orchestra

Gustavo Dudamel has begun his tale of two cities.

As Dickens prophetically reminds us, ours is hardly the first age of wisdom and of foolishness, the first epoch of belief and of incredulity. Dudamel’s great challenge is to make his 17th and final season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic — and his prelude season before taking over the New York Philharmonic (in September he officially became designate music and artistic director) — the best of musical times for both cities.

The opening concerts for the two orchestras were two weeks apart, the Big Apple having come first. The main works on the New York-centric program were by two great 20th century composers, Bartók and Charles Ives, who were treated as outsiders by the city’s musical establishments during their lifetimes.

The performances were impressive. An orchestra that has a reputation for being difficult was responsive. If I read the room right, there was a genuine, if somewhat guarded, sense of optimism from a welcoming crowd.

Following a tradition he started with his first season in L.A., Dudamel opened with a newly commissioned work, Leilehua Lanzilotti’s “of light and stone.” He struck instant sonic gold with this mystical evocation of Hawaii, wondrous in sound, Lanzilotti, a hopeful good start.

Dudamel has a different look these days when he walks out on stage for an L.A. Phil concert after he’s been away for a while. Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, he again seemed ever so slightly hesitant, as if not knowing what to expect now that his leaving has become manifest. But greeted by a full house’s demonstratively embracing thankful enthusiasm, he beamed, the hesitant posture turning into ownership.

The conductor opened his farewell season with Ellen Reid’s “Earth Between Oceans,” a joint commission bridging his two orchestral families.

(Timothy Norris / Los Angeles Philharmonic)

The new work this year is Ellen Reid’s “Earth Between Oceans,” and it is Dudamel’s first effort at bringing together what he calls his two families.

Reid, who is herself bicoastal between L.A. and New York, narrates, through astonishing orchestral properties and powers, an environmental tale of her two cities. The work is a joint commission with the New York Philharmonic; Dudamel will take it east in the spring.

Earth, air, water and fire are Reid’s subject matters, which she translates into four movements that cover a New York winter, an aerial approach to Manhattan’s noise and quiet, the Altadena and Pacific Palisades conflagrations, ending on a sort of surfboard ride over crashing blue waves. With the help of a wordless Los Angeles Master Chorale, Reid tells the story through ever-surprising instrumental evocation.

Nothing, however, sounds like you might expect in Reid’s massive orchestral soundscape capable of holding a listener in tight grip for 30 minutes. Is that percussive pounding in earth the ground moving under our feet and the cello solo snowy Central Park? I don’t know how she does it, but I immediately bought into weird sounds from the chorus indicating something words can’t express about what those New York skyscrapers are up to. The effect of what sounded like ticking clocks going astray felt like an inviting dip in the lake.

Dudamel ended the concert with Richard Strauss’ “Alpine Symphony,” 125 orchestral musicians schlepping up the mountain, finding spiritual ecstasy at the summit and getting drenched on the way down, a self-satisfied drinking in of nature with every step. It is an astonishing, so to speak, over-the-top score, which you either love or abhor for its instrumental vulgarity.

Love was in order Thursday. Dudamel first performed “Alpine Symphony” at Disney in 2008, a year before beginning as music director. He jogged up the mountain and back, full of beans, showing off but also sharing his enthusiasm and demonstrating a skill that gave confidence that this 20-something conductor had the chops.

Dudamel’s performance of Strauss’ “Alpine Symphony” demonstrated the L.A. Phil’s distinctive immediacy compared with his more formal European interpretations.

(Timothy Norris / Los Angeles Philharmonic)

Last summer, I heard Dudamel conduct the “Alpine” with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival. The playing was sumptuous but formal and distant. These were the Alps as seen from a comfortable gondola taking in the view, and what a view, indeed.

The L.A. Phil sound, on the other hand, reveled in being-there, huffing-and-puffing immediacy. A rainstorm was a rainstorm: wet. The pastures replete with cowbells weren’t so much scenic as earthy, the real thing.

