake or bliss out operatically. Heaven and hell are décor. But longtime L.A. Philharmonic followers can nonetheless still recall the incense of Carlo Maria Giulini’s rapturous Requiem performances around the time Dudamel, who is 28, was born.

So it was almost spooky how Dudamel managed to tap into the robust, burnished Giulini L.A. sound. He reseated the orchestra closer to the way it was in the Giulini days with the violins to his left and the violas and cellos on the right. He went for richness over detail, although the wind solos, in particular, stood out with loving immediacy.

Dudamel began and ended with a stagy stillness. But if he thought for a moment he might summon up churchly silence before letting the first notes in the cellos miraculously appear out of thin air, he was reminded of the real world in 2009. A cellphone rang. He stopped the performance, waited for silence to return, waited another 15 seconds for good measure, and repeated the magic trick flawlessly.

Many Thursday, no doubt, will remember Dudamel’s extraordinarily visceral Dies Irae, the section in which Verdi summons the wrath of God with startling bass drum and spectacular antiphonal brass. The so-called spine-tingling “chords of doom” shake up any concert hall, but Dudamel went all out and saved the county a great deal of money by providing a useful test of Disney’s seismic reinforcements.

Employing extremes in dynamic range, bringing out orchestral colors and amping up all the dramatic character in Verdi’s late, carefully constructed score, while also encouraging as much emotion as his soloist cared to exude (which was a lot), is not the easiest way to hold the score together. The fact that soprano Leah Crocetto, mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova, tenor David Lomeli and bass John Relyea were loud and characterful, in a properly operatic larger-than-life way, also seemed to suit their conductor.  

Dudamel still may not have found the underlying thread to the Requiem. In Gothenburg, he led a series of inspired moments that only began to merge into a whole by the last of the three performances. But he’s gotten considerably closer to the score’s essence in an original way in a very short period of time. The 90 minutes flew by, an ebbing and flowing of time and feeling that felt altogether natural.

The Requiem ended as it began -- with prolonged silence. In Gothenburg Dudamel explored just how long he could keep an excited crowd quiet, once ending with what seemed like a good chunk of John Cage’s silent piece, “4’33”. In Disney, Dudamel slowly lowered his hands for half a minute. That, like nearly everything else in the Requiem, felt right. It’s nice to know that Dudamel’s hardly resting on last month’s laurels.

Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Pre-concert talks one hour before. Limited ticket availability, call (323) 850-2000. http://www.laphil.com.

-- Mark Swed

Photo: Gustavo Dudamel conducts Verdi's Requiem Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times.

Jeanne Silverthorne takes advantage of these associations to poke fun at artistic genius by reproducing its hallowed site — the studio — almost entirely out of rubber. At Shoshana Wayne Gallery , the installation includes a faux-wood patterned rubber chair and easel, a trash can full of rubber light bulbs, several rubber shipping crates and of course, rubber plants, complete with ambitious rubber ants.

Silverthorne seems to exhort us not to take art so seriously, but her pliant studio artifacts are also laced with signs of decay and disease. There are dying flowers, tiny flies and candles shaped like DNA sequences for mental afflictions like depression and panic (also all made of rubber). The quiet charm of the exhibition emerges as it uses this dark sense of humor to buoy the inevitable doubts and failures of artistic practice.

The objects function on several different levels, one of which is simply that they are made from an unexpected medium. The chair, easel and crates look like wood but are made of rubber, which turns them into a species of cartoon prop that one imagines might go bouncing or shimmying around the room.

But then there are objects like the trash can of light bulbs studded with flies, which could be just that, but might also be a metaphor for discarded, rotten ideas. Also of indeterminate status are the DNA candles, which could be artworks, but might also be read as novelties or a darkly humorous statement about artistic practice fueled by mental disorder. This multivalent approach allows the pieces’ goofy humor to surface alongside their more macabre implications, cleverly defusing some of the drama we normally associate with the depths of creativity.

– Sharon Mizota

Jeanne Silverthorne, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave. No. B1, Santa Monica. (310) 453-7535, through Jan. 9. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.shoshanawayne.com

Photo: Jeanne Back and Forth, 2009. Photo Credit: Gene Ogami.

