In the year it has been at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Michael Heizer sculpture known formally as "Levitated Mass" and more familiarly as "the rock" has drawn more than 300,000 people, many of them posing for Instagram or Twitter photos as though they are holding the boulder in their palm or on their shoulder. The shot even has a name —- the "boulder holder" pose.

Doug Pray's new documentary, "Levitated Mass," which has its world premiere this week at the Los Angeles Film Festival, tells the complete story of LACMA's rock star, and the tale has levity and mass.

Reporting...

Two athletic icons whose posters have graced many a bedroom wall recently became more permanent fixtures on opposite ends of the world.

A sculpture of martial artist and film star Bruce Lee by a Guangzhou, China, artist was unveiled Saturday in Los Angeles. And on Monday photos of a statue of Lakers star Kobe Bryant in that same Chinese province popped up on Twitter.

The statue of Kobe in Lakers uniform, standing with a basketball under his arm, appears to be outside the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts' Sculpture Museum, according to tweets.

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Kob...

Maggie Gyllenhaal will return to the stage next spring as a pregnant wife who tries to pedal off her libido in “The Village Bike," producers announced Tuesday.

MCC Theater’s off-Broadway production will begin performances May 21 and open June 9 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York. Obie winner Sam Gold will direct.

Gyllenhaal will play a woman whose conflicting sexual desires and need for stability lead her on a bike tour across the countryside.

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The play premiered in 2011 at London's Royal Court Theater and earned its author, Penelope Skinner, a...

A potent charge of relevant provocation propels “revolver” at the Celebration Theatre. In the final production at its longtime venue, L.A.’s flagship gay theater scores a profoundly affecting bull's-eye with Chris Phillips’ incisive study of violence and forgiveness, as expressed in societal, personal and even eternal terms.

Unfolding in seemingly random vignettes that echo the six chambers of the title firearm, “revolver” explores its thematic subtext via distinct issues, from homophobia to substance abuse to the afterlife, that impact on the gay community,...

The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation has awarded more than $127,000 to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The grant is to help the company's outreach arm, which brings the Bard's work to children in underprivileged schools.

Other beneficiaries from the foundation's recent round of funding include the Islington Community Theatre, Half Moon Young People’s Theatre and the Young Musicians Symphony Orchestra.

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“We are delighted to continue supporting projects and initiatives which provide high-quality tuition in the arts and heritage, and make an...

Helen Mirren, who has reigned on screen and stage as the queen, can add another jewel to her crown.

National Theatre Live announced Monday that its June 13 live broadcast of "The Audience," which stars Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, attracted a record 100,000 viewers in North America and the UK, the Associated Press reports.

The success has prompted NT Live, which screens stage shows from England at movie theaters around the world, to plan a series of encores this summer on both sides of the Atlantic.

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North American will host 700 screenings of "The Audience," while...

In terms of donations, arts and culture was Americans’ fastest-growing charitable cause in 2012, rising an estimated 7.8% to $14.44 billion, according to a leading annual research report on charitable giving.

Donations to education rose second-fastest, with a 7% gain, according to the latest edition of “Giving USA,” issued Tuesday by the Chicago-based Giving Institute and its research partner, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University.

Overall charitable giving totaled $316.2 billion, up 3.5% from 2011, the report said. The “modest overall gains ......

Broadway shows posted a healthy uptick in box-office revenue in the week immediately following the Tony Awards, with best-play winner "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike," by Christopher Durang, seeing an especially large percentage jump in ticket receipts from the previous week.

"Vanya and Sonia," running at the Golden Theatre, grossed a total of $654,304 for the week ending Sunday, up 18.3% from the previous week. Overall, Broadway shows grossed a total of $24.8 million for the week, a 6% jump from the previous week. 

The revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Cinderella" won only one Tony...

Some heavy lifting took place on Sunday night at American Jewish University’s Gindi Auditorium, when Bodytraffic performed excerpts from its 2009 work, “Transfigured Night.”  One of three pieces on a shared bill with L.A. Dance Project, the lifting, unfortunately, had nothing to do with partnering, but instead featured dancers awkwardly raising and lowering Ascon de Nijs’ hefty lighting sticks shrouded in wood and made of PVC pipe. 

Perhaps Lillian Barbeito and Tina Finkelman Berkett, who co-founded the L.A.-based troupe in 2007 (and present only commissioned works),...

Is Broadway ready to see Neil Patrick Harris' angry inch?

Coming off a successful stint hosting the Tony Awards last week, Harris will be heading back to Broadway next year in a production of the musical "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." Producers announced on Monday that Harris will star in the first Broadway staging of the popular John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask musical about an angsty, transgender rock musician.

"Hedwig" is expected to open on Broadway in spring 2014, but no opening date or theater has been announced. The musical was first performed in 1997 and had a long off-Broadway...

For all of the attention lavished upon West Coast composers lately, one who has mostly escaped the net is Ernest Bloch.

Though Swiss-born, Bloch lived a good deal of his life on the West Coast, directing the San Francisco Conservatory and teaching at UC Berkeley. He spent his last 18 years in the tiny town of Agate Beach on the Oregon coast -- and you can hardly get further West than that. 

So Long Beach Opera, champions of the new and/or neglected, stepped into the breach Saturday night, staging what was touted as the U.S. professional premiere of Bloch’s sole opera, “Macbeth.&...

New to the modern classroom we call the app store is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. An app designed for iPads gives users the chance to go deeper into the work best known for its “Ode to Joy” movement.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony the app has been downloaded by half a million people since its May release. A demo version is free, the full app is $13.99. (There are also iPod and iPhone versions.)

It's from Touch Press, a London-based company with a wide range of educational apps ranging from Shakespeare’s sonnets to the periodic table of elements.

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