It stopped me mid-scroll. In an Instagram reel, one DJ was mixing an upbeat track in a dark, packed room while another danced on a stage behind her, twerking perfectly on beat. Above them, a message flashed on a massive screen: “Love. Dance. And F— Ice.”
The crowd went wild, matching the energy of the two Los Angeles-based DJs who go by Mango and Ginger. The night looked so electric that I could feel the FOMO traveling through my body.
When I tapped the location tag, I assumed I was looking at an underground warehouse party in downtown L.A. or a venue in Hollywood. Instead, the party — known as If You See Me You See Me — was happening 120 miles south in San Diego. As a DJ and music lover, I knew I needed to get down there ASAP.
For many Angelenos, San Diego is the place to go for a peaceful weekend getaway — think scenic cliffs, serene beaches, fresh fish tacos and visits to Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo. But it’s easy to sleep on its vibrant nightlife scene — and I don’t just mean the bars crowding the Gaslamp Quarter. The city is home to some of the most exciting late-night spaces, from hi-fi listening lounges to a cinematic Middle Eastern restaurant that feels straight out of Disneyland.
“People just aren’t aware,” says San Diego native Mo Perez, who as DJ Dopemo regularly packs out parties at North Park’s Bluefoot Bar and Lounge. “Then they come here and they’re like, ‘Wow, San Diego is really fun.’”
This is part of the reason why Sasha Marie, a longtime DJ and former member of the Soulection music collective, decided to continue hosting her event If You See Me You See Me, in partnership with Future Is Color, in her hometown of San Diego, even amid invitations to bring it to other cities. She invites DJs from around the globe, many of whom wouldn’t typically play in San Diego, to spin at the party.
“I feel like it’s important to show that something can be successful here,” she says.
Consider this your wake-up call to tap into San Diego’s nightlife scene, whether you want to go dancing or vibe to diverse sounds or have a cocktail in a one-of-a-kind atmosphere. These nine great spots are a sampling of how the city comes alive after dark.
Alexey Bakharev
The U.S. government will authorize the sale of sanctioned oil tankers, allowing these vessels to ship crude legally to help rein in soaring shipping costs, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said during a Citadel Securities event on Monday.
He noted that “a
The slogan of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, which plays a prominent role in the new LACMA exhibition “Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias,” was blunt: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”
Those words capture a central tension in the sprawling show, which occupies interconnected galleries at the far end of the museum’s Resnick Pavilion. Many of the beautiful, sometimes ingenious products and technologies developed with the rise of the modern era gripped the popular imagination and made life easier, healthier and more connected. But they didn’t free people from domestic labor or deliver the prosperity and security heralded by their promoters. They instead often raised expectations, forced dependency and gave rise to a vision of progress that reinforced social exclusion, bred anxieties about status, and concealed the environmental costs of a culture built on consumption.
Sound familiar?
The desire for these transformative products was never innate, and LACMA’s exhibition zeroes in on that idea from the start. “Good design is seldom accepted. It has to be sold,” Midcentury photographer Julius Shulman is quoted as saying in the catalog.
The show traces the hard sell of a domestic utopia via world’s fair posters, model home catalogs, magazine advertisements, television specials and science-fiction imagery — along with close to 200 physical objects of every sort, including kitchen appliances, electronics and furniture. In each of its four documented eras — pre- and post-Depression, post-World War II, the height of the Cold War, and the counterculture ’60s and ’70s — promoters dressed the same promise in new terms, whether through cleanliness, leisure, security or freedom.
Arthur Radebaugh, “Closer Than We Think! Robot Housemaid,” 1959.
(Chicago Tribune / TCA, photo courtesy San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University)
At every turn a vision of a better life was made to seem desirable and, just as important, inevitable. Like any good advertising, it worked best when soothing our anxieties and tapping into our fantasies.
