Four of the six plays in La Jolla Playhouse’s 2016-17 season will be world premieres, including veteran playwright Joe DiPietro diving into the seamy side of movie history with “Hollywood,” a show about the scandal of the never-solved 1922 shooting death of silent film director William Desmond Taylor.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights Quiara Alegria Hudes and Ayad Akhktar also have new plays coming.
For Hudes it’s “Miss You Like Hell,” a musical about a mother and teenage daughter on a cross-country road trip. Hudes is writing the script and teaming with the composer, singer-songwriter Erin McKeown, on the lyrics.
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Hudes came to prominence in the late 2000s as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s collaborator on the musical “In the Heights,” then won the Pulitzer for drama in 2012 for “Water by the Spoonful.” The director is Lear deBessonet, who’s based at New York’s Public Theater.
Akhtar, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer for his drama “Disgraced” (which the Mark Taper Forum will stage next summer), offers “JUNK: The Golden Age of Debt,” a look at financial dealmaking behind the mergers and acquisitions boom of the 1980s.
The Playhouse’s announcement says the protagonist, presumably not named Gordon Gekko, is “an upstart genius hell-bent on changing all the rules.” Tony winner Doug Hughes (“Doubt”) directs. Akhtar’s 2013 play “The Who & the What” also had its premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse.
DiPietro is known for writing the book and lyrics for “Memphis,” the Tony-winning musical about the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll that was seen at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2009 before going to Broadway, and for an oft-produced musical revue “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.”
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When the Mariinsky Ballet performed “Cinderella” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oct. 8, even the wondrous Diana Vishneva as Cinderella couldn’t bring unity to the movement, but she danced with flawless, fearless authority. Read more >>
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Branden Jacobs-Jenkins leaves a rehearsal of his play “Appropriate,” opening Oct. 4 at the Mark Taper Forum, to eat first with a reporter, then later with his agent and some unspecified Hollywood people, who presumably hope to lure him away from the field and city where he has experienced meteoric success in the last five years. Read more >>
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Soprano Abigail Fischer performs Oct. 7 in the opera “Songs from the Uproar” at REDCAT in Los Angeles.
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Moisés Kaufman’s muscular revival of “Bent,” which played at the Mark Taper Forum, opening on July 26, renders what many had written off as a parochial drama about the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany into a gripping tale of love, courage and identity. Read review >>
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Malaviki Sarukkai performing at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica on July 19, 2015. Sarukkai is the best-known exponent of South Indian classical dance.
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Bramwell Tovey conducts the L.A. Phil with pianist Garrick Ohlsson in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 at the Hollywood Bowl on July 14, 2015.
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Argentine dancer Herman Cornejo performs in the West Coast premiere of “Tango y Yo” as part of the Latin portion of BalletNow.
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Jake Shears plays Greta in Martin Sherman’s play “Bent” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles through Aug. 23, 2015.
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Dancers rehearse a one-night-only performance choregraphed by Raiford Rogers, one of L.A.’s most-noted choreographers. This year the dance will be to a new original score by Czech composer Zbynek Mateju.
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Oscar-winning actor Ben Kingsley in Los Angeles on July 9, 2015.
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Mia Sinclair Jenness, left, Mabel Tyler and Gabby Gutierrez alternate playing the title role in the musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s “Matilda” at the Ahmanson Theatre. The three are shown during a day at Santa Monica Pier on June 16, 2015.
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American Contemporary Ballet Company members Zsolt Banki and Cleo Magill perform a dance routine originally done by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This performance was presented as part of “Music + Dance: L.A.” on Friday, June 19, 2015.
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Miguel, a Grammy-winning guitarist, producer, singer and lyricist, is photographed in San Pedro on Wednesday, June 10, 2015. His new album “Wildheart,” explores L.A.’s “weird mix of hope and desperation.”
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Los Angeles-born artist Mark Bradford is photographed in front of “The Next Hot Line.” This piece is part of his show “Scorched Earth,” installed at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, June 11, 2015.
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Paige Faure, center, plays Ella in “
Cinderella,” which opened at the Ahmanson Theater on March 18.
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The Los Angeles Opera concluded its season with “The Marriage of Figaro,” with Roberto Tagliavini as Figaro and Pretty Yende as Susanna, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
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“Trinket,” a monumental installation by Newark-born, Chicago-based artist William Pope.L, features an American flag that is 16 feet tall and 45 feet long. The work is on display at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA through June 28.
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Conductor
Gustavo Dudamel’s contract with the Los Angeles Philharmonic has been extended to mid-2022.
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Alex Knox, from left, Carolyn Ratteray, Lynn Milgrim and Paige Lindsey White in “Pygmalion” in spring 2015 at the Pasadena Playhouse.
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On March 17, Google celebrated the addition of more than 5,000 images to its Google Street Art project with a launch party at the Container Yard in downtown Los Angeles.
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Los Angeles architect Jon Jerde, who was outspoken about his opinions on the
state of public space, died on
Feb. 9. The CityWalk at Universal Studios is among his famous designs.
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Diana Vishneva as Princess Aurora in
American Ballet Theatre‘s production of “
Sleeping Beauty” that premiered at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in March.
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Los Angeles Philharmonic assistant conductor
Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla leads the orchestra in her first L.A. Phil subscription concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall on March 1 in a program of Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky.
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Rachele Gilmore as Alice and Christopher Lemmings as Mouse with supernumeraries in “
Alice in Wonderland.” Susanna Malkki conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic in this collaboration with the L.A. Opera at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
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Marcia Rodd, left, and Dick Cavett reprise their roles in “
Hellman v. McCarthy,” a play inspired by actual events on “The Dick Cavett Show,” at Theatre 40 in February. The production starred Cavett as himself and Rodd as literary celebrity Mary McCarthy.
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Irish playwright
Conor McPherson‘s latest play, “
The Night Alive,” ran at the Geffen Playhouse from Feb. 11 through March 15.
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Ric Salinas, left, Herbert Siguenza and Richard Montoya, of the three-man Latino theater group Culture Clash, brought their “Chavez Ravine: An L.A. Revival” to the Kirk Douglas Theatre to mark the group’s 30th anniversary. The play ran from Feb. 4 through March 1.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) With “Hollywood,” directed by La Jolla Playhouse Artistic Director Christopher Ashley, he’ll forgo songs in what’s described as “a noir thriller.”
One of the key figures is Will Hays, whom the film industry hired to clean up Hollywood’s act in the wake of lurid scandals in the early 1920s. One result was the Hays Code, which for decades kept anything overtly libidinous out of the picture in Hollywood movies.
The Playhouse also is throwing its support to an emerging writer, Jeff Augustin, and director, Joshua Kahan Brody, who will team for “The Last Tiger in Haiti.” A brief description says it’s about child slaves huddling and telling stories in the aftermath of an earthquake in a way that “weaves Haitian lore into a contemporary narrative of survival and betrayal.”
The Playhouse has begun selling subscriptions to the 2016-17 season, although run dates and the titles of two additional plays have yet to be announced.
mike.boehm@latimes.com
Follow @boehmm of the LA Times for arts news and features
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