Lyle Zimskind

LA Opera is kicking off a "Figaro Unbound" trilogy with its own wonderfully excessive west coast premiere production of Ghosts which we suspect will prove to be a company signature piece for years to come. Expect to see this made-in-LA production start making the rounds.

It really is an ugly episode in the story of our urban development that Chavez Ravine recounts, one that every civic-minded Angeleno should learn about. And a breezy, fast-paced evening of silly jokes and charismatic schtick isn't a bad vehicle for getting the weighty story across to an audience that may have little knowledge of these events.

Premiering just as Alex Gibney's new documentary film based on Going Clear receives accolades at the Sundance Film Festival, Disconnection rides in on a small wave of recent arts and entertainment media examinations of the Church and its activities. Thanks in large part to a very strong cast, Disconnection merits a look as well. It's certainly not what anyone would have ever expected to see at the Beverly Hills Playhouse back in Katselas's heyday.

Tension between overbearing fathers and the resentful sons who chafe at their influence is a recurring theme in the American dramatic canon. William Bivens's Ransom, Texas situates this classic conflict in the back office of a family-owned factory where "not a goddamn thing has changed" in years.

Mexican composer Daniel Catán was among the first to devote himself fully to the operatic genre in Spanish. His charmingly strange Florencias en el Amazonas, conceived as a homage to the great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was introduced to LA audiences in 1997 in a production that's now being revived at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with three more performances through next weekend.

Created almost 230 years apart, the short operas Dido & Aeneas and Bluebeard's Castle may never enter the repertory as a standard double bill, but the works share a thematic bond in their portrayal of eternal isolation ensuing from the fateful cutoff of an epic love.

The right performance of La Traviata can be a real thrill, as Verdi's opera delivers some of the most recognizable arias in the Italian repertoire right in the first scene and sustains a highly charged emotional and dramatic pitch throughout its three fairly short acts. Plus it's usually a highlight of every Los Angeles Opera season when company Managing Director Placido Domingo takes the stage to sing in his one annual production here. So with Domingo now appearing in Traviata to open the new season in LA, what could possibly be off?

Almost five years after its Broadway debut, "Race" is finally getting its Los Angeles premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. The plot isn't one of Mamet's strongest, but in addressing what one of the play's characters describes as "the most incendiary topic in our history," this play explicitly fulfills what Mamet has elsewhere described as theater's essential mission to explore "a seemingly unresolvable social problem," a societal "unconscious confusion," in a way that we would not rationally consider anywhere else.

Any roughness around the edges in "The Vacancy," which premiered this weekend seems beside the point. There are just too many powerful scenes containing so much richly evocative dialogue here to walk out thinking about how the sum of these parts might in theory have been made marginally stronger. The much more pressing take-home question is: Hey, who is this playwright Jeptha Storm?

The annual Hollywood Fringe Festival is back in its fifth edition with over 275 shows running day and night in 40 or so theater spaces, all in one neighborhood, through the end of the month. We caught five of these shows Friday night.