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.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times

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.

PHOTOS: Hollywood stars onstage

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.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times

“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.

PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage

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.

PHOTOS: Arts and...

Though not nearly as famous as his Campbell's soup cans or his Brillo boxes, Andy Warhol's Perrier screen prints created in the '80s helped to elevate the sparkling-water brand into the realm of post-modern chic. This summer, the French company is repaying the favor by issuing a limited series of bottles that pay tribute to Warhol's designs.

The new Perrier bottles will feature four different label designs that are inspired by Warhol's prints. Some of the bottles also will feature famous quotes from the artist, such as "In the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes" and "Art...

Organizers of the Pritzker Architecture Prize — the highest award in the field of architecture — have turned down a request to retroactively honor Denise Scott Brown, whose design partner and husband Robert Venturi received the award in 1991.

Peter Palumbo, the current chair of the Pritzker jury, said in a letter that "Pritzker juries, over time, are made up of different individuals.... A later jury cannot reopen or second-guess the work of an earlier jury, and none has ever done so."

The letter, dated June 14, was addressed to the leaders of a group known as Women in Design, at...

In the decade since its founding, the International Contemporary Ensemble has become essential. The flexible collective of 33 musicians is likely the most accomplished new music group in New York, and it makes a significant contribution toward keeping the city musically cosmopolitan, regularly providing compelling performances of meaningful and dauntingly difficult new music from afar.

One of the most memorable concerts of recent work I've heard in the last half-year, for instance, was ICE's program devoted to the feisty, remarkable Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth at Columbia University in...

Several treasured works of art at the Detroit Institute of Arts -- including an 1887 Van Gogh self-portrait and Giovanni Bellini’s “Madonna and Child” -- are safe from being sold off for the time being.

Michigan’s Atty. Gen. Bill Schuette asserted his formal opinion that the museum’s art collection could not be sold by the city to help pay off its massive $15 billion to $17 billion in debt. The collection is held in charitable trust for the people of Michigan, the attorney general wrote.

Schuette noted the city’s serious financial situation in the 22 page...

British artist David Hockney and filmmaker Martin Scorsese will be this year’s honorees at the annual L.A. County Museum of Art’s Art + Film Gala, the museum announced on Monday.

The big-ticket event, which will be held Saturday, Nov. 2, is a fundraiser for the museum and gathers notable names from the art, music, fashion and film worlds.

Now in its third year, the Art + Film Gala is co-chaired by Leonardo DiCaprio and LACMA trustee Eva Chow, who is married to Mr. Chow restaurateur Michael Chow. Gucci is the presenting sponsor.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture by The Times

A focal point of...

Photojournalist Alex Webb, associated with Magnum Photos, has contributed to such magazines as GEO, Time and the New York Times Magazine over several decades. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Rebecca Norris Webb, also a photographer.

How and when did the idea for "The Suffering of Light" — a 30-year retrospective — come about? What inspired the title?

The creation began some years ago as a series of discussions with two different museum curators about putting together a midcareer survey exhibition and book of my work. Neither exhibition transpired; however in the process, the...

Arts advocates who tried to throw a touchdown bomb in Sacramento this spring were sacked for a loss instead Friday as the California Legislature passed a $234-billion budget that cuts funding for the state's arts grant-making agency 7.6%.

The budget for the 2013-14 fiscal year that begins July 1 includes $5.024 million for the California Arts Council -- $412,000 less than its current funding.

It's a far cry from the $75 million in guaranteed annual funding that arts advocates had sought in a bill that got tabled last month in the state Assembly's appropriations committee.

Under the new budget,...

In the history of music, certain artists always will be twined with certain venues: Charlie Parker and Birdland, the Apollo Theater and Ella Fitzgerald, James Levine and the Metropolitan Opera House.

The number of performers who've played the Hollywood Bowl is so long and venerable that no single name could dominate its legacy, not even that of the Fab Four. But over the last eight years, since he made his Bowl debut as a 24-year-old conducting Silvestre Revueltas' "La Noche de los Mayas" and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, Gustavo Dudamel has put his mark on the storied amphitheater many times....