Sheikh's work delivers no less bitter truths. "Beloved Daughters," his deeply affecting exhibition at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, addresses the devastating effect of traditional social mores on women in India. Sheikh documents a life cycle of inequities: from abandonment in infancy and limited or nonexistent educational opportunity, to spousal and familial abuse, and back again to abandonment in widowhood.

For all the pain inflicted upon his subjects by virtue of their being born female, however, Sheikh never depicts them as victims but always as dignified, whole human beings, compromised by circumstance, not by nature. Explanatory wall texts and individual testimonies tell us in words of extraordinary depersonalization; the images re-personalize, restoring the basic humanity that social conditions have stripped away.

"Moksha," the earlier of the two projects, was prompted by a 1998 New York Times article about the community of Vrindavan, a holy city in northern India that has harbored widows (an estimated 20,000 at present) for 500 years. A portion of them settle there by choice, attracted to the tranquillity of a life devoted to Krishna, but the majority seek refuge in the town after having suffered the "social death" of widowhood, which leaves them alone and impoverished. In Vrindavan, the women beg or receive a small pension in exchange for their chanting. Permanently stigmatized by the death of their husbands -- a blot on their own karmic balance sheet -- they pray to reach moksha (heaven), where they can stay for eternity, released from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Sheikh's study of the city and its residents oscillates between document and sense impression. In contrast-rich black and white, he shows a family of monkeys huddled in a corner; a wall of well-used water bottles hanging above a clutter of humble pots and pans; an ashram astir with praying widows in traditional white shrouds; a gridded perch full of pigeons; a dark empty alley; a tangle of light hovering in the black- ness.

His portraits are sculptural in their attention to textures of skin and fabric, light and shadow. Some are accompanied by excerpts from the sitters' accounts of their lives and their journeys to Vrindavan. Dreams of Krishna and their lost husbands often enter into the stories, and Sheikh's pictures (some taken from the front, some from behind, eyes open or occasionally closed) poetically invoke lives in which the remembered and wished-for are as vividly real as the women's present surroundings.

In one tender grouping of seated portraits, Sheikh isolates and frames each sitter's hands. One woman cradles a copy of the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. Another holds two pet white rats in her lap. In one simple but breathtaking image, Sheikh focuses tightly on a woman's hands resting on her knees, the skin like carved, burnished wood, worn smooth by endurance.

Sheikh published a tremendous book on the "Moksha" project in 2005. That year, the New York-born photographer received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship as well as the Henri Cartier-Bresson International Award for his work addressing the displacement and exile of populations around the world. He returned to India to explore more fully the situation of women in traditional society. The project, "Ladli" (beloved daughter, in Hindi), embraces a wide span of female experience, from infancy to old age, almost entirely through head-and-shoulder portraits, some shot from behind.

Across this continuum of beautifully earnest faces, Sheikh concentrates his attention and sharpest focus on the eyes. They are each picture's soulful and exacting epicenter. The focus starts to soften almost immediately beyond the eyes, and is slightly blurred already at a sitter's cheek. The intensity of these gazes, these encounters, is matched by the blunt facts laid out in the accompanying texts, starting with the tragedy that the birth of a girl represents, both for the baby, dismissed as a burden, and for the mother, rejected as a disappointment. Sheikh describes lives consumed by basic survival and tenuous dependencies on others. The complexity of their fate, as rendered in words, is complemented poignantly by the simple, visual evidence of their humanity.

The 70 photographs in the show, organized by curator Joel Smith of the Princeton University Art Museum, are divided fairly evenly between the two projects. "Ladli" was published in book form in 2007.

Sheikh is not only sensitive as a photographer but savvy as a social reformer, recognizing that images alone cannot contain all the ingredients necessary for change -- an understanding of causes and conditions as well as a path toward solutions. He identifies several agencies addressing the challenges faced by the female population in India, and he distributes his work broadly and free of charge through human rights organizations.