The orchestra sounded rapt and ready for ecstasy Thursday. There are two new first-chair players. A member of the orchestra’s second violin section, Melody Ye Yuan, has become her section’s principal. Ryan Roberts is the new principal oboe, and he had a luminous solo in the “Alpine.”

It was only after Roberts, who grew up in Santa Monica, won the L.A. Phil blind audition for principal oboe that Dudamel discovered he had just hired away a rising star in what is about to become his New York Philharmonic. But it’s all in the big new family.

Eddie Palmieri, the Grammy-winning Nuyorican pianist, bandleader and composer who helped innovate Afro-Caribbean music in the States and transform the New York salsa scene, died on Wednesday. He was 88.

According to a post on his official Instagram, Palmieri passed away in his Hackensack, N.J., home. The New York Times confirmed via his youngest daughter, Gabriela Palmieri, that his death came after “an extended illness.”

Multiple celebrities chimed in to pay their respects, including Spike Lee, Ramon Rodriguez and representatives from Fania Records, the pioneering New York salsa label, also released a statement.

“[On Wednesday], Fania Records mourns the loss of the legendary Eddie Palmieri, one of the most innovative and unique artists in music history,” the statement said. Palmieri briefly recorded music with the label but also released music under Tico, Alegre, Concord Picante, RMM and Coco Records.

Others took to social media to mourn the loss, including David Sanchez, a Grammy-winning jazz tenor saxophonist from Puerto Rico, who uploaded a slideshow of photographs of the two. Sanchez recounted the time when his soprano saxophone was stolen — and Palmieri helped him pay for a new one. “Your being and your music will continue to live on in the hearts of many,” Sanchez wrote in the Instagram caption.

Palmieri’s contemporary Chuchito Valdes, a Grammy-winning Cuban pianist and bandleader, also chimed in with an Instagram post lamenting the loss: “A sad day for music. One of the greatest of all time is gone, an innovator. The man who revolutionized salsa and Latin jazz. My great friend.”

Born on Dec. 15, 1936, in East Harlem to Puerto Rican parents from Ponce, Palmieri was the younger brother of Charlie Palmieri, the late piano legend known as the “Giant of the Keyboards.”

The family later moved to the South Bronx, where they opened up a luncheonette called “Mambo”: a name chosen by young Eddie, who was enthralled by the Cuban dance hall rhythms. He often controlled the jukebox with blissful Latin jazz tunes by Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez and Machito.

Palmieri was deeply influenced and inspired by his older brother, who was nine years his senior and introduced him to prominent big-band acts of the 1940s, like Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and Woody Herman, all of whom seemed to dissolve by the end of World War II. Though Palmieri had an itch to lean into the timbales like Tito Puente, he would eventually follow in his brother’s footsteps and take piano lessons from Margaret Bonds, one of the most prominent African American concert pianists at the time.

Although he briefly joined his uncle’s orchestra, Chino y sus Almas Tropicales, as a timbal player, Palmieri rose to fame as a pianist, playing with various bands including the Eddie Forrester Orchestra, Johnny Segui and His Orchestra, and eventually Tito Rodriguez and His Orchestra, which was a main act at the Palladium Ballroom between 1958 to 1960.

“In the audience, you could have maybe a Marlon Brando, Kim Novak, all the Hollywood starlets because it was the height of the mambo,” said Palmieri in a 2013 interview with Jo Reed. “On Saturday, you had the blue-collar, mostly Puerto Rican. And then Sunday was black, Afro-American. It was intermingled or different nationalities that had nothing to do whether you were green, purple, white, we came to dance.”