NEW YORK — It's easy to imagine that "Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes," a vast, dense and beautifully installed new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, began as a kind of parlor game. You can almost picture the curators, Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, brainstorming to come up with the most unlikely, counterintuitive thesis about Le Corbusier they could — and then setting out to defend it with straight faces, deep scholarship and a good deal of museological firepower.

The thesis is that Le Corbusier was an architect who put concern with the natural world at the...

In traditional Native American belief, spirits can inhabit seemingly inanimate things.

Can paintings, sculptures, decorative objects and handicrafts also be infused with the spirits of their subjects, and of the people who made them?

If so, the new Irene Helen Jones Parks Gallery of Art, which opens Saturday at the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park with the exhibition "Art of the West," is 4,000 square feet of haunted space where the gathered ghosts may be in tumult.

In the largest room, two Navajo wool blankets woven in the 1800s hang on a wall opposite John Gast's...

Playwright Sarah Ruhl is a proven practitioner whose buoyantly surreal plays are moored by cosmically serious themes.

Pulitzer-nominated in 2005, Ruhl’s “The Clean House” exploited a comical situation -- a Latina domestic worker's quest for the perfect joke -- to explore larger issues of death and loss. And in “Eurydice,” recently seen in a stellar production at A Noise Within, Ruhl slanted the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus into a moving story of undying paternal love -- Ruhl’s moving valedictory to her own dead father.

Ruhl’s 2007 play, “...

Six months after her husband's death, Olga Knipper, famed actress and widow of Anton Chekhov, is gearing up to face an audience again.

In a dimly lighted rehearsal hall in St. Petersburg, Russia, with two other actors, she prepares to resume her life onstage. Her monologue from "The Cherry Orchard," though, is not coming out right. She fears that grief has destroyed her capacity to feel.

Outside a graver crisis is erupting. A march of workers ended in a massacre. Actors from this company may have been killed. The bloodshed of this day — Jan. 9, 1905 — will be recorded in history...

It's a typically dry afternoon in Sun Valley, in an industrial area near the Burbank airport where the pavement is scorched and the air is speckled with construction dust.

Tucked behind a 12-foot-high ficus hedge, however, inside a Willy Wonka-like facility teeming with invention, Jim Doyle is making it rain.

A sheet of water cascades from the ceiling with a thunderous roar inside a dark, garage-like space called Area 9. Water rushes out of wide-mouthed hoses on the cement floor, flooded with half an inch. The cinder block walls, painted black, are coated with mist and a damp, acrid scent...

Let’s face it: Theater lovers don’t always plan in advance. Sometimes the yen for a glitzy, high-heeled hit such as “Kinky Boots” just washes over you unexpectedly. Which is why the mega-popular TKTS booth in Times Square -- which turns 40 this month -- has become a landmark for procrastinating tourists, not to mention budget-minded arts lovers.

Founded by the Theatre Development Fund in June 1973, TKTS offers theater-goers same-day seats on and off-Broadway at a discount. The drawback? The lines, of course. And a first-come-first-served policy that, in Manhattan, means...

Ethan Hawke has a taste for the macabre. More specifically: “Macbeth.”

The actor will star as the king of Scotland in the Shakespeare tragedy at Lincoln Center this winter. Jack O'Brien, whom Hawke worked with on 2006/2007’s "The Coast of Utopia" -- a role that earned him a Tony nomination -- will direct. The two also worked together on the 2003-04 Broadway staging of "Henry IV."

“Macbeth,” however, has long been on Hawke’s wish list. “It’s a part I’ve always wanted to play,” he said on the PBS series “Shakespeare Uncovered.&...

Before the 1980s, abstract painting typically embraced pure form — gesture or geometry as something self-contained, insulated from outside contamination.

Over the past generation, however, another practice has bumped that insular, aloof idea aside. Conceptual abstraction flings open the door to the world and everything in it.

"Painting in Place," a scruffy yet ambitious exhibition organized by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), is the latest to survey the widespread and invigorating territory. Thirty artists show 47 works in the old Farmers & Merchants Bank downtown. The range of...

