Dara Weinberg

Kitty McNamee is the artistic director and founder of Hysterica Dance Company, which was founded in 1997. Her primary training is in modern dance, but Hysterica's visceral, physical work draws on influences from cinema, music, and popular culture. The LA Times wrote this about Hysterica in 2002: "Choreographer Kitty McNamee sees contemporary pop culture too clearly to be seduced by its lies. Probing it in a series of eerie, neo-Expressionist dance dramas for her...

Roll over, Oscar Wilde. The funniest, most absurd, most farcical show in town is David Greenspan's She Stoops To Comedy at the Evidence Room. Tony Kushner has called playwright Greenspan "probably all-round the most talented theater artist of my generation." He is one of the few modern playwrights we have ever experienced who writes for the theatre as theatre, with all the possibilities of talking to the audience, making fun of the form, and...

The Fairfax Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library opened this morning. Located at 161 S. Gardner Street, just north of 3rd, the new branch boasts lots of parking, beautiful dark wood furniture, a phalanx of computers and a very large floor plan. It has one of the biggest footprints of the regional branches, with a central section full of tables, chairs and room for study groups. More space doesn't necessarily mean more books...

Writers, throw in the towel! Why spend years angling for agents and contracts when you can P.O.D - or publish online? Carl Hayes, online novelist, embraces conformity and eschews the starving-artist lifestyle on his tongue-in-cheek website, Improving Thomas, the tale of a former nonconformist artist who has now embraced the life, and personal philosophy, of an office drudge. Hayes posts new chapters, prettily PDF'd, regularly and will even notify you when the latest installment...

The Company of Angels opens Lisa Loomer's The Waiting Room tonight at 8 pm in Silver Lake. Directed by Cornerstone Theater Company veteran Armando Molina, this provocative black comedy about female beauty, stereotypes, and medicine hasn't been performed in Los Angeles since its 1994 world premiere at the Taper, but the issues it addresses loom even larger today (I Want A Famous Face, anyone?) We aren't the first culture, nor will we be the...

The Woman's Club of Hollywood is sponsoring an event tonight, The Stand-Up Chicks, with proceeds benefiting Hurricane Katrina relief. The line-up of over 10 female comedians features Stephanie Whang, our friend Maia Madison singing "All The Good Men Are Gay," and other quirky and divine tidbits of the LA stand-up scene. This fundraiser, originally intended to help support the college fund of a graduating senior at Hollywood High School, has now been expanded to...

The resilient and acclaimed Open Fist Theatre Company, recently thrust from their home of 15 years in Hollywood, has gallantly taken up residence in a new home at the Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica. Speaking in Tongues, by Andrew Bovell, is the last show of their 05-06 season. It is a perfect collaboration, not only between two theatre companies, one with a play and no stage, and another with a space and an empty...

Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth and The Autograph Man, is on a roll this September, and it's bringing her back to SoCal. Not only is she going to be in Los Angeles for An Evening with Zadie Smith at 826 LA on October 2nd (details coming to you as soon as we get them), not only is her third book, On Beauty, coming out September 13th, she's on the Booker Prize shortlist. She's...

Laist finally finished all three of Alexander McCall Smith's short comic novels in the Portugese Irregular Verbs trilogy, just in time to get caught up for the first book in a new series and the latest book in an old one. After a very successful six-book run in a planned eight-book arc about the Botswanan detective Precious Ramotswe, Smith launched a new set of mysteries around Scottish moral philosopher Isabel Dalhousie. The Sunday Philosopher's...

What better way to wake up an Ahmanson audience than by having four swimsuit-clad ripped New York street kids, including the gorgeous, barely-legal Ricky Ullman, cannonball into a giant pool of water in the orchestra pit? Dead End, the first of 21 plays scheduled by Center Theatre Group's new artistic director Michael Ritchie, begins with a splash and ends with a song. We've never seen a large crowd of old theatre-goers pay better attention...