Downtown L.A.'s arts scene grapples with curfews and cancellations: L.A. arts and culture this weekend
(On Thursday, Los Angeles city officials carved out a curfew exemption for ticket holders of indoor events and performing arts venues downtown including the Music Center, paving the way for evening performances of Center Theatre Group's 'Hamlet' and Los Angeles Opera's 'Rigoletto.')
The Trump administration says it will deploy 4,000 National Guard members and 700 Marines to L.A. to protect immigration agents and federal buildings at a reported cost of $134 million. On Tuesday, the state of California requested a temporary restraining order blocking the deployments, so it's anyone's guess as to how this will ultimately unfold.
The uncertainty, including how long Mayor Karen Bass' 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew will remain in effect, has added to the pall over downtown L.A., where businesses and restaurants are also struggling with security issues and the many unknowns of the swiftly evolving crisis.
On Wednesday, I reached out to many of downtown's arts leaders, and they all issued statements in support of Los Angeles and all of its inhabitants.
'As Los Angeles' largest theatre company, located in Downtown LA, we are heartbroken by the events unfolding around us and affecting so many in our beautiful and diverse city,' CTG said. 'Our mission is to be a home for everyone who calls themselves an Angeleno.'
This is a sentiment that abounds throughout this proud city of immigrants, where many with friends or neighbors who are undocumented feel sorrow to see the violence and destruction.
As losses mount for the arts in downtown L.A., it is worth noting that if you add the cost of President Trump's Saturday military parade in Washington, D.C. — estimated to be about $45 million — to the aforementioned price tag for sending troops to Southern California , the total is about $179 million. The National Endowment for the Arts, which Trump has proposed eliminating entirely, requested a $210.1 million budget for 2025, and millions in grants for arts groups have been clawed back this year under Elon Musk's DOGE.
I'm arts and culture reporter Jessica Gelt, standing with my community in support of all its members. Here's this week's arts news.
Academy screeningsThe Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presents two very different films this weekend. On Friday, the North American premiere of a new 4K restoration of 1975 best picture winner, 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' starring Jack Nicholson, screens with supervising film editor Richard Chew and editor Lynzee Klingman joining screenwriter Larry Karaszewski to discuss the film. Then, the academy's Teen Movie Madness! series continues Saturday with a 25th anniversary screening of cheerleading cult fave 'Bring It On' in 35mm, preceded by a conversation with actor and artist Brandi Williams, who played Lafred in the film.'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' 7:30 p.m. Friday; 'Bring It On,' 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Academy Museum, David Geffen Theater, 6067 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. academymuseum.org
CinderellaLos Angeles Ballet closes out its 2024-25 season with this fairy tale classic featuring choreography by Edwaard Liang set to the music of Sergei Prokofiev. This reimagined version adds a modern sensibility, new twists, fantasy and humor to the story of a young woman, mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters, who is transformed for a date with a prince by a fairy godmother.7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Dolby Theatre, 6801 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood. losangelesballet.org
Renée Fleming & FriendsBroadway and opera come together as vocalists Tituss Burgess, Lindsay Mendez and Jessie Mueller join the legendary soprano for a one-night-only concert presented by L.A. Opera. When Fleming appeared in the musical 'Light in the Piazza' at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 2019, Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote that the singer 'delivers the goods in the show's climax … Sound and sense are at last joined, making the distinction between Broadway and opera irrelevant.' (The performance is still planned as originally scheduled. Please check with L.A. Opera for updates.)7:30 p.m. Friday. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laopera.org
Black Cowboys: An American StoryBeyoncé earned accolades (including her first best album Grammy) for 'Cowboy Carter,' bringing the iconography of the Black West to the mainstream. For those whose appetites have been whetted for more, this exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West, conceived and organized by the Witte Museum in San Antonio, delivers a deep dive into that underreported slice of history. Tales of how Black men and women deployed their equestrian skills to great effect as they tamed and trained horses, tended livestock and embarked on cattle drives across the country come to life through historical and contemporary objects, photographs and personal recollections. The Autry's presentation also highlights Hollywood's influence on the Black cowboy image with movie memorabilia, including vintage film posters and the costumes used in the 2021 Netflix film 'The Harder They Fall.'Saturday through Jan. 4. Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park. theautry.org
'Broadway finally got its groove back. The 2024-25 season was the highest-grossing season on record and the second-highest in terms of attendance,' Times theater critic Charles McNulty writes in a column about last Sunday's Tony Awards. That resurgence could be attributed to the many high-powered film and television stars on New York stages including George Clooney, Kieran Culkin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Denzel Washington, Bob Odenkirk and Sarah Snook — but the real reason audiences flocked to live theater this season, McNulty concludes, was 'unadulterated theatrical fearlessness.'