When Edwin S. Porter made the film “The Great Train Robbery” in 1903, he counted on the audience to connect scenes that were discontinuous in time and space. Dashiell Manley asks us to do much the same, creating three related installations at three different locations: LAXART, Redling Fine Art and a storage locker a few blocks away (accessible via Redling).

The works, which are all different versions of each other, were inspired by Porter’s innovative film that defined not only the western genre but cinematic storytelling as we know it.

Manley dissected the film’s third...

Made up to look like black and white drawings, the protagonists in Mary Reid Kelley’s videos speak in a constant, densely allusive patter. This approach worked swimmingly in her 2010 show at Susanne Vielmetter, which featured two videos that looked at the darker side of early modernism. The stark, stylized appearance of those works perfectly evoked stripped-down modern aesthetics.

Her latest efforts — in collaboration with her partner, Patrick Kelley — are less taut and more expansive. Their effect, while equally beguiling, is more diffuse.

“Priapus Agonistes,” is...

Political comedy isn't what it used to be, but what shtickmeister could compete with the running gags of those currently holding office?

David Mamet took up the challenge and came up short with his Oval Office farce "November," leadenly staged last fall at the Mark Taper Forum. Now we have "Yes, Prime Minister" trying to tickle audiences at the Geffen Playhouse with the behind-the-scenes machinations of the British government.

Written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, the team that co-created the popular BBC television series "Yes Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister," the show redeploys the...

“Artifex,” at Koplin Del Rio, is a group exhibition of Chicano artists that claims to transcend Chicano identity. It’s not clear exactly what this means, but the show draws some nice connections between artists who are far-flung except, of course, for their Chicano identities. Have we come so far that it is surprising to find Chicano artists have something in common? Or is it proof that there is something called “Chicano art”?

At any rate, there is a sympathetic vibration between Shizu Saldamando’s delicately drawn portraits of her hip young friends and...

After dazzling your eyeballs at LACMA’s James Turrell exhibition across the street, do something similar for your ears at Tyler Adams’ solo debut at Steve Turner Contemporary.

Adams uses sound — low droning tones — and the vibrating skins of audio speakers to generate much of his work, which addresses the eyes, ears and sometimes the body with remarkable elegance. In a gallery context that generally privileges sight, the exhibition asks us to contemplate other facets of experience.

The show begins on the building’s facade, with a row of satellite dishes emitting a...

Sandra Bullock could soon sign on for the hard-knock life: The Oscar-winner is reportedly in talks to play the boozed-up Miss Hannigan in Sony Pictures' planned reboot of "Annie."

Bullock would star alongside "Beasts of the Southern Wild's" Quvenzhane Wallis as adorable orphan Annie and Jamie Foxx as a modern-day Daddy Warbucks, a wealthy would-be mayor named Benjamin Stacks.

Jane Lynch is currently starring as the evil orphanage headmistress in the Tony-nominated Broadway revival.

PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage

Bullock, who stars in the upcoming comedy "The Heat," initially turned down the...

“This is either the longest suicide note in history, or the juiciest, dirtiest, most delicious confession you’ll ever hear,” begins “Hungry Woman” at Casa 0101. Food, family and post-feminist freedom are the chief thematic ingredients in playwright Josefina López's witty, compelling fantasia, and though still refining, it’s perhaps her richest work yet.

Adapted from López's novel, “Hungry Woman in Paris,” this nonlinear account follows outspoken Canela (bravura Rachel González), a Mexican American journalist facing existential meltdown. After her...

"Sweet Bird of Youth" officially opened this week and has garnered enthusiastic reviews from London critics. The production is directed by Marianne Elliott, who previously worked with Numrich on the Broadway run of "War Horse."

Cattrall plays the washed-up movie star Alexandra...

A portrait of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II that was commissioned to mark her 60 years on the throne has been defaced at Westminster Abbey in London. The painting, created by artist Ralph Heimans, has been taken down from public viewing.

A statement published on the official website of Westminster Abbey said that the incident occurred at lunchtime on Thursday. A visitor sprayed paint on the portrait, which hangs in the Chapter House section of the historic church.

"Until work can be done to remedy the damage it will – very regrettably – not be possible to have the painting on public...

