The great 20th century conductor Bruno Walter claimed he wasn’t ready to conduct Mozart until he was 50. This refined, unfussy musician believed the heaven-sent symphonies of a young composer who died at 35 were wasted on the young, with their immature tendencies to romanticize, their childish swagger, their puppy love.

Gustavo Dudamel, 28, opened and closed a Los Angeles Philharmonic program in Walt Disney Concert Hall Thursday night with two late, major Mozart symphonies – the “Prague” and “Jupiter.”  In an act of great seriousness, he used these scores to make an Alban Berg sandwich. The filling was Berg’s elegiac 12-tone Violin Concerto, written in “memory to an angel,” and the wondrously affecting swan song of the Austrian composer who died at 50 in 1935. The violinist was the still youthful Gil Shaham, 10 years Dudamel’s senior.

Obviously, we have no way of knowing whether Walter would have thought that Thursday’s performances had too much musical baby fat.

But I thought about this once-perfect Mozartean on Thursday. Dudamel uses a slightly smaller orchestra for the symphonies than was the custom in Walter’s day. And Dudamel upended the fast movements with rhythmically precise swift punches the way early musickers sometimes do with their flexible period instrument ensembles.

But, somehow, this Venezuelan, who has conducted the Vienna Philharmonic only a time or two (and most recently in Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky), excavated a long-lost Viennese character out of his new orchestra.

Perhaps a few molecules of Old Vienna still linger in the L.A. Philharmonic’s marrow. Walter spent his last years in Los Angeles. Otto Klemperer -- who apprenticed with Mahler, as did Walter -- was music director here in the 1930s at a time when Viennese refugees populated the Hollywood studio music departments. When Zubin Mehta became music director in 1962, he was determined to channel Vienna, where he had studied, and spent years on making that happen.

Dudamel managed the task practically overnight. This was not the sound of his Berio or Verdi earlier this month and has nothing to do with the surfs-up California sound he will need next week for his West Coast, Left Coast concerts. But Thursday was a Gemütlichkeit Vienna-fest.

The “Prague” (Symphony No. 38) shares the heavy dramatic clout of “Don Giovanni,” an opera Dudamel has conducted, and he made the symphony weigh a great deal. The “Jupiter” (No. 41) burst with energy and was treated in a grand fashion. Dudamel likes to take repeats and he likes slow tempos in the slow movements, so they went on an affectionately long time.

The special Mozartean moment in the “Jupiter,” which ended with a spectacularly incisive and momentum-crazed Finale, was the Minuetto.  It was so airy it seemed to float like a balloon. 

That airiness also proved an insightful echo of the floating quality of parts of Berg’s Violin Concerto.  While following Schoenberg’s 12-tone method, Berg didn’t avoid tonality and he even found a way to quote Bach and folk song. At points Berg’s lyricism could be downright Mozartean, and that clearly appealed to Dudamel and Shaham.

Dudamel paid particular attention to details. Often two or more very different expressive lines are played at the same time, but Berg indicates exactly what should be highlighted. Dudamel went him one better by creating an extraordinary three-dimension sound field that allowed every line to be exactly shaded.  Rich emotion and simultaneity rarely add up to apprehensibility as they did here.

Shaham contributed his characteristic lovely tone and easy virtuosity. In music that both looks forward and back stylistically, he looked to the past more than to the future. He even allowed a tad of Tchaikovsky-like flair into his phrasing (which is a tad too much).

But quibbles are beside the point. Complaining about an excess of beauty is not a 21st century luxury.

-- Mark Swed

Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles. 8 p.m. today (a "Casual Friday" concert without the "Prague" Symphony), 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Pre-concert talks one hour before. Limited ticket availability, call (323) 850-2000. www.laphil.com..

Photo: Violinist Gil Shaham and conductor Gustavo Dudamel performing Berg's Violin Concerto Thursday in Walt Disney Concert Hall. Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu/Los Angeles Times

Starting Dec. 7, Laemmle Theaters in Southern California will screen broadcasts of opera productions from Milan's La Scala and Barcelona's Gran Teatre del Liceu. The season of programs, which runs through July 1 and includes six productions, features such vocal luminaries as Plácido Domingo, Diana Damrau, Jonas Kaufmann, Ben Heppner and Erwin Schrott.

The participating Laemmle cinemas are: the Sunset 5 in West Hollywood, Town Center 5 in Encino and Playhouse 7 in Pasadena. This will be the second year that Laemmle Theaters has participated in the opera broadcasts, which are organized by Emerging Pictures.

Kicking off the series on Dec. 7 will be a live broadcast of La Scala's opening night production of Bizet's "Carmen," conducted by Daniel Barenboim, and starring  Kaufmann, Schrott, Anita Rachvelishvili and Adriana Damato. The live broadcast begins at 9 a.m., with a rebroadcast at 4:30 p.m.

Verdi’s "Il Trovatore" is next, with a live broadcast from the Gran Teatre del Liceu on Dec. 22 at 11 a.m. (A rebroadcast will play at 4:30 p.m.)

The remainder of the series runs from April to July.

