Lyle Zimskind

LA Opera kicked off its new season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this weekend with a pair of classics. Saturday night delivered a visually odd but musically solid presentation of "Eugene Onegin," Tchaikovsky's take on the romantic tragedy by Pushkin. Sunday's matinee presented a fantastically entertaining performance of Mozart's "Così Fan Tutte," a sophisticated, slightly unsettling comedy of sexual manners.

Using songs he wrote for the score of Ramzi Abed's 2007 indie film "The Devil's Muse," about the infamous Black Dahlia murder case, iconic early goth rocker David J (Bauhaus, Love and Rockets) has now created his own brief theatrical collage on the same perpetually intriguing LA tragedy.

These six actors in these six roles are very engaging company, and even though the evening is not short, it's never boring for a moment. Indeed, we were even a little disappointed when it ended, as we really were hoping for some more revelatory insight that would fill in all the narrative ellipses that Britt's play had repeatedly teased us with to sustain our interest.

Not only is every one of the five bank tellers featured in "Next Window, Please," competent enough to keep her job, but they're also all really fine women who don't deserve to become unemployed. Unfortunately three of them are about to get laid off. Which three is it going to be, who's going to decide, and how is the decision going to be made? If you're already hooked, you should definitely go see Doug Haverty's new play at the Lonny Chapman Theatre in North Hollywood.

Theatricum Botanicum's outdoor theater space and its surrounding grounds are a grand place to spend a summer evening. And while venerable classics make up most of the repertory staged there, the company also sometimes presents more contemporary works. Right nowBill Bozzone's amusing comedy "Rose Cottages," which premiered at New York's Ensemble Studio Theater a quarter century ago, is getting its west coast premiere under the stars in Topanga Canyon.

Five young, emotionally wrecked New Yorkers baring their hearts in a pair of free group therapy sessions are the endearingly odd subjects of Ryan Scott Oliver's oddly endearing new chamber musical, "Out of My Head," now running at the Pico Playhouse in West L.A.

July is National Ice Cream Month. To celebrate, we'll be reviewing some of our favorite ice cream spots -- and some new ones, too -- all this week.

July is National Parks & Recreation Month, and all month long LAist will be featuring a hand-selected park a day to showcase just a few of the wonderful recreation spaces--big or small--in the Los Angeles area.

A program note for "Twist: An American Musical," the new adaptation of Dickens's "Oliver Twist" set in 1920s New Orleans, suggests that audiences should "feel free to tap your toes to the music" and affirms that "it's okay if the [show's] book...moves you to tears or to laugh out loud." But these are unlikely responses to this show.

Now that the Hollywood Fringe is formally underway, after a week of preview performances, there are, of course, way too many productions up and running to catch more than a small fraction. So how to pick which ones to go see? Well, there's the random crapshoot method. Or you can find out which shows other people have already seen and what they think of them. So far, we've seen five shows selected by random crapshoot. And here's what we think of them, in a roughly descending order of preference.