In the 1920s and ’30s, new discoveries about hygiene inspired products by soaring talents in the nascent field of industrial design who set out to create clean, easily maintained homes — laboratories for healthy living in an age still ravaged by diseases like polio and tuberculosis. Mathias J. Weber and Russell E. Vanderhoff’s seductively streamlined Health-o-Meter scale gave the illusion that homeowners could be scientists, for the first time monitoring their own weight and growth. Kohler’s Integra, introduced as “the toilet of the future” at the Chicago fair, had a dramatic black finish made to equate sanitation with modern design. And Bruce Goff’s gleaming Vitrolite kitchen for Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company, shown in Charles Turzak’s rendering, integrated pigmented structural glass counters and cabinets into a polished, easily cleaned whole.
American Stove Co., Magic Chef stove, series 1400, introduced 1935.
(Lynton Gardiner / The Wolfsonian–Florida International University )
Vast expansions in electricity, telecommunications and production promised to connect the country and ease the tedious work of cooking, washing and cleaning. The American Stove Co.’s Magic Chef stove, one of the first ovens to be equipped with a clock, recast kitchen work as something that could be measured and controlled. Frank G. Brotz’s Kohler Electric Sink, which incorporated a motorized dishwasher into the familiar basin, promised release from the “thrice-daily drudgery” of washing dishes. Western Electric’s clear-cased Model 302 telephone enticed gawkers with an impressively complex system of wires and mechanisms.
George R. Lum for Western Electric Co., Telephone, model 302, desk set 1938.
(AT&T Archives and History Center)
Many of the names who dreamed up these wonders are now etched in design history. Isamu Noguchi created a baby monitor before baby monitors were a thing: the Radio Nurse, a dark Bakelite receiver resembling an abstract face. Walter Dorwin Teague gave corporate products a precise, machine-age polish, while Raymond Loewy brought the same sleek optimism to objects like the globe-shaped New World radio for Colonial Radio Corp., molded in glossy, heat-resistant Catalin and embodying quite literally the new reach of communications.
Lester Beall’s Rural Electrification Administration poster.
(The Resnick Collection)
Selling this promise of a technological future to those clinging to the dream of American prosperity was an especially potent exercise during the Depression. In his illustrated 1932 manifesto “Horizons,” Norman Bel Geddes cast “new design” as a path toward “economy, efficiency, comfort and happiness.” As the economy faltered, an orderly, healthy home could be sold as a form of salvation, with prosperity seemingly within reach. At the Chicago fair, corporations sponsored full-scale model homes and filled them with products already available or soon to be. For rural households still without electricity, Lester Beall’s 1937 Rural Electrification Administration poster “Wash Day” turns federal infrastructure into a household fantasy. Inside the black silhouette of a farmhouse, a pristine white washing machine appears at an almost monumental scale, set against flat fields of saturated color.
Irving Harper of George Nelson and Co. for Herman Miller Inc., Marshmallow Love Seat, model 5670, designed 1956, this example made c. 1960s.
(Jonathan Urban / Museum Associates / LACMA)
By the ‘40s and ‘50s, the postwar home and its many accouterments — powered by wartime advancements, growing abundance and an ethos of “buy now, pay later” — amplified the promise. Plastic, prefabrication and push-button convenience suggested that mass production could bring elegant, futuristic living — and freedom from drudgery — within reach of the masses. George Nelson treated furniture as a flexible system, producing (with designer Irving Harper) the candy-colored Marshmallow Love Seat; replacing conventional upholstery with 18 brightly colored circular cushions mounted on a spare steel frame. Eero Saarinen produced the molded-fiberglass Pedestal chair, sweeping the seat and stem into a single sculptural form intended to eliminate what he called the “slum of legs” beneath tables and chairs.
Eero Aarnio for Asko Oy, Ball Chair, designed 1963.
(Jonathan Urban / Museum Associates / LACMA)
Architects attempted to make the home itself into a sexy product. At Disneyland, Monsanto’s House of the Future, designed by architects Richard Hamilton and Marvin Goody, was a gleaming, cross-shaped structure of molded plastic, raised above the ground on cantilevered supports and partnered (in renderings) with a plastic heliport. Its kitchen featured molded surfaces and electric appliances. Promotional images and films conjured a playful, adaptable and benevolent house — plastic as the building block of family happiness.
Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house was an aluminum, factory-made “dwelling machine” that could be delivered by air and assembled almost anywhere. Its unified form, modular furnishings, water-recycling system and labor-saving technology promised a more efficient life, less tied to conventional building and household routines.