But in 1961, Palmieri went on to start his own band, La Perfecta, an ironic title given its not-so-perfect setup. It formed as an eight-piece Cuban conjunto, which ditched the traditional jazzy saxophone. There were timbales, congas, bongos, bass, piano and vocals — but with a twist of its own kind: the inclusion of two trombones, played by Barry Rogers and Jose Rodriguez, instead of the costly four-set trumpets. Palmieri also added a whistling flute, played by George Castro, for a charanga edge (in the place of a traditional violin).

“La Perfecta changed everything in the history of our genre, in my opinion. Certainly in New York,” said Palmieri. “And then influenced the world, because after that all the pawn shops got rid of their trombones.”

His group helped usher in the iconic salsa genre with their first album, “Eddie Palmieri and His Conjunto ‘La Perfecta,’” dubbing him the nickname “Madman of salsa.” However, he was not too fond of the emerging term, which seemed to cram different styles like mambo, charanga, rumba, guaracha and danzón into one single category.

“Afro-Cuban is where we get the music,” explained Palmieri in a 2012 interview with the Smithsonian Oral History Project. “The influence of the Puerto Rican is the one [that] upheld the rhythmical patterns and the genre of Cuba. So then that becomes Afro-Caribbean.”

La Perfecta went on to release its most famed album, “Azúcar Pa’ Ti” in 1965. It included the song “Azúcar,” an eight-minute track that was later added to the National Recording Registry in 2009.

In 1976, Palmieri became the first to win a Grammy for the inaugural category of best Latin recording, for his album “Sun of Latin Music.” He holds a total of eight Grammy awards. In 2013, the National Endowment for the Arts honored him as a Jazz Master and the Latin Grammys granted him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

But Eddie Palmieri’s impact spanned beyond his own accomplishments. He was a mentor, a teacher and an advocate for Latin music and culture, which includes advocating twice for the inclusion of the Latin jazz album category in the Grammys — first in 1995, then again in 2012 after its removal.

Palmieri was predeceased by his wife of 58 years, Iraida Palmieri, who passed away in 2014 — and who he often referred to as “Mi Luz Mayor.” He is survived by his four daughters, Renee, Eydie, Ileana and Gabriela; his son, Edward Palmieri II; and four grandchildren.

Tuesday night, Gustavo Dudamel was back at the Hollywood Bowl. This summer is the 20th anniversary of his U.S. debut — at 24 years old — conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and becoming irrepressibly besotted with the amphitheater.

He walked on stage, now the proud paterfamilias with greying hair and a broad welcoming smile on his face as he surveyed the nearly full house. The weather was fine. The orchestra, as so very few orchestras ever do, looked happy.

For Dudamel, his single homecoming week this Bowl season began Monday evening conducting his beloved Youth Orchestra Los Angeles as part of the annual YOLA National Festival, which brings kids from around the country to the Beckmen YOLA Center in Inglewood. But it is also a bittersweet week. Travel issues (no one will say exactly what, but we can easily guess) have meant the cancellation of his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela‘s trip to the Bowl next week. Dudamel will also be forced to remain behind with them in Caracas.

After 20 years, Dudamel clearly knows what works at the Bowl, but he also likes to push the envelope as with Tuesday’s savvy blend of Duke Ellington and jazzy Ravel. The soloist was Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, whose recent recording of Ravel’s complete solo piano works along with his two concertos, has been one of the most popular releases celebrating the Ravel year (March 7 was the 150^th anniversary of the French composer’s birth).

Ellington and Ravel were certainly aware of each other. When Ravel visited New York in 1928, he heard the 29-year-old Ellington’s band at the Cotton Club, although his attention on the trip was more drawn to Gershwin. Ellington knew and admired Ravel, and Billy Strayhorn, who was responsible for much of Ellington’s music, was strongly drawn to Ravel’s harmony and use of instrumental color.

On his return to Paris, Ravel wrote his two piano concertos, the first for the left hand alone, and jazz influences were strong. Cho played both concertos, which were framed by the symphonic tone poems “Harlem” and “Black, Brown and Beige, which Ellington called tone parallels.

