Our critics pick spring's most anticipated L.A. arts, theater, classical music, pop and comedy shows

Los Angeles Times

02-04-2025

Broadway shows, world-class art and concerts that crisscross the musical spectrum descend on L.A. this spring. Whatever your jam, be it painting, photography or sculpture, Beyoncé, Boulez or AC/DC, 'Hamlet,' Ibsen, stand-up or show tunes, our critics have a recommendation for you. So pick up your phone (or pencil and planner) and start adding events to your calendar for the must-experience performing and visual arts events of the season.
April 5-Aug. 31Will Rawls: [siccer] at Institute of Contemporary Art L.A.Rawls projects stop-motion videos of still images of Black dancers onto chroma green screens suspended from the ceiling. The mix of animation, photography, projection and motion tangles up an array of lens-based media to dissect representations of the human body. — Christopher Knight
April 12-Aug. 4Don Bachardy: A Life in Portraits at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and GardensBachardy has been drawing portraits of artistic, literary and film personalities for more than 70 years. A selection of about 100 examples in graphite and acrylic on paper comprises a survey of the prolific L.A. artist, drawn from the Huntington archive of his work. — C.K.
May 11-July 2Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia at the Los Angeles County Museum of ArtAround 150 examples of pan-Asian Buddhist sculptures, paintings and ritual objects from LACMA's fine permanent collection, finally being shown after many years being tucked away in storage, will be augmented by several loans to represent diverse concepts of Buddhist thought. — C.K.
June 8-Aug. 31Noah Davis at the UCLA Hammer MuseumMore than 50 figurative paintings made by the late Los Angeles artist, who died at 32 in 2015, just as Davis' career was beginning to attract wide attention, arrives after stops in Potsdam, Germany, and London. Davis' paintings, often built around found photographs, regularly balance on a knife-edge between daily life and dream. — C.K.
June 17-Sept. 28Queer Lens: A History of Photography at the Getty Museum With a provocative title that centers queer imagery within established photographic history since the mid-19th century, the exhibition will examine the ways in which the accessibility and immediacy of camerawork has shaped perceptions of LGBTQ+ people. — C.K.
June 21-Oct. 12California Biennial: Desperate, Sacred, but Social at Orange County Museum of ArtTaking a risk, OCMA's Biennial plans to pair early, youthful work by such established artists as Miranda July, Stanya Kahn, Laura Owens and Joey Terrill, all in their 50s or older, with a variety of work by present-day teenagers. Paired will be a show drawn from the museum's permanent collection and chosen by a group of teen curators. — C.K.
April 10'Gigenis,' Akram Khan at the Grenada Theatre, Santa BarbaraOne of the defining moments in Los Angeles culture was the U.S. premiere of Peter Brooks' 'Mahabharata,' a transformative theatrical epic presented on a Hollywood soundstage in 1987. A dancer in the production happened to be Akram Khan, now a leading choreographer who has made his own large-scale dance from the Hindu epic. 'Gigenis: The Generation of the Earth' employs seven dancers and seven musicians who meld traditional Indian techniques with Western ones. Troubling as it may be that L.A. itself is not hosting Khan's London-based company, the venturesome UC Santa Barbara Arts and Lectures series is for a single night. — Mark Swed
April 24Evgeny Kissin at Walt Disney Concert HallThe Russian-born pianist became a sensation at 12 with his first Chopin recording in 1984. Currently a British and Israeli citizen highly critical of the Russian government (which recently declared him a 'foreign agent'), and a composer and Yiddish poet as well as pianist, Kissin has become a kind of world citizen whose recitals have an intensity all their own. It's been a while since he's been back to L.A., but the Los Angeles Philharmonic presents his first recital in more than a decade for a program of Bach, Chopin and Shostakovich. With luck, Kissin can be enticed to read and play his own works as well. — M.S.