Hamilton & Goody Architects, Monsanto House of the Future, 1956.
(MIT Museum)
Institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and magazines like Arts & Architecture promoted prototype homes from now legendary industrial designers and modernist architects like Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Marcel Breuer, Albert Frey, Gregory Ain and even Frank Lloyd Wright.
Effective pitches could turn a product, whatever size, into a fantasy of freedom. In the General Motors film “Design for Dreaming” (1956), directed by William Beaudine, a woman enters a fabulous kitchen as if in a magical dream. The promise, said curator Wendy Kaplan, was that the fictional woman would have more time for “tennis and hanging with … friends.” The dream even hinted at a life beyond domesticity — perhaps even freedom to “actually have a profession,” Kaplan added.
But the housewife in these displays was still expected to remain responsible for the home. Liberation came through a more efficient kitchen, not a change in who cooked. And appliances that reduced some labor often raised the bar: more frequent washing, more cleaning, more elaborate meals, as University of Chicago home economics professor Hazel Kyrk described in “Economic Problems of the Family.”
Frank G. Brotz for Kohler Co., Electric Sink, introduced 1926, this example 1928, Kohler Co.
(Kohler Archives)
That universal “everyone” did not, however, include everyone. Government-backed home ownership and the suburban boom excluded many Black, Latino and Asian Americans through redlining, restrictive covenants and discriminatory lending — a fact reflected in the almost complete absence of minorities in these vast selling campaigns.
A few welcome exceptions on the creators’ side are architect Paul R. Williams’ “Small Home of Tomorrow,” which proposed a simple, well-designed home fitted with gee-whiz appliances; Arthur Elrod and William C. Raiser’s swirling, vivid orange Ebony test kitchen, which treated cooking as creative craft; and the proposed multiracial community of Soul City, founded by Floyd McKissick, which imagined homeownership as a claim to economic autonomy that segregation denied.
The vision of a utopian domestic future took a strange turn during the Cold War, marrying the breathless excitement of the space age with the existential dread of nuclear annihilation. The same scientific power that had transformed lives now produced weapons capable of destroying humanity. The home was imagined as both shelter and command center.
Office of Donald Deskey Associates. Drawing, design for Undersea Lounge: Scheme 3 Interior Perspective, ca. 1960s. Designed by Russell Heston (b. 1929).
(The Estate of Donald Deskey, courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum / Art Resource, NY)
As the age’s potent mix of terror and delirium spun on, designers and illustrators proposed ways to live comfortably in space, underwater or in underground bunkers. Paul László’s “Atomville, U.S.A.,” a vision of suburbia half a century in the future, buried the family home beneath an earthen shell that doubled as a helicopter landing pad. Its sunken gardens and swimming pool promised comfort, while a blast door, escape hatches and air filtration protected against nuclear fallout. Donald Deskey Associates imagined a hypnotic “Undersea Lounge,” a self-contained interior for living beneath the water, while NASA illustrator Rick Guidice vividly depicted physicist Gerard K. O’Neill’s proposed Stanford Torus — an enormous, wheel-shaped suburb in space.
Bob Lerner for LOOK Magazine, Anne Anderson in RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen, 1959, kitchen designed 1956.
(Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LOOK Magazine, Photograph Collection / Robert S. Lerner Photography, LLC)
An endless array of products leaned into the public’s awe at the age’s sci-fi possibilities. This included prescient pieces ahead of their time, like the video-enabled AT&T Picturephone, and those that would never come to pass, such as the RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen. The latter’s spread in Look Magazine (displayed for crowds at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow) showcases a Roomba-like vacuum and other astonishing appliances that seem to work by themselves. But men hidden behind two-way mirrors actually operated them. Others, like the two-wheeled Ford Gyron Remote Control Car of the Future, only managed to come to life as children’s toys; and some were just plain ridiculous, like Honeywell’s H316 Kitchen Computer, which required a two-week training course just to retrieve a recipe.
Honeywell Inc.; Computer Control Division; Neiman Marcus, H316 Kitchen Computer, 1969.