There has been no shortage of Ravel concerto performance of late — or ever — but Ellington is another matter. Although the pianist, composer and band leader was very much on the radar of the classical world — “Harlem” was originally intended for Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony; Leopold Stokowski attended the Carnegie Hall premiere of “Black, Brown and Beige,” as did Eleanor Roosevelt, Marian Anderson and Frank Sinatra — Ellington never played the crossover game. The NBC “Harlem” never panned out and became a big-band score. Ever practical, Ellington, who composed mostly in wee hours after gigs, always wrote for the occasion and the players. He tended to leave orchestration to others, more concerned with highlighting the fabulous improvising soloists in his band.

The scores, moreover, were gatherings, developments and riffs on various existing songs. “Harlem” is an acoustical enrapturement of the legendary Harlem Renaissance and one of the great symphonic portraits of a place in the repertory. “Black, Brown and Beige” is an ambitious acoustical unfolding of the American Black narrative, from African work songs to spiritual exaltation with “Come Sunday” (sung by Mahalia Jackson at the premiere) to aspects of Black life, in war and peace, up to the Harlem Renaissance.

Both works are best known today, if nonetheless seldom heard, in the conventional but effective orchestrations by Maurice Peress and are what Dudamel relies on. The version of “Black, Brown and Beige” reduces it from 45 to 18 too-short minutes.

The primary reason for these scores’ neglect is that orchestras can’t swing. The exception is the L.A. Phil. With Dudamel’s surprising success of taking the L.A. Phil to Coachella, there now seems nothing it can’t do.

The time has come to commission more experimental and more timely arrangements. But even these Peress arrangements, blasted through the Bowl‘s sound system and with the orchestra bolstered by a jazz saxophone section, jazz drummer and other jazz-inclined players, caught the essence of one of America’s greatest composers.

Ravel fared less well. The left-hand concerto has dark mysteries hard to transmit over so many acres and video close-ups of two-armed pianists trying to keep the right hand out of the way can be disconcerting. This summer, in fact, unmusical jumpy video is at all times disconcerting.

Ravel’s jazzier, sunnier G-Major concerto is a winner everywhere. But for all Cho’s acclaim in Ravel, he played with sturdy authority. Four years ago, joining Dudamel at an L.A. Phil gala in Walt Disney Concert Hall, Cho brought refined freshness to Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto. In Ravel at the Bowl, amplification strongly accentuated his polished technique, gleaming tone and meticulous rhythms, leaving it up to Dudamel and a joyous, eager orchestra to exult in the Ravel that Ellington helped make swing.

Tuesday night the Los Angeles Philharmonic opened its 103rd season at the Hollywood Bowl. It was a beautiful evening. Lustrous twilight. Bright moon. Paradisal weather. Unusually light traffic. A program featuring Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev favorites. Cares could easily slip away once walking through welcoming and efficient security.

Still, the real world is never far away from the Bowl. One of the highlights of this season has fallen victim to a baffling Venezuela travel ban. Gustavo Dudamel can no longer bring his Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra in August. That now means that Dudamel will spend only a single week at the Bowl during his penultimate summer as L.A. Phil music director.

Some of the Bowl’s facilities have been dolled up a bit, but the amphitheater feels fragile after the January wildfires. The military on our streets has produced an L.A. edginess. Could that have contributed to the Bowl’s unusually low opening-night attendance? Ticket sales were said to have been strong, making the many empty seats worrisome no-shows.

What Tuesday night did herald was an L.A. Phil summer season with fewer splashy events than usual (no opera, for one), several conductors making their Bowl debuts and a good deal of Russian music. It was, moreover, a Tuesday that proved a relatively somber occasion, which, despite the lovely atmosphere, fit the mood of the times.

Danish conductor and Minnesota Orchestra Music Director Thomas Sondergard made his L.A. Phil debut. There is temptation to place every debut, along with every conductor invited back to the Bowl, as a potential candidate for the long list, short list or whatever list to be the L.A. Phil’s next music director after Dudamel departs for New York next year. But Bowl concerts tend to be hit-and-run events.