Mozart’s "The Abduction from the Seraglio," starring Damrau, will be broadcast on April 21 from Barcelona; La Scala's production of Verdi’s "Simon Boccanegra," featuring Domingo, is set for April 29; Wagner’s "Das Rheingold," starring René Pape and conducted by Barenboim, will be broadcast May 26 from La Scala; and Gran Teatre del Liceu's production of Tchaikovsky’s "The Queen of Spades," starring Heppner, is set for July 1.

All transmissions will be in high definition. General admission is $25.

-- David Ng

Photo: La Scala in Milan. Credit: Agence France Presse

In the case of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which recently posted on its website the audited financial statement for the 2008-09 fiscal year ending June 30, the bad news includes a 23% decline in the value of its cash and investment portfolio, from $254.7 million to $196 million.

Barbara Pflaumer, the museum's chief spokeswoman, said that by quickly reining in spending when the economy tanked, including a hiring freeze, canceling some exhibitions and postponing a $50-million segment of its ongoing expansion and renovation program, LACMA avoided "any major hiccups that kept us from operating on a normal basis" and managed to escape the large-scale layoffs that have hit many other big museums, including L.A.'s J. Paul Getty Trust and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With L.A. County footing nearly a third of the bill, LACMA's expenses -- including such mandatory costs as depreciation and interest on its $385-million debt -- came to $74.1 million for the year, down a tick from $74.4 million in 2007-08.

Eight jobs were lost, however -- six by layoffs, and two via retirement vacancies that won't be filled  -- leaving a LACMA staff of about 350. An additional 16 openings won't be filled until finances improve.

Of greatest concern, LACMA saw donations shrink from $129.7 million to $29 million. This is while the museum is trying to reel in major gifts to fund the $450-million campus "transformation" campaign that's in the second of three planned phases, with about $134 million still to go.

On the positive side, LACMA was able to acquire new art valued at $42.8 million via purchases and donations, down slightly from $45.7 million the previous year. And attendance grew to 853,000 from 825,000, Pflaumer said. Maybe $12 general admission for a day looking at art -- and free for those 17 and under -- has its appeal in a rotten economy.

Click here for the full story.

-- Mike Boehm

His works from that decade are not as revered as his groundbreaking movies from the '50s, his gnarly assemblages from the '60s, his rollicking collages from the '80s or his mesmerizing inkblot drawings from the '90s and on. The '70s seemed to catch Conner in a rut, stubbornly persisting against the futility of it all and never breaking through to an aesthetic resolution that would make it all worthwhile.

 At Michael Kohn Gallery, the 45 paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, books, lithographs and movie brought together for Bruce Conner in the 1970s make you think of the legendary artist's work from that decade differently. Rather than being the low point of a long career filled with highlights, the '70s represent the purest expression of Conner's profound suspicion of anything that smacks of success, stinks of inauthenticity or reeks of entitlement. It's all about defiance and rejection.

At the same time, he never romanticized failure for its own sake. His handcrafted abstractions, made with common felt-tip pens on ordinary sketchbook pages, begin with small, meaningless marks. Slowly, restlessly and intuitively, they worm their way toward something like the grungy underside of cosmic insight. Call it gutter sublime. It's also there in Conner's modestly sized two-tone paintings, in which exhaustion is palpable and despair too close for comfort.

His point-blank photographs feature famous and forgotten members of San Francisco punk bands performing as if their lives depended on it. Conner's pictures are intimate and alien, matter-of-factly capturing the way disdain and desire energized these misfits.

The paralysis and insanity of full-blown paranoia are a hairbreadth away from many of the works in the smartly selected show, and their menacing proximity gives Conner's powerfully conflicted works their bite and bravery.

– David Pagel

Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 658-8088, through Dec. 19. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.kohngallery.com

Image: Roz of the punk rock band Negative Trend, 1978. Credit: From Michael Kohn Gallery.

 At L.A. Louver Gallery, Wudl's first solo show in four years features 15 intimate works on paper and canvas. Most measure no more than 4 or 5 inches on a side.

Only one is bigger than a sheet of notebook paper. It's a fanciful, multi-eyed portrait of Wudl's teenage son, and its dreamy virtuosity is intoxicating. The rest of the works in "Specimens From the Flowerbank World" are inspired by the Flower Ornament Sutra, a revered Huayan Buddhist scripture.

Many depict solitary roses, their soft pink petals and vivid blue grounds made up of tiny club motifs, like those found on playing cards. Glistening jewels, floating eyeballs and other types of flowers also appear, as if orbiting a central rose or simply floating before the vastness of infinity, which is also abuzz with Wudl's ubiquitous clubs.

Every work is exquisite, so fantastically rendered and precisely crafted that many seem to have been made with the aid of a microscope. But none are fussy, precious or breathless. That's the magic of Wudl's art. He manages to make intense concentration and laser-sharp focus look relaxed, not quite casual but serene and welcoming.

Laurel and Hardy even appear in one drawing, adding just the right touch of comic relief at just the right moment. Unlike much art based in painstaking devotion, Wudl's never gets portentous or overzealous. Its vitality is mature and seasoned, a pleasure to breathe in and be in the company of.