May 8, 10-11Esa-Pekka Salonen Leads Debussy & Boulez at Walt Disney Concert HallMay 30Celebrating Pierre Boulez: 1925-2025 at the NimoyThe 100th anniversary of the birth of the revolutionary French composer and conductor was March 26 and will be marked later this spring by two tributes. At the L.A. Phil, which Boulez conducted often, French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard (whom Boulez invited to be in his Ensemble Intercontemporain) and L.A. Dance Project join Esa-Pekka Salonen for a varied program. At UCLA's Nimoy Theater, L.A. pianist Gloria Chang (whose playing Boulez was so fond of that he wrote a her a delightful little wedding piece) teams up with Dutch pianist Ralph van Raat for Boulez's formidable two-piano 'Structures' along with two-piano pieces by John Cage, Stravinsky and, among others — surprise, surprise — Frank Zappa. — M.S.
May 18-20, 22'Schoenberg in Hollywood' at the NimoyArnold Schoenberg's 150th birthday last fall still calls for celebration during the official 2024-25 season and getting in just under the wire will be the about-time West Coast premiere of 'Schoenberg in Hollywood,' produced by the music department at UCLA, where Schoenberg once taught. Tod Machover's 2018 opera depicts the only-in-Hollywood weirdness of the composer's encounters with studio head Irving Thalberg as they haggle over the eccentric notion of the uncompromising modernist scoring a feature film of Pearl S. Buck's bestseller 'The Good Earth,' which takes place in a Chinese village. — M.S.
June 5-8 Ojai Music Festival at Libbey Bowl and other Ojai venuesThis year's Ojai Festival, where Boulez famously served as music director five times, turns to the irrepressible flutist and all-around new music advocate Claire Chase. To the festival's usual range of Bach to … everybody, Chase has added a theme of honoring the environment. Australian composer Liza Lim's 'How Forests Think,' for instance, will be the main work on the Saturday evening program, while Annea Lockwood, the New Zealand master of mastering environmental sounds, will take advantage of Ojai's natural wonders. A Terry Riley premiere is also on tap. — M.S.
June 3, 6-8 and 10Seoul Festival at Walt Disney Concert HallThe same weekend as Ojai is the L.A. Phil's festival of new music from Korea curated by Unsuk Chin, a composer long-championed by the orchestra. Other names are likely to be unfamiliar to Angelenos no matter how closely you follow the scene — Juri Seo, Kay Kyurim Rhie, Whan Ri-Ahn and the weekend orchestra programs' conductor, Hankyeol Yoon, among them. A little Brahms is thrown in presumably because who doesn't love Brahms? — M.S.
April, May and JunePacific Symphony at Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa MesaNot only is Carl St.Clair's 35-year tenure as music director the longest of any current conductor at a major orchestra, but he is also the one who made Pacific Symphony what it is today. Once a scrappy pickup band that played in a high school auditorium with awful acoustics, it is now a world-class ensemble with its own world-class concert hall. St.Clair goes out with flair in concerts that include a semistaged production of Wagner's 'Das Rheingold,' along with an installment of his annual Cathedrals of Sound series that pairs organ solos with a big-boned Bruckner symphony (the popular No. 7, this time). His final program as music director (after which he becomes music director laureate) will be Verdi's Requiem in June. — M.S.
April 16-May 18'Furlough's Paradise' at Geffen PlayhouseThe Geffen Playhouse presents the West Coast premiere of a play by a.k. payne that was recently named the 2025 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner, a prestigious international award for women+ playwrights in the English-speaking theater. This two-hander zooms in on the relationship of two cousins, one on a three-day furlough from prison to attend a family funeral. Sade and Mina used to be inseparable but their lives have diverged and their memories don't match up. Geffen Playhouse Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney, who was payne's teacher at Yale, has described the play as a search for 'utopia in a world that has a criminal justice system that is far from perfect.' — Charles McNulty
May 6-June 1'Life of Pi' at Ahmanson TheatreJune 3-June 15Segerstrom Center for the Arts Visual enchantment, achieved through ingenious theatrical means, is the great reward of this stage adaptation of Yann Martel's Booker Prize-winning novel by playwright Lolita Chakrabarti. A 16-year-old boy's tale of survival at sea, complete with a menagerie that's brought to life with dazzling puppetry, 'Life of Pi' celebrates the power of the imagination to sustain us through the losses that flesh is heir to. Max Webster's production, which won three Tony Awards for its mesmerizing design, brings audiences along on an adventure that combines the heartfelt wisdom of a classic fable with the splendor of modern stage poetry. — C.M.