Stunningly beautiful and also viscerally disturbing, Sheikh's work attests to the notion that art exists -- to paraphrase the director Andrei Tarkovsky -- because the world is not perfect.

--Leah Ollman

'Fazal Sheikh: Beloved Daughters," Museum of Photographic Arts, 1649 El Prado, San Diego, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Through Jan. 31. $6 (619) 238-7559, www.mopa.org

Cropped tightly to create dynamic compositions, the projections read like moving abstract paintings, portraits of the body in thrall to geometry. This relationship becomes even clearer in a pair of photographs.

One is an image of the white ball alone on a black ground; the other depicts the woman in a graceful back bend that emulates the spherical form. This equivalence between object and body reveals, not surprisingly, the body’s failure to mimic the form exactly; but, in highlighting this gap between ideal and reality, the work debunks in a small way the quest for absolute transcendence that has characterized much abstract art, from Malevich to Rothko.

Instead, there is a kind of classicism in Riboli’s images. Perfect shapes like the sphere and the circle have formed the building blocks of representations of the body — think of Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man,” inscribed in his perfect circle. In this way, Riboli’s works trace the flickering line between representation and abstraction, reminding us that all images are an intertwining of the two.

– Sharon Mizota

Laura Riboli, Redling Fine Art, 932 Chung King Road, Los Angeles. (323) 230-7415, through Nov. 29. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.redlingfineart.com

Photo: Rolls, Tosses, Rotations (Ball), 2009, Courtesy of Redling Fine Art.

She records pregnancy’s inevitable physical changes in a 6-second video comprised of still shots, taken over several months, of herself standing naked in a bedroom. Her belly grows, but the room undergoes an even more drastic change, transforming from a cluttered work-space to a stately boudoir, complete with four-poster bed and dark wooden armoires. “Growing up” is figured as both a temporal and spatial transition.

Time and space are also intertwined in a group of spare pencil drawings of Phelps and her son. Executed in a thin yet confident line, each depicts a variety of everyday scenes whose contours overlap and intersect. In previous works Phelps used this effect to convey the subjective passing of time, but here the layering takes on an added dimension, connoting an intense, almost claustrophobic closeness between mother and child.

This kind of condensation is reflected in the show’s title, “Drawings About the Present Quickly Become Works About the Past,” which is written on the wall in letters made alternately out of scrap paper, drawings and real flowers. While these ephemeral materials illustrate the meaning of the phrase, they are also a little clichéd — dying flowers are an over-used shorthand for the impermanence of life.

But Phelps makes an interesting connection between drawing and those moments (like becoming a parent) when we are conscious of time passing. Both are transitions between the present as we know it and the past as we choose to remember it.

– Sharon Mizota

Danica Phelps, Kathryn Brennan Gallery, 955 Chung King Road, Los Angeles. (213) 628-7000, through Nov. 14. Closed Monday and Tuesday. www.kathrynbrennan.com

“Locating Landscape: New Strategies, New Technologies” at Sam Lee Gallery is a thought-provoking look at how nine contemporary artists are updating this aesthetic. It includes pieces by two artists from the original exhibition — Lewis Baltz and Frank Gohlke. These works, in particular Baltz’s small, 1977 images of bleak Nevada landscapes, function as touchstones, allowing us to evaluate how their dispassionate, matter-of-fact approach appears in the exhibition’s other works.

Baltz and his contemporaries were interested in stripping landscape photography of its romantic tendencies. The younger artists in this show combine that clear-eyed vision with humor, new technologies and narrative to suggest a different kind of psychic investment in the environment.

Paho Mann’s photos of vacated Circle-K convenience stores are straightforward documents of generic, corporate architecture re-purposed by smaller businesses, often to amusing effect. Each of his nine images is a full frontal view of what looks like the same building: a nondescript modernist box with large windows and an overhang in front.

However, each structure is a different, former Circle-K that, like a paper doll, has been variously re-dressed as “Mr. Formal” (a tuxedo rental shop), “Big Apple Cleaners” or “Carniceria Cuerrero.” While Mann’s relentlessly similar compositions attest to the corporate homogenization of the landscape, they also offer a glimmer of hope that this blankness might be a canvas for a more quirky, local presence to assert itself.

