Lyle Zimskind

LA Opera has set a high bar in recent years with one compelling Mozart production after another, but 'Abduction' is not quite as dynamic as the others.

Loft Ensemble opens its new production of "The Cherry Orchard," a classic about the passing of an era, forced by a vulgar parvenu with a personal fortune, vindictive motivations and a strong hand. Sound familiar?

Three years after presenting a revival of Philip Glass' modernist classic Einstein on the Beach, LA Opera debuted its own co-production (with the English National Opera) of another, far less known Glass opus, Akhnaten, this weekend. Like Einstein's, the Akhnaten score is grounded in the extended repetition, with slight variations, of pulsifying musical motifs.

One might have been forgiven around the end of the last century for hoping that Hedwig was going to nudge American musical theater in a new direction with an expanded musical and thematic range. Adaptable and renewable as Mitchell and Trask's show has proven to be, at least, we can probably affirm now that we know Hedwig will never die.

For the third season LA Opera is giving LA's opera-curious a chance to check out one of its mainstage productions in a big-screen public simulcast of a live performance from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Crown City Theatre Company's wordless theater piece presents a tonally faithful evocation of the essential story line and characterizations of F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent horror film 'Nosferatu: A Symphony in Terror.'

It's an exciting moment when all four of the Ramones burst into their backstage dressing room at the beginning of John Ross Bowie's new play, "Four Chords and a Gun," about the iconic punk band. The production's costume designer, Kerry Hennessey, and wig designer, Lauren Wilde, instantly bring the classic album covers to life with their just-about-perfect visual recreation of Joey, Johnny, Mark and Dee Dee, and the boys are all abuzz with the shared energy of having just banged out a live set of 28 songs in one hour. After that high-impact introduction, though, the rest of the show is oddly joyless,

LA Philharmonic superstar chief conductor Gustavo Dudamel will be performing across First Street from his usual Disney Hall home to make his LA Opera debut in the last two performances of 'La Boheme' this season on June 10 and 12. Before Dudamel joins for those two dates, the LA Opera Boheme is running for several performances under the baton of up-and-coming Italian conductor Speranza Scappucci, with alternating singers in the three lead roles

Even amid the persistently frisky playfulness of Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night, one character avers early on that "My stars shine darkly over me. The malignancy of my fate might perhaps distemper yours." In the Fugitive Kind theater company's Shine Darkly, Illyria, resident playwright Meghan Brown imagines an aftermath to the rolicking Elizabethan classic in which all that carefree exuberance has culminated in a careless obliviousness that has brought Illyria to the brink of environmental devastation.

This new-to-Los Angeles production of 'Madame Butterfly' is a lot more fun to watch than the oddly static one that LA Opera presented only three years ago.