(Mark Richards / the Computer History Museum)
By the late 1960s, confidence in technological progress was fraying. Environmental damage, plastic waste and the conformity of suburbia prompted designers and countercultural communities to imagine other ways of living — up to a point. The residents of Drop City, a Colorado artists’ community, built domes from the curved steel tops of salvaged cars. Architects Barry Simpson and Charles Hosford made a folding stool that could serve as a seat, stepstool or side table. Small, portable, multipurpose designs, from inflatables to cardboard furniture offered a life with fewer possessions. The Whole Earth Catalog, founded by writer and editor Stewart Brand, promoted ecological knowledge and self-sufficiency, but was still a compendium of things to buy.
Companies, too, found ways to sell all natural products, flexibility and individual expression. Zanotta advertised the first beanbag chair, the polystyrene-filled “Sacco,” as “A Big Bag, a Soft Seat.” Its formless body accommodated slouching, lounging or lying down, selling freedom from both conventional posture and the bourgeois living room. Even resistance to consumerism could be packaged as a new consumer ideal.
The pairing of objects with their promotional campaigns is the show’s most illuminating contribution, shedding light on the massive, often strange apparatus needed to drive these incredible designs — some icons, some welcome surprises — forward in each age. It reveals how the country’s 20th century manufacturing prowess expanded into the production of dreams. Corporations, government and the media taught consumers what progress should look like, which anxieties a product might soothe, and what kind of future to desire.
Isamu Noguchi; Zenith Radio Corporation, Radio Nurse receiver and Guardian Ear transmitter with original box, 1937.
( Museum Associates / LACMA)
But the sheer abundance of objects — I haven’t even mentioned the fascinating companion show-within-the-show, “The Kitchen and Its Discontents” — leaves less room for examining those campaigns and the work they performed. The excellent catalog follows those connections further, tracing how often hypnotic visions of the future home both reflected and shaped ideas about lifestyle, progress, gender, race, labor and consumption; in the galleries, those ideas remain largely suggestive.
Still, the exhibition offers a revelatory history — and a telling roadmap to our present. While the future imagined here made life easier, cleaner, more beautiful and more exciting, it did not arrive as advertised. The plastic home didn’t remake housing; the automated kitchen didn’t free women from domestic work; the self-sufficient home gave way to new forms of reliance. Yet a similar techno-utopian pitch survives in today’s smart homes and domestic technologies, from assistants like Alexa to artificial intelligence marketed as a way to make life easier. These tools may offer real benefits even as they addict and distract us. And while the systems sustaining our comfortable, consumption-driven lives launch us toward climate disaster.
These rooms powerfully evoke what Kaplan in the catalog calls America’s “restless forward motion, powered by the conviction that tomorrow’s design would solve today’s problems.” That ingenuity is worth celebrating. But its promises deserve open-eyed scrutiny.
We are weathering a truly apocalyptic heat wave in L.A., but that hasn’t stopped Halloween from sneaking up on us. For those who like to give themselves the creeps, the city has its fair share of spook shows, including Griffith Park’s Haunted Hayride and the Queen Mary’s Dark Harbor. These mainstays offer hardworking actors seasonal jobs, but usually don’t allow for any real narrative besides jump scares and chainsaws. Which is why I’m so jazzed about a new entry to the immersive Halloween show scene: “Hospital of Emotions After Dark,” with its specially ticketed basement creep-fest, “Below.”
For readers who haven’t been inundated with a million ads for “Hospital of Emotions” on your Instagram feeds, it’s an immersive art show that unspools in 80 discrete rooms over four floors of the shuttered St. Vincent’s Medical Center near downtown L.A. The 45,000-square-foot exhibition opened in late May and was supposed to close in late July, but has extended its run due to popular demand. This month that run includes an after-dark option, which features the regular show — only after-hours — with ambient lighting and roving actors who show up in the most unexpected places (I won’t spoil it, but I got one of the most serious jump scares of my life in one of the exhibit rooms).
A separate ticket (which can be purchased in a bundle with the main exhibition) gets you a ride in an elevator to the hospital’s long-abandoned basement where you are treated to an immersive theater show with a nun for a tour guide. My nun was played by Penny Wiggins, and I’m not sure I have ever witnessed such true commitment in a spook show. Wiggins sold her character — at one point with genuine tears.