– David Pagel

L.A. Louver Gallery, 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice, (310) 822-4955, through Dec. 31. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.lalouver.com

Image: "Waking." Credit: from L.A. Louver Gallery.

-- Real or fake?: A researcher claims to have discovered text that authenticates the Shroud of Turin. (Forbes)

-- Back in the studio: The rock band Green Day is recording a new version of its hit song "21 Guns" with the cast of the stage musical "American Idiot." (Playbill)

-- New job: Scott Rothkopf will leave his position as senior editor of Artforum to become a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. (New York Times)

-- Tooting his horn: Composer Edward Elgar ("Pomp and Circumstance") was apparently a terrible trombone player. (The Independent)

-- High-tech: Two instruments that were aboard the Hubble Space Telescope go on display at the National Air and Space Museum and are scheduled to tour California. (BBC News)

-- Antitrust: Ambassador Theatre Group’s purchase of Live Nation’s UK theaters is being investigated by Britain's Office of Fair Trading. (The Stage News)

-- For the kids: Oxford will be getting a new children's museum dedicated to the art of storytelling. (The Guardian)

-- Art in motion: New York's Metrocard becomes art, sort of. (New York Times)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Times music critic Mark Swed reviews Philip Glass's latest opera; theater critic Charles McNulty reviews "Equivocation" at the Geffen Playhouse.

-- David Ng

Photo: an image of the Shroud of Turin. Credit: Ellen Jaskol / For The Times

A nonprofit organization founded in 1900 and located at Boston University, the American Schools of Oriental Research support the study and public understanding of peoples and cultures of the Near East. The prize, to be presented today at a professional meeting in New Orleans, recognizes “the best open-access, open-licensed, digital contribution to Near Eastern archaeology by an ASOR member.”

Project leaders Lynn Swartz Dodd of USC and Rafi Greenberg of Tel Aviv University are expected to accept the award on behalf of an international team composed of Americans, Israelis and Palestinians.

The digital map apparently won the approval of jurors because it offers a body of information previously unavailable to the public about sites surveyed or excavated since 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

USC’s website is part of an effort to establish a framework for the disposition of the region's cultural heritage in the event of a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. Interactive satellite maps on the website show about 7,000 archaeological locales, including Shiloh, where the original tabernacle of the Hebrews is thought to have been located, and the Qumran caves, where the Dead Sea scrolls were found.

The public can access the West Bank and East Jerusalem Archaeology Database at http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/wbarc. Users must have Google Earth to get full use of the information.

-- Suzanne Muchnic

Photos: West Bank and East Jerusalem searchable map. Credit: USC. Lynn Swartz Dodd exploring an ancient monastery. Credit: Kristin Butler.

Lynn Nottage's "Ruined," which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year, will have its L.A. premiere at the Geffen Playhouse. A spokeswoman for the company said the drama is scheduled to open the Geffen's 2010-11 season.  

"Ruined" will be a co-production with Seattle's Intiman Theatre, where it is set to run July 2 to Aug. 8. The Geffen's season usually begins in August or September, but the company said no opening date had been set yet for the drama.

Kate Whoriskey, the Intiman's incoming artistic director, is expected to stage the play in Seattle and L.A., according to the Geffen. 

In February, Whoriskey directed the New York production of "Ruined" at the Manhattan Theatre Club, where it quickly became one of the most talked about plays of the season. (The play originated at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in November 2008, also under Whoriskey's direction.) In April of this year, "Ruined" won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. 

The play focuses on the matron of a Congolese brothel who tries futilely to keep the outside war at bay. But violence keeps intruding thanks to the constant foot traffic of both women and men through the brothel doors.

In an interview with The Times this year, Nottage said: "I knew I wanted to tell a story that was not agitprop, that was universal, epic and unabashedly theatrical. Something truthful and yet joyful. And I didn't know how I was ever going to do that."

The Geffen said that Nottage may be "intimately involved" with the productions in Seattle and L.A. 

Nottage is no stranger to L.A. theater. Local audiences may remember her play "Intimate Apparel," which ran at the Mark Taper Forum in 2004 and starred Viola Davis. Her work has also been produced by South Coast Repertory in Orange County.

-- David Ng

Photo: Lynn Nottage, on the set of the New York production of her drama "Ruined." Credit: Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

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Lynn Nottage always points a provocative pen

Ultimately, though, it's all about A and the selves she incites. Besides the remarkable Sigall, company stalwart Sheldrick sometimes exposes technique as B, but her arch deadpan is richly apt, and Myette does everything possible to humanize C's pat, youthfully impatient character. Their mutual affinity reflects Albee's mordant lyricism, and recommends this thoughtfully elegant reverie.

– David C. Nichols

"Three Tall Women," El Centro Theatre, 804 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 20. $20. www.westcoastensemble.org or (323) 460-4443. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Photo: Leah Myette, Eve Sigall and Jan Sheldrick. Photo credit: Carla Barnett.