May 11-June 22'White Rabbit, Red Rabbit' at Fountain TheatreIranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour has devised an experiment that has been intriguing audiences around the world. A different actor performs the work for the first time at every performance. No rehearsal or director, just the actor and the terror of an unread script. In New York, Nathan Lane, Whoopi Goldberg and Cynthia Nixon were among the notable stars who undertook the challenge. Who knows if any A-listers might pop up in the Los Angeles premiere? There's more at stake than a gimmick. Soleimanpour wrote the play after he was forbidden to leave his country for refusing military service. This is his secret communication about life under a repressive regime, a message in a bottle about censorship and the slippery power of art. — C.M.
May 14-June 8'A Doll's House, Part 2' at Pasadena PlayhouseLucas Hnath ('The Christians,' 'Dana H.'), one of the most stylishly innovative contemporary American playwrights, has brought back Nora from Ibsen's classic to assess how her life turned out 15 years after she slammed the door on her marriage and instigated a revolution in modern drama. The play, a comedy of ideas with profound emotional weight, considers both the benefits and the costs of personal freedom. Jennifer Chang directs this new take on one of the smartest and most entertaining new plays of the last 10 years. — C.M.
May 28-July 6'Hamlet' at the Mark Taper ForumRobert O'Hara, a leading playwright ('Barbecue,' 'Bootycandy') and director ('Slave Play'), offers his own version of 'Hamlet' in a new adaptation that lends the classic tragedy a noir spin. Don't underestimate what an intrepid dramatist can do with Shakespeare's inexhaustible masterpiece. In 'Fat Ham,' James Ijames created a Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy that questioned the role of destiny in shaping our lives. O'Hara, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Salvador Dalí and 'Perry Mason,' will no doubt forge his own radically questioning path in a production that promises not to be squeamish about blood. — C.M.
June 17-July 12'Parade' at the Ahmanson TheatreMichael Arden's triumphant Tony-winning 2023 Broadway revival of Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown's musical drama proved that one of more challenging works in the modern musical repertory is an indisputable classic. This breathtakingly ambitious show tells the story of the 1913 trial of Leo Frank, a gross miscarriage of justice that culminated in his antisemitic lynching. While parsing the social and political context, the musical never loses sight of the protagonist and his wife, finding room for the heartbreaking personal side of an American tragedy that reveals the dark side of our collective past. — C.M.
April 28, May 1, 4, 7 and 9Beyoncé at SoFi StadiumThree months after 'Cowboy Carter' finally brought her a Grammy Award for album of the year, Beyoncé will launch her highly anticipated tour behind the country(-ish) LP with a five-night stand in Inglewood. Beyoncé being Beyoncé, there's no telling what kind of musical and visual spectacular she's got in store — though she may have provided a hint in December with the characteristically intricate halftime show she performed during a Christmas Day NFL game. Giddy up. — Mikael Wood
May 7Central Cee at the Hollywood Palladium Hip-hop fans of a certain age will recall any number of U.K. rappers once poised to break out in the U.S. (Give Dizzee Rascal's early-2000s 'I Luv U' a spin if you haven't in a while.) Still, this could be the moment for Central Cee, who crashed the Top 20 of Billboard's Hot 100 last year with 'Band4Band,' his throbbing pop-drill duet with Lil Baby, and recently dropped a debut LP, 'Can't Rush Greatness,' stocked with streaming-bait collabs with the likes of 21 Savage and Lil Durk. — M.W.