I won’t give away the plot, but it’s harrowing, especially if you are someone familiar with the hospital, which opened in the late 1800s and was the first hospital in the city. I had my daughter there in 2016, so it was extra chilling to know that this basement of horrors was there even then. The show uses the building’s actual abandoned infrastructure as its framework, so guests are led through dank subterranean corridors, old examination rooms and specimen labs, as well as an autopsy room.
“Below” isn’t as viscerally gory as “Dark Harbor” or “Haunted Hayride,” but it’s more artistic. There is dancing and an actual script that features a “gotcha” twist — as well as an upsetting demon who appears out of nowhere. I applaud the commitment by the actors who, I imagine, must find it kind of scary just waiting down there for the next round of guests. Plus, it’s good fun to be in the “Hospital of Emotions” at night when everyone is a little wild and there’s a sense that something out of the ordinary might pop out at you at any minute.
I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt begrudgingly wearing a tank top and shorts in early October. This is your arts and culture news for the week.
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Felipe Dulzaides / Bradley Baboc
Cuban-born artist Dulzaides uses photography, drawing, video, performance, sculpture and sound to capture the sublime nature of Havana knife sharpeners in the exhibition “Balance in Place.” L.A. painter Boboc drew on the Toy District as inspiration for a new series of paintings, “Shadoobie (Shattered).”
Opening, 6-9 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Thursday-Sunday, through Nov. 8. Arcane Space, 324 Sunset Ave., Unit G, Venice. arcanespacela.com
Ludovico Einaudi
The popular Italian pianist and composer returns to Disney Hall for the first time since 2019 on this solo tour.
8 p.m. Friday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com
Mälkki Conducts Bartók
Susanna Mälkki leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Béla Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra.”
11 a.m. Friday, 2 p.m. Sunday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com
Takács Quartet with Jeremy Denk
The Grammy winning ensemble teams up with the MacArthur Grant-winning pianist for a program of chamber music featuring works by Haydn, Mendelssohn and Franck.
7:30 p.m. Broad Stage at Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, 1310 11th Street, Santa Monica. broadstage.org
Laura Andreson, 1979, Forrest L Merrill Collection, Photo by M. Lee Fatherree
(Photo by M. Lee Fatherree)
The Eternal Quality of Aesthetic Joy: Laura Andreson and Her Legacy
The artist bristled at “superfluous” decoration, favoring distilled jar, box, bowl and vase forms influenced by her love for Scandinavian and Bauhaus design. She became a wizard with glazes, conjuring lustrous surfaces resonant with elements of the Southern California landscape. This show offers a rare opportunity to savor the gorgeous purity of her work, alongside that of several of her mentors and peers, such as Gertrud and Otto Natzler and Glen Lukens, as well as some of her students, including JB Blunk and Bernard Kester. (Leah Ollman)
Noon-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, Oct. 10-Jan. 9, 2027. Craft in America Center, 8415 W 3rd St. craftinamerica.org
Haunted Soiree: True Crime
An immersive theater experience inspired by the 1928 Hex Hollow murder with cocktails and curious encounters.
Selected nights through Oct. 31. Nocturne Theatre, 324 N. Orange St., Glendale. hauntedsoiree.com
Pacific Jazz Orchestra’s Benefit Concert
Songwriter and producer David Foster, singers Katharine McPhee, Joanna “JoJo” Levesque, Veronica Swift, Adam “AeJaye” Jackson, violinist Anne Akiko Meyers and pianist Emmet Cohen are the headliners for a celebration of founding Artistic Director Chris Walden’s 60th birthday, which also includes a buffet reception and dancing under the stars.
7 p.m. Private estate in Toluca Lake, address to be provided upon confirmation of attendance. pacificjazz.org
Saint Megan
Playwright Joy Gregory, inspired by the journey of the granddaughter of the founder of the controversial Westboro Baptist Church, examines the long history of American Christian zealotry.
Opening, 8 p.m. Saturday, 8 p.m. Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays, 2 p.m. Sundays through Nov. 22 (no performance Oct. 12 or Oct. 31. Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave. roguemachinetheatre.org
Akram Khan Company
In the London-based dance troupe’s final touring production, “Thikra: Night of Remembering,” an international cast of women perform contemporary and Bharatanatyam dances.