The Smithsonian Institution's standoff with President Trump took a new turn Monday evening when the Smithsonian issued a statement that could be read as a rejection of Trump's late-May firing of National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet. The Smithsonian said the organization's secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch, 'has the support of the Board of Regents in his authority and management of the Smithsonian,' after a lengthy meeting by the board. This seems to imply that, for now, Sajet isn't going anywhere.
On Wednesday, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., announced a major gift of modern and contemporary drawings from longtime museum supporters Lenore and Bernard Greenberg. The collection of more than 60 works of art includes pieces by Vija Celmins, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Susan Rothenberg, Ed Ruscha, Shahzia Sikander and Cy Twombly.
'Adrien Brody's art is horrendous. Why are some people pretending it isn't?' senior ARTnews editor Alex Greenberger argues in a pointed, sometimes hilarious takedown of the Oscar-winning star's paintings. 'Adrien Brody has received due attention for his acting abilities: his Oscar-winning performance in last year's film The Brutalist is the kind of work most actors would be lucky to pull off once in their lifetime. Last week, however, he started receiving undue attention for the hideous art he debuted in New York at Eden Gallery, which — based on its press coverage, anyway — is one of the most talked-about exhibitions of the summer,' the column begins. If you need a chuckle, it's worth reading in its entirety.
Unlike his assessment of Broadway's season, Charles McNulty wasn't so positive about a recent L.A. theater offering. He did not enjoy director Robert O'Hara's world-premiere adaptation of 'Hamlet,' starring Patrick Ball from MAX's hit show 'The Pitt.' The new material places the story in a noir landscape in modern-day L.A. and features a second-act twist when a detective comes to investigate the play's bloodbath a la 'CSI.' 'O'Hara's audacious antics are stimulating at first, but there's not enough dramatic interest to sustain such a grueling journey,' McNulty writes.
A massive Barbara Kruger mural titled 'Questions' on the side of MOCA's Geffen Contemporary began appearing in news broadcasts and social media posts across the country as ICE protests unfolded over the weekend. This proved prophetic, since the 1990 artwork is composed of a series of pointed questions that interrogate the very nature of power and control. Read all about it here.
Pasadena Playhouse has announced its 2025-26 season, its first since buying back its historic 1925 building. Theater lovers can gear up for the shiny new Tony Award-winning best revival of a play, 'Eureka Day,' as well as Peter Shaffer's 'Amadeus,' a world-premiere adaptation of 'Brigadoon' and the novel two-person hip-hop musical, 'Mexodus.'
— Jessica Gelt
There is nothing more delectable — or truer to the diverse fabric of Los Angeles — than a good street taco. The Food team has pulled together a delicious list of 19 street vendors to support from the 101 Best Tacos guide.