Several artists use GPS technology, a quantitative take on landscape that the “New Topographics” artists would (and do) appreciate. Margot Anne Kelley pairs her landscape photos with first-person texts about her adventures in geo-caching, a kind of treasure hunt in which participants hide caches of various things and post their GPS coordinates to a website for others to locate. Christiana Caro used GPS to locate places exactly 10 miles from her home in eight different directions and took 365-degree panoramas at each spot. Unfortunately only one of them, a wooded area, is on view.

Similarly under-represented is Gohlke’s project, a collaboration with poet Herbert Gottfried, in which they use GPS to explore a particular latitude line and respond to what they see. Serial projects like these are often more interesting as ideas than visuals anyway, but it might have been better to keep the show more focused than to include such small sections of these works.

More successful is Andrew Freeman’s series “[Manzanar] Architectural Double.” When Freeman learned that the barracks from Manzanar, a World War II Japanese American internment camp, had been relocated all over California after the war, he set out to find them. His photographs of their new locations and identities as apartments, garages, even museums, are poignant evidence of how a national shame becomes part of the everyday landscape. As such, the series excavates history hidden in plain view and, like Mann’s recycled Circle-K’s, suggests how a certain architectural blankness can be a clean slate for starting over.

Also included are works by Adam Thorman, Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe.

– Sharon Mizota

“Locating Landscape,” Sam Lee Gallery, 990 N. Hill St. No. 190, Los Angeles. (323) 227-0275, through Dec. 5. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.samleegallery.com

Photo: Days Dollar Store, Phoenix, Arizona, 2006. Photo credit: Paho Mann. Courtesy Sam Lee Gallery.

-- Slumping: Sotheby's reported a wider third-quarter loss over the same period last year due to continued weakness in global art sales. (Bloomberg)

-- New digs: New York's Dia Art Foundation is planning to build a new home on the site of its former home in the Chelsea neighborhood. (New York Times)

-- Major appointment: The Barnes Foundation has named the Brooklyn Museum's Judith Dolkart as its new chief curator. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

-- Musical Bard: Tony-winning rock musician Stew will write the score for a new production of Shakespeare's "Othello" in Connecticut. (Playbill)

-- Flat broke? The Honolulu Symphony said it no longer has enough money to make payroll. (KITV)

-- In the black: The new Durham Performing Arts Center in North Carolina gives more than $400,000 to the city, which owns the building. (News Observer)

-- Job crunch: Emerging architects are having trouble finding jobs in Britain. (The Architects' Journal)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Producers of Broadway's troubled "Spider-Man" musical still face a budgetary shortfall; Cirque du Soleil's "Viva Elvis" is set to open in December in Las Vegas.

— David Ng

Photo: Sotheby's in New York. Credit: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg.

The Hammer Museum might wish for the case of the long-gone Leicester Codex -- Leonardo da Vinci's handwritten, illustrated notebook that’s primarily about the properties of water -- to be water under the bridge. But once you auction off Da Vinci's handiwork for $28 million, as the Hammer did 15 years ago this month in the granddaddy of L.A. deaccessionings, well, people tend to remember.

Plans at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which opened in 1609, call for showing 44 or 45 pages at a time, for three months, then cycling in the next group of pages. That’s to save the light-sensitive work from potential damage from overexposure. The first set of pages went on display in September, divided between two venues – the library itself and the nearby Santa Maria delle Grazie convent, which also houses Leonardo’s “The Last Supper.”

The Ambrosiana is run by Catholic priests, as noted in this Wall Street Journal article on the exhibition. They probably take a longer institutional view of their obligations than your typical American museum board -- after all, the library has managed to hang onto its codex for nearly 400 years, as opposed to the Hammer's four.

According to an Associated Press report, the Atlantic Codex, originally all in one volume, was re-bound in 12 separate volumes during the 1960s and 1970s -- and stayed that way until Ambrosiana authorities decided to unbind Leonardo’s pages for easier display and study. That job fell to Benedictine nuns, who painstakingly melted away the wax bindings.