8 p.m. UCLA, Royce Hall, 340 Royce Drive, Westwood, cap.ucla.edu
Camerata Pacifica
The chamber ensemble opens its 37th Season with Rachmaninoff’s “Variations on a Theme of Chopin, Op. 22” and Schubert’s “B-Flat Major Trio.”
5 p.m. Sunday. Bank of America Performing Arts Center, Janet & Ray Scherr Forum Theatre, 2100 Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. The Huntington, Rothenberg Hall, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; 8 p.m. Wednesday. The Colburn School, Zipper Hall, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.; and 7 p.m. Thursday. Music Academy of the West, Hahn Hall, 1070 Fairway Road, Santa Barbara. cameratapacifica.org
Heartbreak House
The Antaeus Theatre Company launches its 35th season with George Bernard Shaw’s dark comedy. Directed by ATC Artistic Director Nike Doukas. The cast includes Elinor Gunn, Harry Groener, Arye Gross and Bernard Addison,
Previews, 2 p.m. Sunday, 8 p.m. Tuesday-Oct. 16; opening, Oct. 17-Nov. 16. Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center, 110 East Broadway, Glendale. antaeus.org
Musical Theater Guild members Valerie Larsen and Gabriel Navarro during a reading of “The Light in the Piazza” in 2024.
(Stan Chandler)
Here’s to Us!
The Musical Theatre Guild marks its 30th anniversary with a benefit concert featuring show tunes from “Titanic,” “Fanny, “The Pajama Game” and “Sunday in the Park with George.”
7 p.m. Broad Stage at Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, 1310 11th Street, Santa Monica. musicaltheatreguild.com
Untitled, n.d. Mavis Pusey
(Neil Lane Collection / Estate of Mavis Pusey)
Mavis Pusey
Two exhibitions this fall will help familiarize audiences with this remarkable woman. “Mobile Images” at the Hammer is a full-scale survey co-organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and is accompanied by a rich and thorough catalog. “Restless” also adds a Pusey publication to the shelf. The Benton show focuses mostly on Pusey’s prints, drawing exclusively from the collection of Ian White, artist, educator and son of esteemed artist Charles White. (Leah Ollman)
“Mobile Images,” through Feb. 28, 2027. UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. hammer.ucla.edu “Restless,” through Jan. 3, 2027. Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College, 120 W. Bonita Ave., Claremont. pomona.edu
Art Of Elan: In The Desert
Inspired by a trip to Bryce Canyon, Olivier Messiaen wrote his percussion-rich chamber music masterpiece “From the Canyons to the Stars” as a 1976 U.S. Bicentennial commission from Alice Tully Hall in New York. Replete with Messiaen’s characteristic bird calls, it’s been done out of doors before, and memorably at the Ojai Music Festival. But the San Diego imaginative new music series Art of Elan is now taking it to the desert for a special performance led by percussionist Steven Schick at an outdoor theater in Borrego Springs. (Mark Swed)
6:30 p.m. Stargazing Theater, La Casa del Zorro Desert Resort & Spa, 3845 Yaqui Pass Road, Borrego Springs. artofelan.org
Angela Hewitt
The pianist performs an all-Mozart recital accompanied by Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra concertmaster and violinist Margaret Batjer for the first installment in LACO’s inaugural recital series.
7:30 p.m. Tuesday. The Colburn School, Zipper Hall, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laco.org
Lisa Batiashvili/Gautier Capuçon/Jean-Yves Thibaudet
The superstar violinist, cellist and pianist team up for an evening of Shostakovich, Debussy, and Dvořák.
8 p.m. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com
Joey Soloway.
(Loshara Vova)
A 1 They/Them Show
The Emmy and Golden Globe-winning creator of “Transparent” steps out from behind the camera to try out their stand-up routine in L.A. before hitting the road with a deeply personal solo comedy performance exploring family, Hollywood, gender, sex, Judaism, ambition and reinvention. A tour is expected to include a November stop in Chicago.
