Best Bets / JULY 29-AUGUST 4, 2001

Movies

The Disney comedy “The Princess Diaries” stars Anne Hathaway, above left, as a shy San Francisco teenager who finds out to her astonishment she’s the heir apparent to the crown of a small European principality. Julie Andrews, right, plays its queen, the girl’s grandmother, who sets about instructing her on the royal ways of the world. Opens Friday.

Pop Music

After years as a private passion of her musical peers, Lucinda Williams, below, assumed the throne as queen of folk-country singer-songwriters with 1998’s “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.” Her new album, “Essence,” features her customary lyrical acuity, along with a wider musical range and a flirtation with the groove. She plays the House of Blues on Monday and the Sun Theatre on Tuesday.

Theater

Actress, singer and playwright Charlayne Woodard performs her solo autobiographical work, “In Real Life,” tracing her quest to make it as an actor. Beginning with her hopeful arrival in New York with two suitcases, a violin and five audition monologues, it includes some backstage intrigue and a host of unique characters. Opens today at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown L.A.

Music

In his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut, Romanian-born Yoel Levi conducts twice at the Hollywood Bowl this week. On Tuesday, his soloists are operatic singers Hei-Kyung Hong and Jennifer Larmore, and he conducts Respighi’s “Roman Festivals.” On Thursday, Andr Watts plays Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto and Levi leads Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

Also: In five performances at four locations this week, conductor Eduard Schmieder brings his I Palpiti Chamber Orchestra for a third summer visit here. Thursday night at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood, the soloist in a 100th birthday tribute to the late Jascha Heifetz is Heifetz pupil Erick Friedman. Another violinist, Ida Haendel, rejoins I Palpiti on Saturday night in Zipper Hall at the Colburn School in downtown L.A. The group also plays today and next Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Monday at UCLA’s Korn Hall.

Museums

“Asylum in the Library: The Method, Madness and Magic of Aby M. Warburg,” opening today at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, explores the mind of the influential and idiosyncratic scholar and the subjects he studied. The exhibition will include a “ritualized space” similar to Warburg’s library, which the scholar--who suffered a mental collapse in 1918--saw as a site of ritual and creativity.

Jazz

Chick Corea brings his new trio to Catalina Bar & Grill in Hollywood on Monday through Friday and next Sunday. The gifted pianist-composer, above left with trio members Jeff Ballard and Avishai Cohen, right, first gained prominence in the late ‘60s when he played with Miles Davis.