As for L.A.’s lost 72-page codex, which Da Vinci wrote in the early 1500s using his famous backward, mirror-image script, the story is more convoluted.

Current owner Bill Gates paid $30.8 million, including Christie’s 10%  commission, for it in 1994 and has regularly sent the volume on display to museums and libraries. It was first seen on a homecoming tour of Italy, then at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Seattle Art Museum. There have been subsequent visits to France, Japan and Ireland.

Why would a museum sell such an artifact? A Da Vinci? The reason given at the time was that the Hammer, whose management had been taken over by UCLA in 1993, needed a cash cushion to shield it against possible payouts from a lawsuit in which a niece of Armand Hammer’s deceased wife was claiming half of his estate -- the art collection included. A judge threw out the niece’s case three months before the auction, but the Hammer put its Da Vinci on the block anyway.

Museum leaders said they were concerned that the niece might appeal, and that other unspecified "legal matters" could arise. They also put out a statement saying, in effect, that it made sense for an art museum to sacrifice a manuscript that was more scientific than artistic -- skirting the broader issue of whether there should be a place at UCLA, a scientific and medical research university, for a document such as the codex. Furthermore, the Hammer said, its Da Vinci bundle would ensure that the art collection, highlighted by two Rembrandts and a Van Gogh, would stay intact.

The Hammer went on to adopt a new collecting and exhibitions tack that emphasizes contemporary art and drawings and has used the $28-million codex haul as an endowment whose interest has funded art acquisitions and general museum expenses.  In 2001, the Hammer got a special advisory dispensation from the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, saying it was OK for it to use some of the codex proceeds for purposes other than buying new art. Normally, AAMD’s voluntary guidelines are adamant that the only proper use for money a museum earns by selling artworks is to buy other art; early this year, the AAMD censured New York’s National Academy Museum for doing otherwise with proceeds from the sale of two  19th century American landscape paintings.

Mimi Gaudieri, then-executive director of the art museum directors’ group, told The Times in 2007 that the Hammer’s exemption was granted partly because of all the upheaval it had gone through in its early years, and partly because Leonardo’s scientific manuscript “wasn’t a Renoir.” (Interestingly enough, a Hammer-owned Renoir was among the works Knight had dismissed in his 1990 review as one of the collection’s “appalling canvases.”)

“The Hammer will be a better museum. It won’t be burdened by having to show a lot of substandard paintings,” said John Walsh, the former J. Paul Getty Museum director who helped the Hammer Museum and the Hammer Foundation decide how to divide the paintings.

The Hammer’s endowment from the sale of its Da Vinci codex has grown to $37 million, and has generated $1.7 million for the museum in each of the two past fiscal years, spokeswoman Sarah Stifler said. The museum uses half the money for expenses other than art purchases, she said -- budget pressures due to the poor economy having slowed efforts to use the codex income solely for buying new art, as called for by museum-world guidelines. A Bill Gates spokesman, John Pinette, says the Leicester Codex isn't currently on display, and that he had no information about where it will be seen next. Will it ever wend its way back to L.A.? Pinette wouldn't speculate. He said that Gates usually ties its appearances to places where it will be "of particular interest" and enhance "a particular moment."

Meanwhile, if you ever find yourself in Milan, where a Leonardo is a Leonardo is a Leonardo, you can check out its big brother and take in “The Last Supper” too. 

-- Mike Boehm

Related

The Da Vinci codex versus the museum code

Hammer divided yet strong

Microsoft's Gates Revealed as Leonardo's Mystery Buyer

The Hammer falls on the public trust

Museum to sell Da Vinci work

Commentary -- Hammer's exercise in superfluousness

Battle for the masterpieces

Photos, from top: Leonardo Da Vinci self-portrait via Associated Press; Leicester Codex on display in New York in 1996, by Richard Drew/AP; Armand Hammer by Rosemary Kaul; Bill Gates, Lisa Poole/AP

Has there been a Broadway production that has suffered so many problems on its journey from concept to reality as "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" -- the long-awaited mega-musical based on the Marvel Entertainment comic book hero?