Sondergard demonstrated a sense of grandeur, sometimes shattering, other times starchy. But there were all the opening-night kinks to be worked out with audio, video, an orchestra just coming back from vacation and coping with minimal rehearsal time.

None of this played into Sondergard’s or the Bowl’s strengths as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A Minor opened the program. The bland Ballade is a lesser score by the late 19th and early 20th century British composer who deserves a revival for his more substantial works.

Pianist Kirill Gerstein performs with the L.A Phil on opening night Tuesday at the Hollywood Bowl.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

For Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the subdued blue shell lighting suddenly turned a shockingly vivid orange. Amplification met the glaring illumination with the evening’s piano soloist, Kirill Gerstein, unnaturally dominating a sonically repressed orchestra. The video monitors went their own crazy way, whether unmusically flipping from close-ups of fingers and lips or attempting surreal cornball special effects.

It was all too much (and in the orchestra’s case, too little), but Gerstein is a gripping pianist in any situation. He has just released an iridescent recording of a piece written for him and vibraphonist Gary Burton by the late jazz great Chick Corea. Thomas Adés wrote his heady Piano Concerto for him. Of all the great recordings of Rachmaninoff’s over-recorded Second Piano Concerto, Gerstein’s recent one with the Berlin Philharmonic may be the most powerful.

Every note, important or incidental, he hit in the Rhapsody had a purposeful intensity. What you could hear of Sondergard’s contribution was a starkly effective percussive response from the orchestra. It was, under any conditions, a striking performance.

Video and audio settled down for Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony, which was written in 1944, a decade after Rachmaninoff wrote his Rhapsody. The world had momentously changed in those 10 years.

Both composers fled Russia after the 1917 revolution, but their relationships with their native land was very different. Although Rachmaninoff never returned, he remained thoroughly old-world Russian. He wrote his Rhapsody in idyllic Switzerland, before immigrating to the U.S., where he died in Beverly Hills in 1943.

Prokofiev spent years in Paris and in the U.S. as a modernist, but ultimately Mother Russia was too strong of a pull, and he returned despite the artistic restrictions of Stalinist Russia. His Fifth is a war symphony, written at a time of great nationalism, and it premiered in Moscow in January 1945 just after Russia had routed the Nazi invaders.

Sondergard’s performance lacked the soul of, say, André Previn. (Previn performed the Fifth at his first concert as L.A. Phil music director in 1985). Here, threatening thunder of the monumental first movement was followed by threatening lightning in the faster scherzo followed by the threateningly dark cloudy skies in the slow movement followed by the victorious bombing of the final movement.

The overpowering bigness of this performance happened on the day that the U.S. reaffirmed its commitment to Ukraine in its war with Russia. Three years ago, some questioned whether Russian music should be performed at all. Several other orchestras canceled performances of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” The Bowl’s annual “Tchaikovsky Spectacular” retained the Overture although the program began with the Ukrainian National Anthem.

This summer Russian music abounds at the Bowl with the usual Tchaikovsky (which will be part of the “Classical Pride” program Thursday), a full week of Rachmaninoff, along with more Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. It was with Tchaikovsky that Dudamel made his U.S. debut at the Bowl, the rest being history.

Russian music has, in fact, been a mainstay of the Bowl for 103 years. Russian performers and composers helped to make L.A. what it is artistically today. And how Russian composers, those who stayed and those who left, dealt with militarism, nationalism and the threat of repression has never felt more relevant.

In early July, the Los Angeles Philharmonic quietly canceled all four Hollywood Bowl performances featuring Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. The L.A. Phil, in a statement, attributed the cancellations of the L.A. leg of the orchestra’s 50th anniversary tour to “travel complications,” and said it looks forward to “welcoming the Orchestra back in the future.”

