Plácido Domingo has two simultaneous engagements in Los Angeles in May and early June, conducting productions of Puccini's "Tosca" at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the new "Dulce Rosa" at the Broad Stage. But his demanding schedule isn't preventing the tenor from jetting to China and Italy in between performances of the two operas.

The 72-year-old Domingo is scheduled to sing in "Nabucco" in Beijing on Wednesday and Friday as part of the annual NCPA Opera Festival.  He is then expected to return to L.A. in order to conduct "Dulce Rosa" on Saturday and "Tosca" on Sunday.

Domingo is also...

It’s the end of an artistic era: After more than a century, the Metropolitan Opera has disbanded its ballet with a modern-day buyout.

The eight remaining members of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, down from 16 in 2011, agreed Monday to leave the company, the New York Times reports. The dancers accepted a package that includes $75,000 in severance and two additional years of health care coverage under the opera’s plan.

There's disagreement on whether the ballet, which has been associated with the Met since its inception in 1883, will be forever defunct.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in...

Bette Midler might have been snubbed when it comes to Tony nominations this year, but she seems to be having the last laugh at the box office.

The Divine Miss M's one-woman show "I'll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers" is becoming one of Broadway's hottest tickets this spring. At $149.27, the production hit the second-highest average paid admission, behind "The Book of Mormon" ($194.47), according to information released by the Broadway League.

The show surpassed the Tom Hanks starrer "Lucky Guy" ($143.23), which has held the No. 2 spot for weeks.

PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage

Both shows...

There are many ways of being a political playwright. Christopher Shinn's approach, centered on characters rather than on ideologies, is one that will never go out of style.

Illuminating large-scale public concerns through the microscopic examination of individual behavior, Shinn finds political meaning in psychological patterns. In plays such as "Four" and "Where Do We Live" (to my mind, the most resonant theatrical response to 9/11), he has shown how the conduct of our nation is reflected in our most intimate relationships.

"Dying City," Shinn's mesmerizing drama now having its Los Angeles...

Appearing with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra eight years ago, 23-year-old Alisa Weilerstein was a playfully kittenish cello soloist in Tchaikovsky's "Rococo" Variations. I wrote then that when she matures, look out.

I can take no credit for divination. The crowd at UCLA's Royce Hall was clearly captivated. Weilerstein had been on LACO music director Jeffrey Kahane's radar three years before she made her debut with the orchestra. She was already being followed with intense interest by the music business.

She's matured; she's now a star; and Sunday night Weilerstein was back with Kahane to...

By some contrarian alchemy, director Amanda Dehnert’s 2007 Trinity Rep-originated rethink of the world’s longest-running musical refreshes this oftentimes cloying classic’s evanescent charm. Her concept places the...

While the proposed “subway to the sea” may be decades away if it ever comes, Los Angeles Opera isn’t waiting for it to happen.  

The company is making the trek from downtown right now, launching L.A. Opera Off Grand on the Broad Stage on Friday night with an evening-length, world-premiere opera, “Dulce Rosa.” 

L.A. Opera’s tireless general director Plácido Domingo was in the pit, vigorously lending his prestige and drawing power. This is good — bringing fully-staged opera to people who can’t, or won’t, navigate the mess that east-west Los...

William Shakespeare is believed to have written 154 sonnets during his life. Carrying around the complete volume has never been physically burdensome since each poem is a mere 14 lines. But a new application for the Apple iPad and iPhone is seeking to make the sonnets even more portable and accessible.

The free app, which is downloadable from the Apple store, is a multimedia experience that includes short videos of actors reciting the sonnets. New videos will be released on a rolling basis, shot on different locations throughout New York.

The project is the brainchild of the New York...

“Chuck” star Zachary Levi will make his Broadway debut opposite stage and screen alum Krysta Rodriguez in "First Date,” a musical romantic comedy with a book by “Gossip Girl” writer Austin Winsberg.

Previews will start July 9 at the Longacre Theatre, with the opening scheduled for Aug. 8. Music and lyrics are by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner.

Levi, who sang in Disney’s “Tangled,” will play an uptight banker on a blind date with an artist and serial-dater (Rodriguez) at a New York restaurant, where patrons and staff become a chorus of the pair&...

A conference to help dancers tackle the Sisyphean task of surviving and succeeding in Los Angeles will feature an unprecedented array of city, county, nonprofit and artistic leaders.

The inaugural L.A. Dance Summit, scheduled for June 8 at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Little Tokyo, is a “big tent opportunity,” said co-organizer Bonnie Oda Homsey, a professional dancer, administrator and educator. 

Because of the city’s sprawl, “it’s easy get in a silo mode and miss opportunities to communicate,” said Homsey, who performed with the...

Like the Oscars, the Tony Awards are preceded each year by a bevy of award shows that renders the main event something of a foregone conclusion.

This Broadway season, many of the front-runners have become clear relatively quickly, with the big-top-themed revival of "Pippin" and the new play "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" by Christopher Durang expected to prevail on Tony night.

Both productions took home the top honors in their categories on Sunday at the Drama Desk Awards, held at Town Hall in New York. They also won big at the Drama League Awards held Friday at the Marriott Marquis.