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'Seeing someone who doesn't present as white might lead us to, among other things, not admit that person,' said one founder, Eric Orwoll, who moonlights as a Platonic scholar on YouTube but is now focused on developing 160 acres in Ravenden, Arkansas, into a community strictly for white, heterosexual people called Return to the Land. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Co-founder Eric Orwoll, at Return to the Land on Aug. 11, 2025. To date, there have been no legal challenges to Return to the Land, and its creators believe they could win a challenge in court, during the Trump administration. WHITTEN SABBATINI/NYT Advertisement The far right is surging in the United States, driven in part by white nationalists exploiting economic anxieties and a populace increasingly frustrated with the political status quo. 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WHITTEN SABBATINI/NYT To date, there have been no legal challenges to Return to the Land. But John Relman, a civil rights lawyer who specializes in fair housing violations, said the group could be sued under not just the 1968 Fair Housing Act but also multiple sections of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1866. 'You've got a smoking gun case of intentional discrimination,' he said. 'I think they're misguided when they say that they're home free.' But Return to the Land says it sees an opening under a federal government that has pushed the boundaries of laws and norms, especially when it comes to race. Advertisement 40 occupants and some goats Return to the Land is the name of both the 160-acre compound, which has about 40 residents, and a private association that Orwoll said 'hundreds' have joined, paying a one-time $25 membership fee and earning acceptance after sharing information online about their ethnic background. Orwoll and Csere, along with three other men, run a limited liability company founded in September 2023. Nearly two weeks later, they bought the land in Ravenden for $237,000, property records show. Members of the association can buy shares currently valued around $6,600 each in the LLC. In exchange for each share, they each receive 3 acres in the compound. Orwoll, 35, recently gave The New York Times a limited tour, allowing entry to the property through a gate that had a lock. He sat on a folding chair in his office, housed in an insulated shed with air conditioning and fiber internet, two pianos and shelves full of philosophy texts. Before a photographer could snap pictures, he pulled a copy of 'Mein Kampf' from a bookshelf and turned it around to hide its spine. The compound feels isolated from the rest of the world. Ravenden is a tiny strip of a town that has about 400 residents and one barbecue restaurant. The closest grocery store is inside a Walmart Supercenter 30 minutes away. The town mascot, a raven, is commemorated by a 12-foot stucco statue on the side of its main road. Related : At the compound, rough gravel roads have been carved by bulldozer into the rugged, wooded terrain. Orwoll showed off one trim, two-story white cabin with an American flag flapping above its front door, and a rising community center he hopes will one day host dinners and events. Down past a creek was a pen of milk goats, both mothers and babies, guarded by Lucy, a white Great Pyrenees, on a long chain. Advertisement The rest of the compound, he said, was off-limits because of residents' wishes. He declined to say how many cabins have been fully built, but some members, he said, already have installed solar panels, dug septic and water systems, and installed generators for electricity. A planned community center at Return to the Land, a 160-acre compound which has about 40 residents and a private association that Orwoll said 'hundreds' have joined, paying a one-time $25 membership fee. WHITTEN SABBATINI/NYT From Plato to Orania Orwoll grew up in La Mirada, California, outside Los Angeles, and in high school, he considered himself a libertarian. He studied the French horn at the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, before moving to Milwaukee to join the orchestra with Shen Yun, the classical Chinese dance and music production. While Orwoll considers the group a cult, he said, 'I liked a lot of how they did things, though. They're very efficient. I thought it was interesting having a compound like they have.' Despite never studying it formally, he'd always been drawn to Greek philosophy, and he eventually started uploading homemade videos about Plato and collective consciousness to his YouTube channel. He attracted a following, including some commenters who responded with arguments about demographic shifts in the United States. They repeated ideas from what's known as the Great Replacement theory — a conspiracy theory that nonwhite populations will replace white people through birthrates and mass migration — and racist pseudoscience about human intelligence and its link to genetics, an idea that has been broadly debunked by experts. Those comments, he said, began to convince him that white people in America were being persecuted and that the fabric of the United States was fraying as its nonwhite populations grew. 