Readjusting to civilian life after a rough tour of Iraq, Michael (Thomas) moves in with fellow vet and longtime friend Chuck (Nathanyael Grey), who works as an EMT. Michael’s dad (David Pantsari) hopes the boys will take care of each other, but just the opposite happens when Chuck’s stalled crush on vegan baker Autumn (Jamie Renee Smith) gets waylaid by Michael. We’re in for a classic love triangle going bad, fueled by PTSD, alcohol and soy bacon.
 
This production, played out in an appropriately dumpy apartment set, is clearly meant to showcase Thomas’ talents. As a performer, he’s an appealing presence, goofy and vulnerable. (The ensemble finds a nice rapport, and an easygoing humor carries some of the flatter scenes.) Director Timothy Gagliardo accentuates the playfulness — there’s a very funny Halloween scene — but lets too much air into the scenes, leaving us to wait for the inevitable violence rather than be surprised by it.

As a writer, Thomas is still discovering how to generate event. The play feels more like a series of improvs than a narrative with a point of view, and it’s not evident what questions “Post” wants to frame. Did war break these men? Are some people just bad? We’re left with loss but not much insight. 

– Charlotte Stoudt

“Post” Complex (The Flight) Theater, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 20. $10-$15. Contact: www.plays411.net. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

Photo: David Pantsari, Donavon Thomas, Nathanyael Grey. Photo credit: Ravi Gahunia.

At Marc Selwyn Fine Art, five of Mullican's Rome paintings fill the main gallery with an abundance of fun, bustling energy. All are on paper. One's backed by canvas. Four are approximately 5 by 7 feet. One runs nearly 12 feet long.

The palette is black and white, painted and drawn with charcoal, ink and tempera, except for one, in which gray graphite lines are softened by watercolor washes in a deliciously rich range of golden yellows and lovely blues.

The surfaces of all of Mullican's works are jampacked with swift little marks — mostly circles, semicircles and rectangles, but sometimes triangles and odd polygons as well as stray lines. These rudimentary units resemble the letters of the alphabet after they've been tossed in a food processor or run through a paper shredder.

It's amazing how much energy and movement Mullican gets out of such basic forms and common materials. His abstract compositions never depict anything realistic (although sometimes you swear you see body parts in them). They are urgent and unfussy, like everyday street graffiti. Yet they are also erotic, their sensuality and charge as electrifying as any finely rendered illusion.

The fun Mullican must have had that year in Rome lives on these works, which look as fresh, sumptuous and spunky as the day they were made.

– David Pagel

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 6222 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 101, L.A., (323) 933-9911, through Dec. 5. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.marcselwynfineart.com

Image: Untitled painting from about 1959. Credit: Robert Wedemeyer / from Marc Selwyn Fine Art.

The necessary requirements are blissfully exceeded in the current production at A Noise Within.  Cavorting on Adam Lillibridge’s Broadway-ready set, director Geoff Elliott and a superb cast hit the banana peel running and never let up.

In this case, slimy spilled sardines substitute, malodorously, for the banana peel. That’s appropriate, considering that “Nothing On,” the play-within-this-play, is a low-rent sex comedy that could be mounted on a Siberian glacier and still stink on ice.

The first act revolves around an ill-fated dress rehearsal just hours shy of opening. Act II takes us backstage a month into the tour.  And we’re back onstage in Act III for closing night, a disaster of Chernobyl-esque proportions.

It doesn’t help that Dotty Otley (Deborah Strang), the show’s cue-challenged star, couldn’t remember a line if it were tattooed on her forearm. But the real problem is backstage hanky-panky. Director Lloyd Dallas (played by director Elliott in neatly ironic casting) has been carrying on with vapid bombshell  Brooke (Emily Kosloski) and naive stage manager Poppy (Lenne Klingaman).  Dotty’s jealous lover, Garry Lejeune (Mikael Salazar, in a particularly riotous turn), has it in for Frederick (Stephen Rockwell), a clueless Method wannabe who has gotten overly cozy with Dotty. Gossip-extraordinaire Belinda (Jill Hill) fans the flames with reports of salacious scandal.  And the entire company, including hard-pressed jack-of-all-trades Tim (Shaun Anthony) keeps constant tabs on doddering drunk Selsdon (Apollo Dukakis), who is always on the brink of a bender.

Frayn’s wryly reductive classic gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a theatrical hothouse, where titanic egos and meager talents clash, hilariously.  In a smoothly trouble-free production, Elliott and company bake the turkey to a golden brown, just in time for your holiday enjoyment.

– F. Kathleen Foley

“Noises Off,” A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale. $40-$44.  In repertory.  Ends Dec. 20.  Call (818) 240-0910 Ext. 1 for dates and times.  Running time:  2 hours, 30 minutes.

Photo: Deborah Strang, Jill Hill and Emily Kosloski. Photo credit: Craig Schwartz.

At Gagosian Gallery, 10 new paintings by Jeff Koons flesh out both aspects of Warhol's love affair with boredom. If Warhol is the father of Pop Art, Koons is a chip off the old block, an unparalleled imitator whose imitations are so cockeyed and corny that they come off as originals, weird as that is.

