Best Bets

Theater

Grandmother Tillie offers unsolicited advice, father Sam Jr. runs the family’s profitable funeral parlor business, brother Sam III runs with the girls, chic mother Peggy runs up the credit cards and son Reuben, an aspiring trumpet player, observes it all over the course of 20 years in “Blue,” Charles Randolph Wright’s lighthearted coming-of-age drama set in rural South Carolina. The stellar cast, directed by Sheldon Epps, includes Phylicia Rashad, right with Diahann Carroll, Clifton Davis and Michael McElroy. Opens today at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Art

“Axis Mexico: Common Objects and Cosmopolitan Actions,” an important survey composed of 19 contemporary Mexican artists working mostly in Mexico City, opens Saturday at the San Diego Museum of Art. The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, photography, installation, performance and video works by up-and-coming and established artists who take specific aspects of Mexican history and culture and incorporate them into the global landscape.

Music

In his Hollywood Bowl debut, the Jerusalem-born conductor Asher Fisch conducts a program of French music with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Susan Graham on Thursday night. The American mezzo-soprano sings Berlioz’s “Les nuits d’ete” and operetta excerpts in her first Bowl appearance.

Dance

Men form a living tower and women glide as if on skates. One dance evokes galloping horses, another the heat of ancient combat. You can even see women dressed in men’s costumes and men dancing on the tips of their toes--in boots! On its eighth U.S. tour, the 80-member Georgian State Dance Company brings an evening of these traditional Black Sea specialties to Pepperdine University in Malibu on Thursday. Still directed by the 1945 founders and their offspring, the company also performs on Saturday at Citrus College in Glendora.

Video

Ben Affleck and Samuel L. Jackson play two New Yorkers in crisis in “Changing Lanes,” a gripping melodrama penned by Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin. Affleck plays a slick attorney involved in a bump-and-run car collision with a recovering alcoholic (Jackson) trying to get his life back together. Roger Michell (“Notting Hill”) directed the film, which arrives Tuesday on VHS and DVD.

Pop Music

For a modest critics’ darling and cult favorite, Wilco sure managed to stir up a storm with the saga of its latest album. Between extensive press and the documentary “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” the story of the band’s collision with its record label over the fate of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” has become part of music-biz lore. In short, label didn’t like it, band left, another company released it and now it’s one of the most acclaimed works of the year. Expect its mysterious, evocative songs to highlight Wilco’s shows Monday and Tuesday at the John Anson Ford Amphi-theatre in Hollywood. Left: John Stirratt, Glenn Kotche, Jeff Tweedy and Leroy Bach.