8 p.m. Wednesday and Oct. 28, doors open at 7 p.m.. The Virgil, 4519 Santa Monica Blvd. dice.fm
Houston Ballet
(Quinn B. Wharton/Segerstrom Center for the Arts)
Houston Ballet
The Texas dance troupe brings celebrated young pianist George Li for an ode to Frédéric Chopin. Making its West Coast debut, and created by Stanton Welch AM, artistic director of the Houston Ballet, the piece, “Sons de L’âme” (Sounds of the Soul), merges choreography with a live performance of Chopin’s famed piano pieces, showcasing the talents of the nation’s fourth-largest ballet company and a rising star of classical music. (Eloise Rollins-Fife)
7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 1 p.m. Sunday. Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. scfta.org
Speaking In Tongues
The world premiere of a Luis Alfaro play is always a welcome event. And his latest work, commissioned by Latino Theater Co. and developed at the theater’s Circle of Imaginistas playwriting group, resonates thematically with Alfaro’s 2023 play “The Travelers,” which LTC produced in 2023 and made my list of that year’s best theater productions. The new play, infused with Alfaro’s trademark Chicano humor, returns us to the world of California’s Central Valley and the stories of migrant farmworkers and their spiritual quests in a societal landscape transforming faster than anyone can keep up. (Charles McNulty)
Previews, 8 p.m. Thursday-Friday; opening night, 8 p.m. Saturday; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through Nov.. 15. Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring Street, downtown L.A. latinotheaterco.org
Cuban-born artist Enrique Martinez Celaya paints the new curtain for the L.A. Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
ICYMI, the best of this week’s L.A. Times arts coverage:
L.A. artist Enrique Martínez Celaya hand-painted a brand new 70-foot curtain for L.A. Opera’s new season.
A documentary about Asco, the revolutionary arts group founded in the 1970s, is streaming for the first time on PBS.
Angelina Jolie and Octavia Spencer have teamed up to make sure kids have access to live theater.
Times theater critic Charles McNulty reviewed Laura Benanti’s autobiographical show, “Nobody Cares,” at the Wallis, and found it a bit too breezy.
McNulty, however, really liked the “spectacular” staging of “The Outsiders” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.
Read about how that staging unfolds during the epic rumble scene near the end of the show.
Love it or hate it, Erewhon is now a permanent fixture at Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“Home of the Future” at LACMA explores the dark side of the American dream.
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As 24th Street Theatre prepares to celebrate its 30th anniversary, it has announced that it raised $3 million to officially buy the converted 1928 carriage house it’s called home for the past 29 years. It also purchased properties next door and across the street in order to expand its mission and community programming, including plans for an outdoor garden and a black box theater, which is, according to a news release, “officially named the 24th Street Black Box Theatre in honor of longtime supporter Jack Black, who is also the new venue’s first donor.” Black is set to host the theater’s gala on Oct. 18.
Tesserae — Andrew McIntosh, left, Ian Pritchard and Joshua Rubin — perform “Bowling, Animals and the Ocean” at the Sierra Madre Playhouse.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
The 99-seat Sierra Madre Playhouse announced it has received $2.5 million from the State of California for a slew of exciting upgrades to its 100-year-old building — marking the largest gift in the organization’s history. The funds were secured by Pasadena Assemblymember John Harabedian, and will be used toward making the historic venue ADA-compliant, as well as to renovate lobbies and other areas open to the public. It will also help with new programming and building infrastructure.
The LA Phil and Orchestre de Paris have announced the launch of a new opportunity: the Salonen International Conducting Fellowship, which is, according to a news release, “designed to nurture and accelerate the careers of the next generation of orchestral conductors … the fellowship will offer early-career conductors unparalleled access to artistic mentorship, practical podium experience, and professional development opportunities at Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Philharmonie de Paris.” The first yearlong program will start in the 2027-28 season, and will feature two to four fellows, who will spend about six weeks working with each orchestra.
The Hammer Museum at UCLA announced this week that Eric Esrailian is succeeding Marcy Carsey as the new chair of the museum’s board (after previously serving as vice chair). Karen Hillenburg will now serve as vice chair. The Hammer also named three new members to its board: philanthropist Leslie McMorrow, attorney Alicia Miñana de Lovelace and Joan Weinstein, vice president of program planning at the Getty.
— Jessica Gelt