Despite their size (approximately 9 by 12 or 9 by 7 feet), flashy colors (metallic silver, verdant green, fleshy pink), sexy subjects (naked models posing languorously in luscious landscapes) and painterly flourishes (juicy smears of semi-translucent pigment), Koons' pictures are boring.

To look at them is to see too many easy nods to works by too many other artists, including heavyweights Roy Lichtenstein, Sigmar Polke and Cy Twombly, super-heavyweights Georges Seurat and Gustave Courbet, and lightweights Christopher Wool and James Nares, not to mention Koons' own over-designed porn pictures of himself and his ex-wife, Cicholina. His new paintings seem to suffocate under the preposterously long list of sources.

And then they get interesting.

 When you finally stop looking at what they depict and start looking at how they do it, you see something strange. Koons has not piled up various types of painting atop one another, putting thin, sinuous lines over thick, gooey brush strokes, or laying swiftly scribbled gestures atop digitally rendered fields of screenprint-style dots.

Not one single bit of oil paint overlaps another speck. Absolutely everything occupies the same plane. And it's all perfectly done.

To stick your nose in these paintings is to be blown away by the fastidiousness of their planning and the meticulousness of their execution.

The labor-intensity is inconceivable.

And that's when it hits you that Koons runs a studio with a huge staff of exceptionally skilled technicians. As an artist, he is dedicated to the production of handmade reproduction — super-realistic depictions of works that look as if they are mass-produced. His paintings are the best copies money can buy.

It's loony. It's perverse. Best of all, it ruffles art-world feathers because it ignores class-based differences between the work of artisans and artists, salespeople and poets.

The crass aspirations of the nouveau riche are Koons' great subject. His oeuvre is the visual equivalent of a 19th century novel of manners. If that's boring, it's exactly the type of boredom that fascinated Andy.

– David Pagel

Gagosian Gallery, 456 N. Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 271-9400, through Jan. 9. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.gagosian.com

Image: Jeff Koons' "Waterfall Couple (Dots) Brown Swirl." Credit: From Gagosian Gallery.

In Pacific Resident Theatre's intimate revival, Marilyn Fox's pitch-perfect staging nails the emotional delicacy in the descent and resurrection of Andrew Crocker-Harris (Bruce French). Facing his final days as a faculty member and an empty road ahead, Andrew has already conceded that he's wasted his life. Mocked as a tyrannical pedant by his students, betrayed by his serial adulterer wife (effectively brittle, frustration-driven Sally Smythe), and humiliated by his headmaster (Orson Bean, in a superbly oily, condescending turn), French's Andrew embodies in the subtlest inflections both full awareness and resigned acceptance of his pathetic circumstances.

This English upper-lip reserve plays like ice compared with the fire in Edward Albee's later American take on academia-induced stagnation, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Yet beneath its genteel veneer,  Rattigan's play seethes with condemnation and scorn for England's rigid class system. Playing to a different national sensibility, director Fox (with support from associate director Dana Dewes) impeccably retains the accents, manners and subtext, but focuses on the simpler but more fundamental heart of the play: a brilliant mind rescued from despair by a simple act of kindness.

In this case, that act involves a parting gift from one of Andrew's students (Justin Preston), who had earlier demonstrated his proficiency in satirizing Andrew's bombastic teaching style. Also coming to Andrew's aid is a younger teacher (Michael Balsley), who gives up something important in switching sides.

Fox -- and Rattigan -- are careful to frame this within the believable bounds of real life, with its limited opportunities and sadly partial victories. Yet in the simple acts of defiance with which Andrew finally reclaims his own destiny, there lies a moving affirmation of resilience and human dignity.

-- Philip Brandes

"The Browning Version," Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd., Venice. 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Dec. 20. $20-25. (310) 822-8392. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.

Photo: Sally Smythe and Michael Balsley. Photo credit: Vitor Martins.

The starry sky is regular subject, spiritual circumstance or actual setting of Philip Glass’ work. His latest opera, “Kepler,” given its American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Wednesday night, is about the German astronomer who identified the elliptical orbits of our solar system. The composer couldn’t have been more at home.

Among Glass’ 23 operas are “Galileo Galilei” and two others based on Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's “Canopus in Argos” series of science-fiction novels. “The Voyage” opens with Stephen Hawking meditating on space-time and an alien spaceship crashing onto Earth; it ends with Columbus taking his final journey on his deathbed into outer space.

Astronauts in space ships, nebbishes having out-of-body experiences, pensive mystics pondering unknown realms, an ancient Egyptian king becoming one with the sun -- these are situations enhanced by Glass’ repetitive melodies, moody harmonies and propulsive rhythms.

But in “Kepler,” Glass’ yin-yang style gains new advances. More than ever before, the same kind of music can express going somewhere or nowhere, a physical or spiritual state, a secular and sacred condition.

