On August 1st, ten world-class Flamenco artists will perform as part of The Fountain Theatre’s Forever Flamenco: LA Olé! The Forever Flamenco! series has been presenting a roster of Flamenco dancers, singers and musicians since 2003, drawing from the rich pool of Flamenco artists in Southern California, San Francisco, Albuquerque and Spain. Among the dancers taking the stage will be Antonio Granjero, Roberto Amaral, Briseyda Zarate, and Genevieve Guinn. Read more…

Glendale-based repertory theatre company A Noise Within presents "Summer with Shakespeare," an intensive summer program for ages 10 to 18 on acting, improvisation, voice, speech, movement technique, mask technique, textual analysis, and stage combat. This year’s theme is "Sorcerers, Spectres and the Supernatural." The selections focus on a wide range of Shakespeare’s otherworldly characters, including ghosts, witches, sorcerers, sprites and supernatural forms. The five-week, Mon-Wed-Fri sessions are led by professional faculty and run from July 6th to August 8th. Read more…

MOCA continues to highlight its permanent collection with Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, focusing on works added to the collection during the past five years. Many of the pieces on view will be exhibited by MOCA for the first time, though the selection also features works by artists included in the recent exhibitions A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968, Poetics of the Handmade, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution. Collecting History runs July 12th through October 19th. Read more… (PDF)

Opening June 27th at the Brand Library, Parallel Play & Collisions highlights new work by local artists Joyce Kohl, Nancy Kyes, and Irena Raulinaitis. A diverse collection, these works overlap in their aesthetic and the use of found objects, creating a dialogue in mixed media. Kohl and Kyes consider their work to be an exploration of "contemporary artifacts," while Raulinaitis’s monoprints and collagraphs incorporate found objects, processes of layering, and the re-creation of art from humble materials. Read more…

The Fountain Theatre continues its unique relationship with one of the world’s greatest living playwrights, Athol Fugard, with the West Coast premiere of Coming Home. Stephen Sachs directs Matthew Elam, Deidrie Henry, Noah Murtadha, Thomas Silcott, Timothy Taylor, and Adolphus Ward in Fugard’s newest work, which opens June 20th and continues through August 29th. Low-priced previews begin June 13th. Read more…

The Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum’s 2009 Summer Season opens with Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, directed by Artistic Director Ellen Geer. Performances take place every Sunday afternoon, May 31st through September 27th, in the Theatricum’s 299-seat outdoor amphitheater carved into the Topanga Canyon hillside. In conjunction with the run of the play, Theatricum will offer a pre-show “Prologue” discussion prior to one performance as well as a more in-depth “Roundtable” discussion, at which playgoers will have a chance to explore the language and complex themes of Cymbeline with Ellen Geer and members of the cast. Read more…

The California Heritage Museum presents California Regionalism: Oils on Canvas, guest curated by Gordon McClelland and staff curator Michael Trotter, on view through August 23rd. Throughout the thirty year period between the late 1920s and the late 1950s, many California artists focused their attention on producing oil paintings which captured scenes of everyday life as they experienced it. The majority of these artists were considered part of the larger American art movement known as Regionalism. Among California’s top Regionalist artists were Emil Kosa Jr., Paul Sample, Barse Miller, Ben Messick, Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, Ralph Hulett and Phil Paradise, many of whose works are on view in this exhibition. Read more…

Opening April 25th, with previews beginning on April 18th, The Actors’ Gang presents Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town. Our Town explores the poignancy of everyday life in a quiet New England village in the early years of the 20th century. The original New York Times review in 1938 called Our Town, “one of the finest achievements… profound, strange, unworldly significance… a hauntingly beautiful play.”  Since then, the Pulitzer-Prize winning play has become Wilder’s most renowned and frequently performed work. Read more…

The Museum of Contemporary Art announces the launch of its online exhibition archive, providing extensive information and images from all MOCA exhibitions dating from 1983 to 2004. The archive - which offers an invaluable resource to students, scholars, and aficionados of contemporary art - was made possible by a grant from the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 funding initiative. Read more…

Los Angeles-based pianist Brian Hanke has released a new album, Interconnections, now available for purchase worldwide on iTunes. The album showcases the world-premiere recordings of two solo piano works by American composers Eric Moe and Arthur Gottschalk, the 2007 and 2008 winners of the annual music+culture International Competition for Composers. Also featured are three of Brian’s own transcriptions of Fauré songs, two sonatas by Mozart contemporary Muzio Clementi, and several shorter works by Franz Liszt and Eric Satie. Read more… [Link requires iTunes]