'I got red-pilled,' he said, using a term for awakening to a supposed hidden truth. 'If we never had mass immigration, if we were still a homogeneous nation, we would not feel as much of a need to form communities like this,' he said. Advertisement Between his recorded musings on Plato, he began weaving in videos about elites in the United States and theories on how the genetics for blond hair and blue eyes spread across the globe over history. Peter Csere, a co-founder of Return to the Land, was arrested in Ecuador for stabbing a miner and is accused of stealing tens of thousands of dollars from a vegan community there. WHITTEN SABBATINI/NYT The videos caught the eye of Csere, 36, a Connecticut-raised jazz pianist. The two men struck up a friendship online. 'Eventually, I realized there is a genetic component to IQ, and it's one of those things that people like to pretend doesn't exist because it's politically inconvenient,' Csere said, repeating the theory in an interview on the compound. 'You have cultures that invented the wheel thousands of years ago, and then you have cultures that never ever invented the wheel until it was given to them by somebody else.' He said he became interested in Orania, a town for white people in South Africa established at the end of the apartheid era that is restricted to Afrikaners — South Africans of European descent — and has been largely ignored by the South African government. Unfulfilled by life as a musician, Csere said he began searching for something with 'more meaning.' He first embraced veganism and a 'need to become a hippie' and formed an eco-village in Ecuador. The village, Fruit Haven, publicly accused Csere of fraud and theft on its website. In a statement, it accused him of absconding in July 2023 with thousands of misappropriated dollars and said that he once stabbed an Ecuadorian miner, causing him a collapsed lung, and was arrested on a potential charge of attempted murder in Ecuador. He has not yet been formally charged. The Times reviewed documentation of the arrest as well as emails from members of the community begging Csere to return their funds. Advertisement Csere said the stabbing was an act of self-defense during an altercation, and he left the country many months after the incident. He disputed the idea that he owed money to any members of the community. Related : 'They've been trying to press charges for a long time and were unable to,' Csere said of Ecuadorian authorities. Members of the community were 'trying to generate drama' by discussing the incident and claiming he owed them money, he said. Men, women and children On a Monday in August, four children giggled and played on a rusty seesaw under the shade of a few trees. There are about a dozen children living at Return to the Land — Orwoll declined to give a firm number — and all are homeschooled, he said. 'I'd rather leave it to the parents to educate their kids how they want,' he said. Orwoll and his ex-wife, Caitlin Smith, have four children between the ages of 2 and 8. Living in the community, Smith said, has been great for her children because it has given them 'people to play with that we could trust.' The pair met at music school; like Orwoll, Smith, 31, who is originally from upstate New York, plays the French horn. Before they had four children, the pair made live sex videos for money on the porn site Chaturbate. 'When I was doing that, I was a moral nihilist. I was not yet a Christian,' Orwoll said of the videos. 'I had a different worldview and value system, and part of my rationale for going toward more traditional values was seeing the mistakes I made when I did not have them as a young person.' Smith declined to comment on the videos. According to her profile page, which is still visible, along with the videos, she listed a preference for men, women, trans people and couples. At Return to the Land, gay people of any race are barred. Caitlin Smith with one of the four children she had with Orwoll, on Aug. 11. They divorced in 2024, and she now is remarried to another man on the compound. WHITTEN SABBATINI/NYT Smith is now remarried to another man, and they live on the compound. She sat next to Orwoll and his new fiancee, Allison, who declined to give her last name, saying she was fearful of being targeted for her views. 'This is how I've always wanted to live — returning to the land,' Smith said. 'The most important thing about this project for me is being able to actually vet my neighbors. You can move to a nice area, and in 10 years, you have no idea who's going to be living down the street. What makes a person a person is their whole past, who they are now. And the genetics as well.' Orwoll hopes to one day welcome around 200 men, women and children to Return to the Land in Arkansas. He said supporters nationwide have expressed interest in following the Ravenden model to build their own communities. The website of Return to the Land shows five additional projects — two more in the Ozarks, one in the Deep South and two in the Appalachian Mountains. Orwoll has a trip planned to Missouri soon, he said, to look at potential land sites for a community there and to 'vet people who may not necessarily be fully vetted.' This article originally appeared in .