FU...

Following an absence of more than two years to recover from injuries and illnesses, James Levine made his big return to the podium Sunday to conduct the Metropolitan Opera orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

But the 69-year-old Levine didn't entirely return to form, having to lead the concert from the confines of a wheelchair.

Though questions remain about Levine's long-term ability to conduct, "this was a day to celebrate his return and bask in his musical glory," wrote New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini.

When Levine entered Stern Auditorium on Sunday afternoon, he received a minute-long...

An essay in the program for Los Angeles Opera's new production of "Tosca," which opened at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday night, begins by quoting Benjamin Britten on Puccini's opera. The British composer, Joseph Berger writes, was "'sickened' by the music's 'cheapness and emptiness,' and the astute critic Joseph Kerman famously called [the opera] 'a shabby little shocker.'"

A few pages on, director John Caird starts out a note on his production by calling "Tosca" "one of the greatest works of music theater ever written." He finds that "its importance is undiminished a century after...

Jean Nouvel, the French architect, is credited with creating "installations" for the Los Angeles Philharmonic production of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," although "transformations" would be more accurate. Azzedine Alaïa designed the striking costumes. The result is a stunningly high style and wonderfully performed French "Figaro" that customized Walt Disney Concert Hall on Friday night in more ways than one.

But since when do the French have a problem with French fries?

The most noticeable thing upon entering Disney on Friday night was that Nouvel has audaciously covered up Gehry's...

Two years ago Stephen Sachs began working on a play about the philosophy and practice of flamenco. He figured he had all the material he needed, having spent years in close proximity to flamenco dancers as the co-artistic director of the Fountain Theatre, home of the long-running performance series "Forever Flamenco!" But after further research, he realized that the Spanish art form intertwined deeply with certain existential preoccupations that also inhabited his writer's mind.

"The older I get, the more aware I have become of the loss of loved ones, the time in front of me and how I'm...

For nearly a century starting in the 1880s, photographers went from sluice to street corner to suburban pool to record one utility's efforts to electrify Greater Los Angeles and beyond.

The result of their labors: the 70,000-image Southern California Edison photography archive. "It's astonishing both in its size and diversity," says William Deverell, co-project director of an online exhibition showcasing the collection. "From the late 19th century to the mid-'70s, it documented everything from infrastructure to interiors to appliances."

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times

The...

Stage and film legend James Earl Jones once said, "It's hard for an actor to go wrong if he's true to the words that August has written."

As an actor and writer, I have found that statement to be true of only a few playwrights. There is usually at least a grunt or two to be added or taken away when attacking most text. The notion that the writer is God and the script is more like scripture is reserved only for our most sacred of playwrights. One thinks of Tennessee Williams, Amiri Baraka, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare.

The first time I was overcome with August Wilson's words I was about 10 years...

"Celluloid condoms between the audience and the immediate gratification of understanding."

"More like watching Playboy TV than having sex."

Hyperbolic outbursts are not uncommon in opera, but rarely were they so concentrated or, um, vivid.

What riled opera so?

Supertitles. Translations usually projected above the stage have driven directors to issue bomb threats. No less than James Levine rashly stated he would rather die than acquiesce.

Three decades after they were invented by the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, what was once an anathema's anathema is now recognized, even if grudgingly by...

"William Wegman: He Took Two Pictures. One Came Out," an exhibition of the artist's text-based black-and-white photographs from the 1970s, is on view at Marc Selwyn Fine Art through July 6.

So you have a new show of your old work.

Yes, and it's new old work. The bulk of it is work that I came across relatively recently. I was going to move to New York temporarily from L.A., Santa Monica. I was there from '70 to '72 and a half. When I moved temporarily, I gave my studio to John Baldessari with the thought that I would come back. I never came back, and I was in the middle of these photographs...

Surprisingly, little has changed at the Eames House since 1949, when Charles and Ray Eames designed their Pacific Palisades home and studio as a model of affordable modern living. Most of the objects they lived with remain in place at the two-part, rectangular structure on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

Charles died in 1978; his wife and professional partner passed away 10 years later. But they are remembered for their creative use of materials and innovative design of architecture, furniture and industrial products.

Ray's colorfully patterned dishes, place mats and napkins are stacked in...

Vincent Kartheiser will swap his sharp suits for ruffles and coattails. The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis announced that the “Mad Men” star will play Mr. Darcy in its summer production of “Pride and Prejudice.”

The adaptation by Simon Reade will begin previews July 6, with an official opening July 12. The limited engagement will run through Aug. 31.

Guthrie leader Joe Dowling will direct; no additional casting has been announced.

PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage

Kartheiser, best known for playing unpopular adman Pete Campbell, has a long history with the Guthrie. The...

What do we do with the Duke? He was, most agree, the greatest jazz composer who ever lived. And more.

Duke Ellington was the soul of American music. David Schiff has just written a brilliantly illuminating book, "The Ellington Century," that places the Duke at the center of it all. Academic Ellington studies are extensive. Terry Teachout has an Ellington biography on the way.

And yet Ellington remains an outsider. A handful of his compositions are standards. But his large-scale symphonic works, his opera, his this and his that — he broke boundaries — are significant rarities....