“If you ever discover that what you're seeing is a play within a play, just slow down, take a deep breath, and hold on for the ride of your life.” I fondly remembered this line, my favorite of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts,” while watching the 2Cents Theatre Group's production of “Private Eyes: A Comedy of Suspicion” at the Hudson Theatre.

Steven Dietz’s 1996 dark comedy tells a tale of adultery among a group of theater people in an ever-dissolving sequence of plays within plays within plays.

Married actors Matthew and Lisa (Philip Asta and...

A reprise of a 2012 production at the Odyssey, Matthew Leavitt’s “The Boomerang Effect,” now at the Zephyr, is a comic romp produced by Del Shores and featuring many of the original cast. Veteran director Dámaso Rodriguez once again helms the proceedings, which are engaging but indubitably “lite” – no misspelling intended.

A sort of “La Ronde” for millennials, the play is a somewhat retro sex comedy about the romantic travails of five couples, from a slacker bag boy who has just learned that his girlfriend is pregnant to an older executive who...

A key moment in the history of post-World War II European avant-garde music was when Stanley Kubrick threw out the score that Alex North had written for “2001: A Space Odyssey” and replaced it with the temporary track he had been using.

Along with “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and “The Blue Danube” was the Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s mysteriously misty “Atmosphéres.” It seemed that everybody and their brother saw the film, and that every college student in America brought the soundtrack. For the first time, ultra-modern music was in the...

Long Beach Opera announced Wednesday its 2014 season will include works by Duke Ellington, John Adams and Wynton Marsalis. The season will feature four productions -- the same as the current season -- at venues around Long Beach and San Pedro.

The company specializes in intimate and experimental productions of pieces that aren't often performed at major opera houses.

Long Beach Opera will kick off the season with a production of Ellington's "Queenie Pie" (Jan. 25, Feb. 1 and 2) at the Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro. The presentation will be a co-production with the Chicago Opera Theater....

Riding high after winning six Tony Awards on Sunday, including the prize for new musical, "Kinky Boots" will launch a national tour in September 2014 that will begin in Las Vegas, producers announced Wednesday on the show's website.

No other cities on the tour have been disclosed. The musical, based on the 2005 British movie about a drag queen who rescues a foundering shoe factory, debuted in Chicago last year before opening in April at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in New York.

Pop star Cyndi Lauper won a Tony for writing the songs for the show. In the current Broadway production, Tony-winner...

"Ann," the one-woman show starring Holland Taylor as former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, has posted a closing notice on Broadway. The play will have its last performance at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on June 30.

Taylor received a Tony Award nomination for her performance but lost on Sunday to Cicely Tyson in "The Trip to Bountiful."

"Ann" officially opened March 7. Producers of the play recently announced that they would be extending its run through Sept. 1. But Wednesday's announcement of the closure indicates that ticket sales weren't strong enough to sustain an extension.

PHOTOS: Arts and...

By some measures, L.A.'s Center Theatre Group is the busiest nonprofit stage company in the nation — and it's the biggest by far outside Manhattan. But now this theatrical giant is in serious need of more than a little help from its friends.

The 2012-13 fiscal year that ends June 30 is expected to yield the fifth consecutive splash of red ink since mid-2008 for the company that runs the Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas Theatre.

Artistic director Michael Ritchie and managing director Edward Rada said in a recent interview that they expect a $500,000 loss — after...

The second edition of RADAR L.A.-- the Los Angeles festival dedicated to contemporary theater from around the world -- is scheduled to begin Sept. 24 and will feature a number of presitigious companies, including the critically acclaimed British group Complicite. 

RADAR 2013 will be presented by REDCAT at Disney Hall and the California Institute of the Arts in partnership with Center Theatre Group. As was the case with the festival's inaugural 2011 version, this year's lineup will be split evenly between local and international productions, according to a spokeswoman.

RADAR is scheduled to run...

Though Shakespeare’s Bottom claimed his dream was “past the wit of man” to describe, it’s well within the wit of the Troubadour Theater Company to revive in spectacular sequin-studded style with the return of “A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream” to Burbank’s Falcon Theatre.

Even by the Troubies’ typically reliable comic standards, this commedia dell’arte-infused mash-up of classical lit and pop culture is an exceptionally hilarious and energetic  romp.

