4 Times Entertainment in association with The Montalbán is pleased to announce the World Premiere of The Soul of Broadway – Impossible Dreams starring Terron Brooks with musical direction by Mark Vogel on Sunday, November 3, 2019. This special one-night-only concert experience, produced and directed by Brian Purcell and choreographed by Leah Seminario, will bring a fresh perspective to Broadway songs—including classic and contemporary favorites —as Brooks reinterprets them all. The award-winning Brooks, best known for portraying Eddie Kendricks in NBC’s Emmy Award-winning miniseries The Temptations, has starred on Broadway in The Lion King as Simba and Hairspray as Seaweed.

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Electronic music-based nonprofit Give a Beat launched the Prison Electronic Music Program in two California correctional facilities in July 2019 as part of a contract awarded by California Arts Council’s Arts in Corrections (AIC) program. The goal of Give a Beat’s year-long program—which focuses on the fundamentals of DJing and beat production—is to help students develop their own sound expressions and technical acumen while also learning business development and music history. It is designed to help students return to the workforce with valuable technical, social, and entrepreneurial skills. Led by passionate DJs and music producers, currently the course is being taught at California City Correctional Facility (CAC) and Kern Valley State Prison (KVSP). This first Prison Electronic Music Program will run through June 2020. It is Give a Beat’s most expansive and long-term music production offering/course to date.

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Saudade Theatre, the first Portuguese theatre company in the United States, presents the World Premiere of My Favorite Suicide, written and directed by acclaimed Portuguese playwright Mickaël de Oliveira, in a co-production with Lisbon-based theatre company Colectivo 84. My Favorite Suicide is an apocalyptic play that pits society and nature against each other, in which one extreme situation is debated in the context of another, even more, extreme circumstance. Performances of My Favorite Suicide will run from Friday, October 18 through Sunday, November 3, 2019, at 905 Cole Theatre at Anthony Meindl’s Actor Workshop in Hollywood, CA. 

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Atlas Obscura presents Red Thread, theatrical exploration of the concepts of chance and chaos with performer and award-winning magician Siegfried Tieber. Using sleight of hand, magic, and illusion, Tieber’s latest creation guides participants through an unlikely journey, blurring the line between the improbable and the impossible. The whole experience may leave Tieber’s guests wondering if their decisions are theirs and of their own free will, or if they are predetermined. Co-written by Jared Kopf, Red Thread will open on Thursday, October 3, 2019, and run through Sunday, November 10, 2019. Each evening will take place at Pskaufman Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, the subterranean art gallery and event space of award-winning shoe designer and creative visionary Paul Kaufman. 

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Highways turns 30! The performance space presents Behold! Highways’ Queer Fest 2019 May–June, its annual queer performance arts festival, which appropriately collides with the enduring creative space’s 30th birthday. From May 3rd through June 30, 2019, two months of new LGBTQIA work will be presented by Highways’ extended family of artists, writers and performers such as solo-theatre legend Tim Miller (a founder and original co-artistic director), eminent artist-activist Michael Kearns, the nation’s first out transgender modern dance choreographer Sean Dorsey, and Black Lives Matter Co-founder Patrisse Cullors. Look for specific Dirty 30 anniversary events that bookend the festival (5/3, 5/4 and 6/29). Behold! will also feature such emerging performance artists and curators as Tyler Matthew Oyer, Marval A Rex, Celeste XXX, Moises Josue Michel, Kyoko Takenaka and Shruti Purkayastha. 

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Mount Wilson Observatory –  the scientific marvel above Pasadena, atop Mount Wilson – is pleased to announce the third season of its Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome, which will take place on the first Sunday of each month, inside the iconic vaulted dome of the 100-inch Hooker telescope. A wide range of musical adventures, thoughtfully curated by Artistic Director Cécilia Tsan, will be presented in this acoustically remarkable venue during the six-month run of the 2019 season, which concludes on October 6^th. See the Concert Series schedule and line-up below. Poised for rediscovery, the grounds of the legendary observatory— founded in 1904 by astrophysical pioneer George Ellery Hale—are open for free to the public year round. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 11, 2018, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts announced its 2018 Artist Project Grants recipients. Among the ten recipients, Fulcrum Arts was awarded a $40,000 grant for its ambitious Lawrence English project Sirens, which will launch during its A×S Festival starting November 2, 2018. In fact, Sirens will be the highlight of Fulcrum Arts’ 10-day biennial festival. English will create a site-specific installation utilizing some of the remaining 160 civil defense sirens – the original role of their sound was as an agent for alert and protection from WWII through the Cold War – that are scattered across Los Angeles. Reappropriating the sirens for the project, the artist will employ sound as a means to create a spatial mapping, reconfiguring Los Angeles’s geographic, political and historical landscapes. 

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Tilted Field, in association with VS. Theatre Company, is proud to present the world premiere of Giovanni Adams’ new play Love is a Dirty Word, opening in Los Angeles on Saturday, June 17th at 8:00pm. The solo work, performed by Adams, with musical accompaniment by Arturo Lopez, is about a young man finding redemption when he is deemed too dirty to love. This autobiographical piece is rooted in Mr. Adams’ experience as a black, queer, Christian man crossing lines of identity, affinity and ideology. Love is a Dirty Word was developed and directed by Becca Wolff (No Static at All, Outstanding Solo Show, 2015 NY Fringe Festival). The play will run through Saturday, July 15, 2017 at VS. Theatre on Pico. Read the rest of this entry »

After the sold-out and award-winning success of The Day Shall Declare It in 2015, Wilderness returns to the Los Angeles Arts District to remount its immersive, site-specific theatre experience, opening Tuesday, May 10, 2016 and running through Sunday, June 19, 2016. [UPDATE: The show has been extended thru July 31st by popular demand!] The internationally acclaimed physical theatre piece weaves together dynamic movement with a collage of American labor literature from Tennessee Williams and Studs Terkel, exploring the concept of work in America: what it does for us – and what it does to us. Developed and co-directed by Annie Saunders and Sophie Bortolussi (Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More), The Day Shall Declare It will run for a limited time, to audiences of only thirty people per show. The intimate performances will run six nights a week. The 2016 version sees the addition of “The Paradise,” an exclusive pop-up bar with live music curated by Vagrant Bartenders. Read the rest of this entry »

Award-winning pianist and composer Peter Manning Robinson will enthrall audiences with a stunning aural and visual art experience at his The Refractor Piano™ Concert on Thursday, April 28, 2016 at Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station. Performing live with his invention, The Refractor Piano™, Robinson is pioneering a new music form: “refracted music.” Without using prerecorded tracks, triggered samples, external sounds, or MIDI instruments, the Emmy and multiple BMI award-winning composer creates a vast spectrum of new sounds with just a refracted, acoustic piano. In a sense, Robinson plays inside the refractions generated by his newly created instrument. His innovative compositions, rooted in classical and jazz traditions combined with improvisation and acoustic refraction, produce a truly original and transcendent live music experience.  Read the rest of this entry »