The new opera was a commission of the Upper Austrian State Theatre in Linz, the city in Austria where Johannes Kepler did some of his most important work. This year’s European Culture Capital, Linz is also a Glass town. Dennis Russell Davies, the American conductor who is Glass’ most significant champion, is music director of the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, which also serves as the opera company’s orchestra.

“Kepler” had its premiere in September, fully staged. But like all arts organizations in New York, BAM is not flush and could do no more than sponsor what was essentially a concert performance as part of the Bruckner Orchestra’s U.S. tour, which was limited to the East Coast.

Something may have been lost in doing so, but the opera is oratorio-like and may well have gained musically from having the orchestra on stage. Kepler is the sole character. Six soloists sing in a variety of combinations, and the chorus functions abstractly by setting the scene and commenting on the action.

Martina Winkel's libretto in German and Latin is a biography of the mind and has the weighty, fragmented, academic qualities many German and Austrian composers favor. As Kepler’s theory unfolds, he struggles with geometry, physics, superstition and religion at a time, during the Thirty Years' War, when these subjects weren’t clearly separated. The astronomer’s task is to appreciate God through the understanding of his clockwork universe rather than take the Bible literally. Winkel relies on Kepler’s words, but she also adds some lines from a Kepler contemporary, the poet Andreas Gryphius, on the plight of Europe in wartime.

We learn little about the protagonist himself, but enough to startle. Intolerant of fools, he calls himself a nasty little dog who bites. But ultimately this mutt becomes the first to give real meaning to the notion of the harmony of the spheres.

Glass always sets out on his musical journeys from the same place, and his score begins familiarly, with his trademark musical figures. But where he winds up is another story. “Kepler” is his most chromatic, complex, psychological score. The orchestra dominates, and the Linz Brucknerians proved focused, serious and compelling. I was struck by the muted, glowing colors, the character of many orchestral solos and the poignant emphasis on bass instruments. Davies made everything sound.

Glass' vocal lines offer a different kind of eloquence. Kepler’s dry descriptions of geographical shapes or his sudden revelations of inner turmoil were weirdly, equally moving.  Baritone Martin Achrainer was an expressive, authoritative Kepler; the six soloists were strong, and the chorus was commanding.  

I sense, on the American opera scene, a ho-hum attitude to Glass, based on the assumption that he always does the same thing. Most important companies have by now done one or maybe two (though, L.A., none) of his operas. The older works are favored over the new. Nothing is planned anywhere in the U.S. at the moment. Critics don’t go out of their way to keep up.

Europe pays more attention. Linz is a town of 200,000, and its performances of “Kepler” (which runs through early January) serve as a tourist attraction and sell out. Linz knows what we don’t – that Glass, following Kepler's lead, understands that there really may be a music of the spheres. “Kepler” is a wise, major opera.

-- Mark Swed

Photos: (top) Dennis Russell Davies conducting the U.S. premiere of Philip Glass' "Kepler" at BAM Wednesday night in New York.  (bottom)  Baritone Martin Achrainer as Kepler. Credit: Jack Vartoogian / BAM

Were William Shakespeare one of today’s bloviating Beltway pundits, would he rather appear on conservative Obama-bashing Fox News or liberal Obama-smooching MSNBC?

Inquiring academic minds have long tried to decipher the politics of a writer who had a way of simultaneously flattering and flouting the powers that be. And it’s to the credit of Bill Cain’s drama “Equivocation,” an ambitiously sprawling work of historical fiction starring the Bard himself, that we come to understand something about the poetic shell-game that artists are forced to play to protect their creative freedom along with their truth.

Shakespeare is a huge subject, as the cottage industry surrounding him attests. Critical studies of every imaginable theoretical flavor compete with speculative biography for the number of volumes produced each year. And this Geffen Playhouse production, which opened Wednesday under the somewhat too lenient direction of David Esbjornson, swells with erudition to both the play’s benefit and detriment. Replete with scholarly wit and a surplus of compelling ideas, the drama keeps wandering off its path to explore yet another facet of the man most of us consider the planet’s all-time greatest playwright.

Shakespeare, nicknamed Shag, is played by Joe Spano as a middle-aged cross between a pragmatic theater producer and conscience-bound artist. A proud member of the “cooperative venture” known as the Globe Theatre, he’s in the business of pumping out plays that will keep his organization’s ticket sales one step ahead of its debts. Ideology doesn’t just turn him off — it strikes him as downright foolhardy in an age of uncertain patronage and shifting partisan winds. Plus, he’s got enough on his hands with his company's veteran star Richard (Harry Groener) and brash handsome newcomer Sharpe (Patrick J. Adams) squabbling like children.

It’s a heady time to be a dramatic poet in London, a city whose stages are swirling with versified revenge tales. But it’s also an uneasy moment to be in the public eye. After James I succeeds Elizabeth I, religious strife, which has been seething in England since Henry VIII’s heretical divorce, erupts into a paranoid mayhem that makes our post-9/11 days look like a Kumbaya sing-along.
 
