Lyle Zimskind

The annual Hollywood Fringe Festival is back in its fifth edition with over 275 shows running day and night in over 30 theater spaces, all in one neighborhood, through the end of the month. We caught four of these shows Thursday night at the Complex Theatres.

The annual Hollywood Fringe Festival is back in its fifth edition with over 275 shows running day and night in over 30 theater spaces, all in one neighborhood, through the end of the month. So far, we've only caught six shows over the festival's first-week preview period, but we've got more on the way.

Over its past three seasons, the LA Philharmonic has undertaken the extraordinarily ambitious project of staging the trio of Italian operas composed by W.A. Mozart with libretti (scripts) by Lorenzo da Ponte in its home venue, the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Conducted by the LA Phil's own star musical director Gustavo Dudamel and directed by Christopher Alden, each of the three productions in three years has been vividly memorable. Collectively, the undertaking has been an absolute triumph and a landmark in this city's musical history.

No one ever seems to mention the opera in their lists of the best things about Los Angeles. But, really, there aren't a lot of cities in the U.S. or any place else where you can go see opera's two greatest stars, Placido Domingo and Renee Fleming, on consecutive days as you can this weekend.

Englishman Peter Brook was already among the world's most prominent theater directors even before he established his own company at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris in the 1970s. One of Brook's latest productions is The Suit, based on a story by apartheid-era black South African writer Can Themba. CAP UCLA presents The Suitthis weekend and next as it approaches the end of its two-year world tour.

"Lucia di Lammermoor" is one of the great warhorses of the 19th-century Italian operatic canon. This doomed affair, Lucia's resulting descent into madness, and the violent crimes of passion that ensue all demand a cast that can both dominate the vocal challenges posed by Donizetti's constant stream of melody and also put the action forward compellingly without undue scenery-chewing. Thankfully, LA Opera's new production of "Lucia," which opened earlier this month, features just such a cast. So why did we feel there was something off about the whole evening?

LA Opera's centennial celebration of English composer Benjamin Britten culminates over the next couple weeks with a gripping production of what is arguably his best opera, "Billy Budd." Adapted from Herman Melville's novella of the same name by E.M. Forster, this version of the story is a perfect specimen of operatic modernism. You won't walk out with a tune playing in your head, but the music conveys a dark story of repression, cruelty and injustice that can seep directly into an audience's consciousness and stick there.

Just 16 months after the grand Colony Theatre in Burbank was on the verge of fiscal collapse and seemed to face the sudden, undesired end of its organizational life after over 35 years of putting on plays, an influx of financial support has brought the company back from the near-dead. Buoyed by its revived fortunes, the Colony is forging ahead with an increased production slate next season and, fast on the heels of that big news announcement, opened its latest show "Sex and Education" this past weekend.

Characters with names and existential dilemmas straight out of Chekhov exchange bons mots thick with contemporary neurotic wit in the currently reigning Tony Award winner for Best Play, Christopher Durang's "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike," now running at the Mark Taper Forum. Directed by David Hyde Pierce (of Frasier fame), who starred in the show's New York production last year, the cast here still features two principal actors in the roles they originated at Lincoln Center and then on Broadway, along with two new leads both good enough to erase any concerns that the L.A. audience is missing out on anything.

Beat-perfect pacing and a stellar production design team can't save Clete Keith's "The Different Shades of Hugh," now receiving its world premiere production at the usually excellent Road Theatre Company's impressive new performance space in North Hollywood. Keith's rigidly schematic plot and a competent but mostly unexciting cast reduce his characters to plot drivers rather than vibrant dramatic engineers in their own right.