Venezuela is on the list of countries on President Trump’s recently announced travel ban list. The ban for the country is partial, but it does affect the types of visas typically used for tourism and business. A number of readers wrote in about the cancellations, speculating about visa issues and the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies. Asked if this was the case, or if any further details about the cancellations were available, a rep for the L.A. Phil declined to comment beyond what was provided in the organization’s statement.

In a review of the Bowl’s opening night, Times classical music critic Mark Swed credited the loss of the orchestra‘s visit to Trump’s travel ban and lamented that the cancellation would reduce Dudamel’s appearances on the Bowl’s stage to a single week during his 16th and penultimate season before he leaves L.A. to become music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026.

The Bolívar Orchestra likely won’t have any trouble traveling to the United Kingdom, however, because it is set to play as a special guest alongside Dudamel for 10 sold-out shows with the rock band Coldplay at Wembley Stadium in late August and early September. (Turns out Coachella was just a warm-up for Dudamel, who really has achieved rock star status in the music world.)

Ticket holders for the canceled Bowl shows received emails about the cancellations and were told that their tickets would remain valid for newly announced programming: Elim Chan, James Ehnes, and the L.A. Phil on Aug. 12 for Tchaikovsky and The Firebird; Gemma New and the L.A. Phil performing Tchaikovsky’s 4th on Aug. 14 with Pacho Flores; and Enrico Lopez-Yañez and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra performing Aug. 15-16 with Los Aguilar.

When the Bowl season was first announced, L.A. Phil President and Chief Executive Kim Noltemy told me that much of the season was organized to highlight Dudamel’s work, including performances featuring composers, musicians and music that he is particularly fond of.

At that time, Dudamel was set to conduct eight shows in August, four of which were with the Bolívar Orchestra — a situation that speaks to his deep, decades-long ties with the organization, which started as a youth ensemble and is composed of musicians trained by Venezuela’s famed music education program, El Sistema, which also counts Dudamel as an alumnus.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, dreaming of a trip to London for an extraordinary show. In the meantime, here’s your arts news for this weekend.

Best bets: On our radar this week

Tiffany Tatreau, from center left, Nick Fradiani and Kate A. Mulligan in “A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical.”

(Jeremy Daniel)

’A Beautiful Noise: The Neil Diamond Musical’
This jukebox musical that ran on Broadway for more than a year finally reaches L.A. on its national tour. Featuring nearly 30 of Diamond’s songs, including “Solitary Man,” “Sweet Caroline,” “I Am … I Said” and “Song Sung Blue,” the show is framed by therapy sessions in which the singer-songwriter reflects on his life’s highs and lows and the genesis of his writing with different actors playing “Neil – Then” (2015 “American Idol” winner Nick Fradiani) and “Neil – Now” (Tony nominee Robert Westenberg).
7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 1:30 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, through July 27. Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd. broadwayinhollywood.com

“Portrait of a Man,” Hendrick Goltzius (1607), pen and brown ink and black chalk, with touches of gray wash, incised for transfer. 11 5/8 × 7 15/16 in. (29.5 × 20.2 cm)

(Getty Museum)

‘Lines of Connection: Drawing and Printmaking’
The exhibition shares the narrative of how European artists worked on paper with various media from the 15th through 19th centuries. The show also includes large-scale works by L.A.-based artist Toba Khedoori.
10 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday-Friday; 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Saturdays; closed Monday; through Sept. 14. J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. getty.edu

Joan Crawford, left, and Bette Davis in the 1962 film “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”

(Silver Screen Collection / Getty Images)

A Joan Crawford Triple Feature
The Academy Museum screens three late-period Crawford vehicles in 35 mm in its Ted Mann Theater. “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962), directed by Robert Aldrich and co-starring Bette Davis (who received an Oscar nomination) relaunched the actors’ careers and became a cult classic. In “Strait-Jacket” (1964), directed by British horrormeister William Castle, Crawford played a woman released from a psychiatric hospital 20 years after being convicted of murdering her husband and his lover with an ax. Finally, Crawford’s last big-screen appearance came in “Trog” (1970), wherein she starred for director Freddie Francis, the noted cinematographer, as an anthropologist who attempts to domesticate a caveman in the 20th century U.K.
2:30 p.m., 5 p.m. and 6:45 p.m. Saturday. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org

Composer Alexandre Desplat conducts an evening of his award-winning film scores at the Hollywood Bowl.