Shakespeare knows how easy it is for a writer to accidentally step on a land mine, which is why he’s taken aback when Robert Cecil (Connor Trinneer), the Machiavellian force behind the throne, commissions (i.e., commands) him to write the official drama of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the alleged Catholic terrorist scheme to blow up Parliament and the king along with it. His majesty desires a topical thriller, with a few witches thrown in to add to his occult delight, and Cecil would very much like his version of what happened to be handed down to posterity.

“We don’t do current events,” Shag says anxiously. “We do histories. True Histories of the past.”

But Cecil insists because he suspects that Shag’s work will last, thanks to his ability to be “all things to all men.” The one cautionary word Cecil leaves him with is that he’s not to be a character in the play. This condition becomes exceedingly difficult once Shag starts investigating a crime that may in fact be too convoluted to sort out onstage, especially in a work that also wants to boldly peel back the many layers of Shakespeare’s transfiguring imagination.
 
At the heart of Cain’s play — performed in modern dress by a company of six actors, all of whom take on multiple roles except for Spano and Troian Bellisario, who plays Shag’s daughter Judith — is the question of the different forms equivocation can take. There’s the kind practiced by Father Henry Garnet (Groener), the Jesuit suspected of conspiracy in the Gunpowder Plot, who wrote a treatise on the righteousness of manipulating words in the service of the old faith. The more interesting contrast, however, is between Cecil, who double-talks purely for personal gain and Shag who deceives to reveal a deeper meaning beyond literal facts.

Esbjornson succeeds in finding a contemporary tone for the play, but the staging doesn’t have the same impressive amplitude that director Bill Rauch’s achieved in his world premiere production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival this past summer. The upside to the Geffen approach is a genial accessibility, but many of the waggish literary rejoinders are delivered in sitcom italics and the movement between theatrical realms (particularly when scenes from Shakespeare’s tragedies are enacted) can seem cramped on Esbjornson’s simple and rather monotonous black set.

The ensemble is probably most effective at portraying members of a quarrelsome theater company, but the notes of Gap ad naturalism the actors occasionally strike seem out of harmony with the situations being depicted. Shakespeare may have introduced a new level of reality to the English stage, but he wasn’t writing in the shallow vein of today’s realism. At times, the cast members appear to lack the stature of their characters; at others, they become declamatory, as if recognizing the need to grow larger. The gap between role and performer was nearly always evident.

Cain should be congratulated for the breathtaking boldness of his endeavor here. But rather than equivocate myself, let me say that more playwriting discipline and a stronger directorial hand would have shored up this toppling Shakespearean structure.  

-- Charles McNulty

"Equivocation," Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Dec. 20. $35 to $75 (310) 208-5454 or www.GeffenPlayhouse.com. Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes

Photos: Top: Connor Trinneer, from left, Harry Groener and Joe Spano. Bottom: Brian Henderson, left, and Patrick J. Adams. Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu/For the Los Angeles Times

In the U.K. next month, a dance artist who has epilepsy will attempt to induce a seizure on stage. Rita Marcalo has stopped taking her medication ahead of the event at the Bradford Playhouse, according to the BBC News. "If she has a seizure, an alarm will sound and the audience will be invited to film on their mobile phones," said the report.

Not surprisingly, the event, scheduled to take place Dec. 11, has sparked controversy. Epilepsy Action, a charity group, has asked the dancer "to reconsider" the event. But the Arts Council of England, which is funding the performance, stated that the project is intended to raise awareness of the illness and that it supports the artist's choice.

All this prompts the question: Is it really art?

The question is the same one that New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce asked in 1994 in her nonreview of Bill T. Jones' AIDS-themed work "Still/Here." Taking issue with the choreographer's decision to put his illness front and center on stage, Croce refused to attend the show and instead ended up penning what is perhaps the most divisive piece of dance criticism ever written.

Whether dealing with AIDS or epilepsy, a work of art that explores the artist's illness is by definition a self-reflective work steeped in identity politics, that most thorny of creative themes. What Croce had to say about "Still/Here" (pictured above) can seem harsh and cruelly dismissive, but it also feels surprisingly relevant today. 

In her 1994 article, Croce wrote that "the cultivation of victimhood by institutions devoted to the care of art is a menace to all art forms, particularly performing-art forms."

She also blasts audiences who would want to attend such a performance: "Instead of compassion, these performers induce, and even invite, a cozy kind of complicity. When a victim artist finds his or her public, a perfect, mutually manipulative union is formed which no critic may put asunder."

In response to Croce's diatribe, Joyce Carol Oates wrote a commentary for the New York Times in 1995 in which she argued a contrary position: " 'The Diary of Anne Frank,' by the young Dutch Jew who died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, is hardly the document of a mere victim, any more than the powerful elegy 'The Ship of Death,' D.H. Lawrence's last poem, written on his deathbed, is."

Oates concluded: "Ms. Croce's cri de coeur may be a landmark admission of the bankruptcy of the old critical vocabulary, confronted with ever-new and evolving forms of art."

Change or die? These days, cultural critics belong to what is perceived by many as a dinosaur profession. The idea that there can be a meaningful public debate about a work of art -- as opposed to, say, gossip about how much it has grossed or who stars in it -- seems quaint and old-fashioned in our era of total PR. 