May 16Outlaw Music Festival at the Hollywood BowlAs usual, Willie Nelson is atop the bill for this annual traveling roots-music show, which the 91-year-old legend inaugurated in 2016. (By the time the festival gets here, Nelson will have turned 92.) Outlaw's lineup rotates depending on the city, but in L.A. we'll also get Bob Dylan, fresh from his Hollywood glow-up courtesy of Timothée Chalamet, and a pair of young bluegrass phenoms in Billy Strings and Sierra Hull. Keep an eye out for surprise guests: Last year at the Bowl, Nelson brought out John Densmore of the Doors to play various percussion 'doohickeys,' as the singer put it. — M.W.
April 18AC/DC at the Rose BowlAC/DC is both a stalwart rock institution and extremely adaptable. The band famously thrived after the death of its original lead singer and capably replaced the late founding guitarist Malcolm Young with his nephew. Axl Rose even stepped in as a pinch-hitting lead vocalist in 2016. Now touring with a new rhythm section, the Aussie hard rockers return for their first U.S. tour in nearly a decade, save for a recent slot at the debut Power Trip metal festival in Indio. — August Brown
May 10Just Like Heaven at Brookside at the Rose BowlMay 17Cruel World at Brookside at the Rose BowlThere inevitably comes a time in your festivalgoing life that the Coachella lineup will be mostly acts you've never heard of, in genres you barely understand. It happens to the best of us. Tuck into the warm blanket of nostalgia at two of Goldenvoice's marquee throwback fests: Just Like Heaven, the millennial indie compendium, gets a long-awaited Rilo Kiley reunion and sets from Vampire Weekend, Bloc Party and TV on the Radio; Cruel World, its goth/new wave evil twin, sports New Order, Nick Cave and a reunited Go-Go's. — A.B.
May 21, 23 and 24Kendrick Lamar and SZA at SoFi StadiumKendrick must still be cracking up at his Grammy haul for 'Not Like Us.' Imagine the glee that comes from cutting a single that vanquishes a guy you despise, forever, and being given music's highest honor for it — and then playing the Super Bowl halftime show as a little lagniappe afterward. His Grand National tour with SZA must feel like a literal victory lap. Let's hope Serena Williams is C-walking side-stage again. — A.B.
April 5, 17 and 22Ali Wong: Work in Progress at the Hollywood Improv (The Lab) If there's one comedian who knows how to work out, it's Ali Wong. No, we're not championing her physical fitness, even though she can and has carried Asian female representation in comedy on her shoulders for a long time now. But when it comes to working out her new material, one of the things this arena-worthy act isn't scared to do is pop into intimate rooms like the Lab at the Hollywood Improv and perform sketches of her newest material in front of a very lucky small room of people. On the heels of her last hilarious Netflix special 'Single Lady,' Wong is at it again, working on new material in a short stint aptly called 'Work in Progress' for four shows. If you can somehow manage to score a ticket, you'll surely be in for something special. — Nate Jackson
May 6Dr. Phil Live With Adam Ray at the Comedy Store It must be odd for TV's Dr. Phil to see the rise of comedy's Dr. Phil — mostly because they're not actually the same person. What started as a lighthearted lampooning of the daytime talk show therapist by veteran L.A. comedian Adam Ray has turned into a full-on frenzy that has resulted in a Netflix special and sold-out shows across the country. Returning to the Comedy Store, where the phenomenon began, Ray is sure to bring out an all-star supporting cast of comedians in an array of ridiculous sketches to make this one of the wildest shows you'll see all spring. — N.J.
May 31Ricky Gervais at the Hollywood BowlSure, death is no joke — but that doesn't mean it can't be funny. Ricky Gervais, one of the modern masters of roasting celebrities and riffing on the macabre, has a new show called 'Mortality.' The controversial English comedian and co-creator of 'The Office' is no stranger to making light of dark subjects in his act, and this one might be his best yet. Currently touring the new material across the U.K., he'll stop in L.A. just in time to bless the Bowl with a cheery conversation with the audience about our impending demise. The tour is also being filmed for Gervais' forthcoming Netflix special. — N.J.