Production on the Julie Taymor project has been a roller-coaster ride of budget collapses and quasi-resurrections. Of course, it's hardly surprising given that the proposed price tag for the blockbuster musical is said to be around $52 million -- which, in Broadway terms, is as big as it gets. 

The Times' John Horn has gone behind the scenes of "Spider-Man" and has discovered that producers still need to raise as much as $24 million. With deadlines looming, the production is said to still be looking for financial backers. 

Will "Spider-man" open in time for the all-important Tony Awards? Will it open at all? And what do Bono and the Edge -- who wrote the songs for the musical -- have to say about the current predicament?

Read the full Times story to find out.

-- David Ng

Photo: Julie Taymor. Credit: Jason Kempin / Getty Images

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Victim of circumstance or not, Julian still has a lot to answer for as he faces a final struggle to kick his habit. It's a dramatic odyssey that demands and gets fierce physical and emotional commitment from lead actor Kevin Jackson, despite some lapses in a script that still needs work.

Set in 1975 Harlem, writer/director Benjamin's tense, downbeat one-act gets right to the point, opening with Julian shooting up with the reluctant help of his wife (quietly understated Tanya Lane). It's not the worst of the indignities he's forced on her, which has brought their marriage to the breaking point. When she leaves him, winning her back is the overriding need that finally induces Julian to get clean.

Structurally, Benjamin's morality tale relies heavily on the tropes of "chitlin circuit" melodrama familiar to urban black audiences. The unfolding scenes chart a predictable course. No nuance or subtlety here --Julian's story is sketched in broad strokes of good and evil as he faces temptations from without and within.

After his wife's departure, we witness the deterioration of Julian's best friend and doomed fellow junkie, Mickey (Javon Johnson), leading to a pivotal confrontation when Julian's pusher, Tutu (Felton Perry) comes by to collect Julian's unpaid debts.

Within this traditional narrative formula, some of Benjamin's dialogue innovates with the urgency and streetwise eloquence of contemporary hip hop -- particularly in Mickey's unraveling and Julian's eulogy for him.

As the Mephistophelean Tutu, Perry unfortunately coasts on natural charisma, never finding enough internal depth and complexity to sell the character's abrupt change from opponent to ally.

The story's internal coherence founders badly on contradiction and ambiguity. For example, Julian is a former horn player who blames the Army for turning him into a junkie, yet reminiscences with Tutu about getting high together after club gigs. The finale’s sermonizing call for unity may tap implicit chords of understanding in its target audience, but its present-day references violate all sense of time and place.

 -- Philip Brandes

"Memoirs," Stage 52 Theater, 5299 Washington Blvd., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends Nov. 22. $25. (323) 960-5521 or www.plays411.com/memoirs. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.

Photo: Javon Johnson (left) and Kevin Jackson. Photo credit: Malcolm Ali.

Tribute shows have to meet impossible expectations: On one hand, they must conjure the legend in question, yet if they give us exactly what we expect, there's no surprise. "Just Imagine," directed by Steve Altman, lives somewhere between real gratification and slight lull with its steady menu of Beatles and Lennon gems.

Piper, with his tea shades and overgrown hair, makes for a credible Lennon, and his vocal stylings and intonations are impressive. He delivers strong versions of "Money," "Revolution," "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," "Come Together" and "I Am the Walrus." And while the band rocks on, an elaborate video show plays above them, featuring archival photos and thematic images.

So far, so entertaining. Unfortunately, Piper's accompanying monologue reliving Lennon's tumultuous life is self-conscious and often lugubrious. This overwritten confessional can sap momentum, which then has to be restarted by a new song. Kudos to the band, Working Class Hero, led by Greg Piper on bass, which never lets the audience drift too far. (Sound designer Jonathan Zenz and sound operator Greg Feo keep the energy high without deafening the crowd.)

The best moments come when Piper sticks to the music. After intermission, acoustic guitar in hand, he takes requests, revealing a command of the Lennon library and an appealingly straightforward performance style. At another point, Piper uses "We Can Work It Out" to demonstrate the distinction between Paul's mastery of melody and John's more bluesy approach; it was the collision of these styles, Piper suggests, that yielded genius. The brief music lesson is a fascinating analysis that deserves more stage time.