But the argument that Croce started 15 years ago is still with us today, even if the voices on both sides continue to grow fainter with time.

-- David Ng

Photo: a scene from Bill T. Jones' "Still/Here," performed at the Wiltern Theatre in L.A. in 1995. Credit: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times 

It will be the Boston Court's first season consisting entirely of world premieres.

The partner stage companies range from L.A.'s Circle X Theatre Co. to the National Asian American Theatre Company in New York, Oregon's Portland Center Stage and the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.

The playwrights offer geographical diversity as well: L.A. veterans Luis Alfaro (pictured) and Tom Jacobson, and newcomers Moby Pomerance from Great Britain and Jordan Harrison from New York. 

Alfaro's "Oedipus El Rey" -- workshopped last year at the Getty Villa -- finds him again spanning the distance and millennia between Sophoclean Athens and Latino L.A., as he did in "Electricidad," staged at the Mark Taper Forum in 2005. This time, the king of the barrio isn't a murdered gang lord, as in Alfaro's loose adaptation of "Electra," but a live parolee who heads to East L.A. after serving time in the federal pen. "Oedipus El Rey" opens Feb. 27 with Jon Lawrence Rivera directing -- a month after an inaugural run opens at the Magic Theatre but with a different director cast and crew.

Jacobson's "The Twentieth-Century Way," opening May 8, combines his past interests in history and gay experience in a two-actor, multi-role play based on actual events from 1914 Long Beach -- an entrapment campaign against homosexuals frequenting public restrooms. The staging is by Michael Michetti, co-artistic director of the Boston Court.

Pomerance's drama, "The Good Book of Pedantry and Wonder," focuses on a historical figure from the late 1800s, John Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Opening July 31, with John Langs directing, it's a co-production with Circle X. 

Words, words, words is again the subject in Harrison's "Futura," concerning a not-too-distant all-electronic future in which they've ceased to exist on the printed page, with apparent psycho-spiritual consequences for a humanity plugged into a reality that's insufficiently tangible and all-too-virtual.  It opens Oct. 9, with Boston Court co-director Jessica Kubzansky directing and Portland Center Stage National Asian American Theatre Company sharing credit on the world premiere with separate, as yet unannounced productions.

-- Mike Boehm

Photos: Luis Alfaro (top); Tom Jacobson. Credits: Ken Hively/Los Angeles Times (Alfaro); Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times (Jacobson)

The artist known as Jeanne-Claude, who along with her husband Christo made wrapping famous structures their artistic calling card, died Wednesday night at a New York hospital from complications of a brain aneurysm, according to reports. She was 74.

Recognizable by her orange-dyed hair, Jeanne-Claude was a fixture of the international art scene and was a highly visible New York personality. Along with Christo, she created "The Gates," a 2005 public art project consisting of 7,503 orange rectangular structures draped with fabric and erected throughout Central Park.

Jeanne-Claude, who was born Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon to a French family in Casablanca, met Christo in 1958 and soon started collaborating on art projects. Their signature style involved wrapping public structures in fabric. In 1964, they moved to New York, where they have been based ever since.

Among the outdoor structures and buildings they wrapped were the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Pont Neuf in Paris; and the Reichstag in Berlin.

One of their most recent projects was "Over the River," which involved fabric panels suspended horizontally above the Arkansas River.

The couple have a son, Cyril, who was born in 1960. 

When asked in a 2002 interview what her favorite among her creations is, Jeanne-Claude replied: "We always say that each one of our projects is a child of ours, and a father and mother who have many children will never tell you which one is their favorite. If people insist that we have to have a favorite one, then we say, 'Okay, you are right, we do have a favorite one and it’s always the next one.'"

-- David Ng

Photo: Christo and Jeanne-Claude answer questions at a LACMA event last year. Credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

-- Red ink: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has reported an $8.4-million deficit for the fiscal year that ended in June. (CultureGrrl)

-- Broadway deal: The Shubert Organization has entered into an unusual, three-year deal with producers Robert Cole and Frederick Zollo, which guarantees Cole-Zollo projects one of the Shuberts' 17 Broadway theaters. (Variety)

-- This old house: Britain's National Theatre is planning an $83-million renovation of its London home. (The Stage)

-- Massive project: Groundbreaking has occurred in Dallas on the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, designed by architect Thom Mayne. (Dallas Observer)

-- Financial trouble: The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra is trying to cut its current deficit of $2.8 million, the highest ever in its history. (Indianapolis Star)

-- In the works: A proposed museum honoring the Negro Baseball League in Baltimore would cost about $4.1 million. (Baltimore Sun)

-- Winner: New York landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh has been selected to redesign the northeast corner of Grant Park in Chicago. (Chicago Tribune)

-- Controversial: A dance artist in Britain plans to induce an epileptic seizure on stage. (BBC News)

-- And in the L.A. Times: Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne examines the designs for the proposed Bush presidential library; Santa Monica vies for Eli Broad's contemporary art museum.

-- David Ng

Photo: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Credit: Daniel Acker / Bloomberg