Arguably the zaniest of Shakespeare’s comedies, “A Midsummer...

German director Achim Freyer divided Los Angeles audiences three years ago when L.A. Opera began rolling out his avant-garde staging of Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung" at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

While many admired Freyer's challenging, pictorial interpretation of the four-opera cycle, there was also a fair amount of booing and critical backlash against his visual aesthetic.

This season, Freyer has returned to "Ring" territory by directing a production in Mannheim, Germany. The staging is sort of new: Freyer has brought back many of the same costumes and much of the same clown-like...

It's a pairing that theater producers in New York and London would no doubt go ga-ga over. But for the time being at least, only audiences in Sydney, Australia, can catch Cate Blanchett and French film icon Isabelle Huppert performing a frightening folie à deux in a new production of Jean Genet's "The Maids."

Blanchett and Huppert play the homicidal houseservants Claire and Solange, respectively, in the Sydney Theatre Company's English-language production that is directed by Benedict Andrews. Rounding out the three-person cast is Elizabeth Debicki as their wealthy mistress. The 22-year-old...

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The Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades boasts a magnificent collection of ancient art in a replica of a Roman Villa, but this summer the biggest sculpture on display will be a creation from 2013: a 23-foot-tall, five-ton steel wheel that will be the centerpiece of an avant-garde production of the ancient drama “Prometheus Bound.”

The play, believed to have had its premiere around 450 B.C., depicts the suffering of the titan Prometheus, who’s been chained by the vengeful gods to a remote mountain. His transgression:...

After 20 years at the Getty Research Institute, Wim de Wit, the head of the architecture and contemporary art offerings there and co-curator of the current Pacific Standard Time Presents initiative on modern architecture in Los Angeles, is leaving the institution.

In addition to the larger initiative, De Wit organized "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990," the Getty's own...

An entertainment kingpin named Harvey with a voracious appetite for awards campaigning? And an involvement in multiple hit productions?

Hollywood veterans would immediately think of Harvey Weinstein. But the description fits another Harvey: Fierstein, the equally outsized showbiz character who over a long career has proved himself to be a marathon man of awards season with a Midas touch at the big show that ends it.

Fierstein, 61, demonstrated his chops again on Sunday with his latest effort, "Kinky Boots." The hyphenate wrote the book for the shoe-themed extravaganza, which won six Tony...

Theodor Adorno's oft-quoted, much misunderstood remark, "It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz," raises questions about the ability of artists to represent the Holocaust. How can the cultural tools that were complicit in genocide comment on its barbarity?

Jackie Sibblies Drury has written a spry metatheatrical play to grapple with just this type of knotty problem. Her unwieldy title encodes the difficulty of her project: "We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915."

Peter Morgan answered his cellphone Friday but said right away that it wasn't a good time to talk. The Oscar-nominated writer of the 2006 movie "The Queen" explained in a polite but hurried manner that he was in a car en route to London's Gielgud Theatre, where his play "The Audience," with Helen Mirren reprising her role as Queen Elizabeth II, has been running since February.

Reached again on Monday, Morgan said that he was busy last week because he was making last-minute changes to a scene between the Queen and Prime Minister David Cameron (Rufus Wright). The rewrites included topical...

The pull of history and considerable topicality sells “One Night in Miami…” at Rogue Machine. Although this well appointed dramedy about what might have gone down in the Hampton House hotel the night that Cassius Clay became world heavyweight champion slightly overdoes the 20/20 hindsight, that doesn’t stop it from grabbing our imaginations.

Inspired by the real-life meeting of Clay, singer Sam Cooke, football star Jim Brown and civil-rights leader Malcolm X on Feb. 25, 1964, playwright Kemp Powers weaves the specifics of their personalities into an engrossing...

Oprah Winfrey is giving $12 million to a planned Washington, D.C., museum that will document African American history. Items from her talk show could be part of its exhibits.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture announced Tuesday that Winfrey's gift, combined with her previous donation of $1 million, is its largest to date.

PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times

"I am so proud of African-American history and its contributions to our nation as a whole," Winfrey said in a statement released by the museum. "By investing in this museum, I want to help ensure that...