The latter part of the show features Lennon's post-Beatles work, including "Woman," "Watching the Wheels" and, of course, his classic peace anthem, which never seems to loses its relevance.

Hard-core Beatles fans probably won't learn anything they don't already know but will savor the chance to goo-goo-ga-joob with favorite songs. Yes, iTunes may be convenient, but nothing matches "Strawberry Fields Forever" live, dense and ecstatic, raining down around your ears.

-- Charlotte Stoudt

"Just Imagine," NoHo Arts Center, 11136 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Dark Nov. 27-Dec. 6. Ends Jan. 2. $35 to $55. (866) 811-4111 or www.justimaginetheshow.com. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.

Celebrity chef Jewell Rae Jeffers, comical alter-ego of Donna Jo Thorndale, spends the better part of her show, “All Cake, No File,” assembling a coconut cream “Prison Break” sheet cake while nattering on about matters domestic and geopolitical.

 “All Cake” is part of the Actors’ Gang’s WTF?! Festival, a series of special shows, concerts and lectures designed to raise money for the company’s community outreach programs. Subtitled “A Johnny Cash prison tribute/cooking show/concert,” “Cake” will benefit the Gang’s prison programs. That’s appropriate, because Jewell Rae is a gal with a soft spot for ex-cons. At one point, she asks  “Are there any convicted felons in the house tonight? Don’t tell me — I’ll fall in love.”

Kentucky native Thorndale may have been born in a red state, but the blood runs blue in her veins, and she uses Jewell Rae as the perky exponent of her political beliefs. Pointing out the exits before the show, she playfully comments that Republicans might want to take special note of the quickest way out of the theater.

Judging from the audience at the Ivy Substation on opening night, one suspects there’s not a conservative lurking within a country mile. But although Jewell Rae may be preaching to the choir, the juxtaposition of her down-home persona and liberal views results in frequently some scathing satire.

There are plenty of opportunities for toe-tapping as well. On opening weekend, special guests the Broken Numbers Band performed crowd-pleasing original music, and the Johnny Cash tribute band, With a Bible and a Gun, provided classic Cash tunes, including a rousing rendition of “I’ve Been Everywhere” that rocked the house.

With her shellacked blond flip and Southern drawl, Jewell Rae makes Paula Deen look like a Goth. Don’t let the retro hairstyle fool you. Jewell Rae is one ticked-off domestic diva, and she doesn’t suffer fools — or conservatives — gladly. After being thrown off her television cooking show for her radical beliefs, she is trying to keep things mellow, frequently assuring the audience, “I’m not going to get political tonight.”

That’s a vain hope. Controversy is Jewell Rae’s favorite dish and she can’t resist biting at those she holds responsible for the burned mess of our national condition. Sometimes, all the righteous indignation wears thin; one wishes Thorndale delivered more laughs with less message.

But hunger is no laughing matter, and Jewell Rae’s observation that food is a “highly politicized commodity” in an increasingly famished Third World is very much to the point.

So too is her assertion that the kitchen is a “seat of power” where real social change can occur. In an era of fast food and poor nutrition, Thorndale’s charming Jewel Rae is out to change the world, one lovingly prepared dish at a time. She’s a little heavy-handed with her seasonings, but memorably spicy throughout.

--F. Kathleen Foley

‘All Cake, No File," the Actors’ Gang at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City 9 p.m. Fridays. Ends Nov. 27 : $15 (310) 838-4264, www.wtffestival.com  Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

If Elvis Presley had lived in Montreal, would his famous catchphrase have been, "Merci ... merci, beaucoup"?

Earlier this year, Cirque du Soleil announced that it was planning to produce a new show in tribute to the king of rock 'n' roll, in collaboration with Elvis Presley Enterprises. Today, the Montreal-based Cirque said the show will be titled "Viva ELVIS" and that it will premiere in December at its permanent home at the Aria Resort & Casino, which is located in MGM Mirage’s CityCenter complex.