(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)

The Cinematic Scores of Alexandre Desplat
Hot on the heels of the release of the hit movie “Jurassic World Rebirth,” in which Desplat incorporated John Williams’ stirring “Jurassic Park” theme into his new score for the film, the celebrated French composer takes the Hollywood Bowl stage to conduct a career-spanning evening of his work. In addition to his Oscar-winning scores for Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and Guillermo Del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” the program includes musical selections from “The Imitation Game,” “The King’s Speech” and more.
8 p.m. Tuesday. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

Culture news

Playwright Richard Greenberg is seen in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood in 2013.

(Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times)

Times theater critic Charles McNulty writes an appreciation of playwright Richard Greenberg, who died July 4 of cancer at age 67. Greenberg’s rise to fame began with his 1988 play “Eastern Standard,” which received a rave review by theater critic Frank Rich in the New York Times. McNulty remembers seeing the play on Broadway as a student and was “dazzled by Greenberg’s New York wit, which struck me as an acutely sensitive, off-angle version of George S. Kaufman’s Broadway brio.”

The casting news continues for “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the Hollywood Bowl. We already know that Cynthia Erivo is set to play Jesus and Adam Lambert will play Judas — now we have it that Milo Manheim will play Peter and Raúl Esparza will play Pontius Pilate. The musical will run Aug. 1, 2 and 3.

The SoCal scene

Pasadena Playhouse, the State Theatre of California, is offering a robust slate of educational offerings.

(Jeff Lorch)

The Pasadena Playhouse is fast moving toward artistic director Danny Feldman’s goal of once again making its historic campus a buzzing hive of educational activity. The playhouse announced earlier this week that it is expanding its offerings, adding options for adults and seniors to its still-growing roster of classes and camps for kids and teenagers. A musical theater community choir, a storytelling workshop and acting lessons for non-actors are also joining the lineup. Check out the schedule, and sign up, here.

IAMA Theatre Company announced its 18th season at the Atwater Village Theatre, featuring the world premiere of Matthew Scott Montgomery’s “Foursome,” a story about queer love and family that is produced in association with Celebration Theatre. There will also be two original workshop productions, including Mathilde Dratwa’s “Esther Perel Ruined My Life,” directed by Ojai Playwrights Conference Producing Artistic Director Jeremy B. Cohen. The 8th annual New Works Festival gets things started from Oct. 9 to 13, and offers audiences the ability to see fresh stagings by playwrights in need of early reactions to help develop and hone their writing. The season ends with a final workshop production of JuCoby Johnson’s “…but you could’ve held my hand,” about the ongoing relationships of four Black friends.

Pack snacks and a blanket and head for the 405 because the Getty’s annual Garden Concerts for kids are back. The series begins Aug. 2 and 3 with 123 Andrés. The next weekend will bring Kymberly Stewart to the stage, followed by Divinity Roxx Presents: Divi Roxx Kids World Wide Playdate on Aug. 16 and 17. The fun begins at 4 p.m., so make a day of it and check out the art first. A free reservation at Getty.edu is required for entry.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

Need a stiff drink after a hard day of doomscrolling? The Food team has created a handy guide featuring 14 martinis that are shaking and stirring the cocktail scene.

Germany shattered the world record for largest string orchestra as 1,353 musicians performed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” The intergenerational event brought together players of all ages, beating the previous record set in Hong Kong in 2018.