Choreographer Vincent Paterson is directing the show, marking his first Cirque collaboration. In a video interview on the company's website, Paterson describes the production as "an abstract biography of Elvis Presley" that will incorporate some "acting moments" spoken in English.

While he is most famous for his collaborations with Madonna and Michael Jackson, Paterson also has worked in the performing arts. In 2006, he staged a '50s style revival of Massenet's "Manon" for Los Angeles Opera.

Cirque performers traveled to Graceland to conduct research for the show, which will incorporate some well-known songs from the Presley catalog.

Check out the mini-documentary above, which features more on Paterson's work on "Viva ELVIS."

-- David Ng

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A kind of “Twilight Zone” meets “Masterpiece Theatre,” this 1974 British status game may seem rather remote in contemporary Los Angeles, but it’s no different than what’s probably happening in the corridors of William Morris Endeavor. Pinter is as much anthropologist as poet, delighting in the absurdities of patrician club chat and the braggadocio of cocky lads. Yet alongside the casual barbs and dirty jokes hovers an aura of strangeness that evokes the black hole of mortality. On Tom Buderwitz’s airless set, death seems to be just on the other side of the door.

Nearly all the elements come together in this production, from Jeremy Pivnick’s sallow lighting to Spooner’s threadbare suit with grotty socks and sandals, courtesy of Audrey Eisner. Mandell relishes Pinter’s language like the single-malt whisky Spooner greedily imbibes, but watch his eyes dart in animal terror when Briggs gives him a shove. Sloan excels as the sexually ambiguous Foster, an anxious peacock trapped in a pen. Pressman has yet to settle into Hirst — he is still performing the role instead of inhabiting it — but like the rich, bitter liquor that takes the sting out of oblivion, this show likely will improve with age.

– Charlotte Stoudt

“No Man’s Land” Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; also 7 p.m. Nov. 8 and Dec. 13. Dark Nov. 26. Ends Dec. 20. $25 and $30. Contact (310) 477-2055 or www.odysseytheatre.com. Running time: 2 hours.

Photo: From left, Lawrence Pressman, Alan Mandell and John Sloan. Credit: Odyssey Theatre.

"Bleeding Through" at Shakespeare Festival/LA is Theresa Chavez and Rose Portillo's noir-tinged interactive theater piece exhuming the secrets within historic Angelino Heights.
 
Based on Norman Klein's novella, this About Productions attraction operates on multiple levels.  After the Unreliable Narrator (David Fruechting) prepares us for more than one version of the truth, we sit around the speakeasy-flavored area within designer Akeime Mitterlehner's excellent multi-perspective set.
 
His story follows Molly (Lynn Milgrim), an elderly resident who may be involved with a long-ago homicide. As the Narrator queries Molly and neighbor Ezra (Ed Ramolete), the reminiscences crisscross with Molly's younger self (Elizabeth Rainey).
 
A morally dubious attorney (James Terry), the boss' dissolute son (Brian Joseph) and Molly's deceptively innocuous second husband (Pete Pano) provide complications that echo various cinematic classics, apt considering that Angelino Heights served as location for many movie murders in Hollywood.

Chavez and Portillo impressively explore the space to suggest contextual layers, assisted by François-Pierre Couture's ambient lighting, Pamela Shaw's period costumes and the live accompaniment by musicians Scott Collins and Vinny Goila. The cast is proficient and, at times -- Molly's first encounter with each of the men, a tense Act 2 poker game -- they reveal the promise in the premise.

However, Chavez and Portillo's stylish stagecraft outstrips their text. Klein's narrative is deliberately ambiguous, short on dramatic bite, which creates onstage action more elegiac than electric. There is also too little use of Claudio Rocha's fine black-and-white videos with Kikey Castillo as yet another Molly. Although "Bleeding Through" is intelligent, admirable and certainly of local interest, it's curiously bloodless.

– David C. Nichols

"Bleeding Through," Shakespeare Festival/LA, 1238 W. 1st St., L.A. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends Nov. 22. $20 and $25. www.aboutpd.org or (800) 595-4849. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Photo: Kikey Castillo. Photo credit: Theresa Chavez.