The New Original Works Festival features new dance, theater, music, and multimedia performance works by artists who are known for their often radical and unconventional approaches. While Week One (with work from Maureen Huskey and Killsonic) may have past us by, there’s still time to catch Weeks Two and Three, beginning this Thursday, July 29th.

Three artists make up Week Two of NOW: Christine Marie & Ensemble, in the expressionist theater piece “Ground to Cloud,” uses projections, electric light and shadowplay to unfold a multidimensional mythology of nature and human intervention. Systems of Us, from choreographer Rae Shao-Lan Blum & composer Tashi Wada, explores the disruption and transformation of relationships in a dance collaboration that may call to mind those early experiments of Cage and Cunningham. Finally, master of Breaking and hip-hop dance innovater Raphael Xavier’s “Black Canvas” explores the body of the Breaker in relation to the stage and life.

Week Three, beginning August 5th, features theater, dance, and animation. Alexandro Segade’s “Replicant vs. Separatist” depicts Segade himself calling the shots on a live sci-fi film shoot in which two male couples navigate the murky waters of state-mandated marriage. Hana van der Kolk’s “Once More, Again, One (Solo)” uses familiar pop music as the background for her solo dance adaptation of a work originally conceived for four dancers. To close, animator Miwa Matreyek (of Cloud Eye Control) uses animation with live projection to explore fantastical worlds in “Myth and Infrastructure.”

- By Helen Kearns

Each “week” of NOW is really only a Thurs/Fri/Sat, so budget your time accordingly. If you only attend one more festival this summer, consider the power of NOW. For more information, please visit www.redcat.org, or call 213-237-2800.

Before any actors even enter stage, a montage of semi-hysterical newscasts can be heard over blackness; reports of a school shooting, four victims, lots of questions. The incident is not brought up again for some time, but serves as what a high-school English teacher would dub as foreshadowing. Images of Columbine-like violence are conjured up in the minds of the audience, only to lay dormant for the majority of a seemingly harmless production. You have Garrett, who meets up with the much more popular Nicole. The two go on a date, hit it off, and before you know it, they’re attracting the jealous attention of Nicole’s ex-boyfriend, Jesse, as well as Garrett’s female partner in crime, Diz. We, as watchers of this John Hughes-esque tale of geek-meets-girl, are left to wonder how such events can lead to the something so extreme.

Along this journey, we are introduced to the world of LARP-ing (aka Live Action Role Play). It’s where Garrett and his geeky friends go to act like they’re characters in World of Warcraft, and it provides a nice break from the high-school hum-drum, but also serves a much deeper function. It’s an update of Shakespeare’s woods, where lovers’ identities are jumbled and proven false, where truth reveals itself in strange ways. One of my favorite moments from these LARP-ing scenes is when Nicole (who Garrett brought to the event) is suddenly attacked by black-hooded, enemy figures called “Darknesses.” They surround her menacingly, until Garrett steps in and fights them off.

The reason I like this bit so much is because I feel it is representative of Garrett’s personal test in this play. He has to fight off the Darknesses in order to get the girl. And in Crafts’s vision, as brought to life by directors Sean Fitzgerald and Vance Roi Reyes, the Darknesses are all-encompassing. There’s so much hate in high-school, so much raw anger, rage, and cruelty. It’s hard to fend it off.  And everything about the production reiterates this theme loud and clear. The set: five colored pillars (symbolic of the five characters) enshrouded by looming blackness. The music: mid-90’s grunge and pop-metal, emlematic of the post-Cobain struggle to compromise between 80’s mindlessness and early-90’s self destruction. The costumes: Garrett, for instance, swims in the customary black attire of goth kids, his hands constantly squirming in their pockets, dying to break out.

Despite a few technical snafus and a couple missed moments acting-wise (though Ryan J. Hill and Sarah Smick were consistently on their game), Friends Like These does what it sets out to do: it questions the identities we wear, whether in high-school or older. And it asks an important question for our time, which is whether or not these identities are just heavy defense pads against something brighter within us. According to Crafts, you can fight the darknesses, but in order to do so, you have to first realize that they’re really just other geeks like you wearing black-hooded robes. Otherwise, you’ll get smothered.

- By Joshua Morrison

For more information on Friends Like These, please visit www.theatreunleashed.com/friendslikethese.

Down Terrace: Bristish writer-director Ben Wheatley first got noticed with a ten-second viral video he made called “Cunning Stunt.” It’s short, one shot, surprising, and insanely realistic. Wheatley borrows this same attitude, storytelling prowess, and predilection for genre-molds to his first feature, Down Terrace, which he shot in only eight days. It tells the tale of a father-son ex-con team who decide to go after the man they think snitched them out. But when a hit-man, his 3-year-old child, and a bossy matron get involved, what could be a simple, maybe humorous crime farce turns ugly, gritty, and extremely dark. Wheatley is the latest figure in the the long-standing “kitchen sink” tradition of British filmmaking, where much like in “Cunning Stunt,” the mundane and passingly familiar transcend into deeper realms.

Mahler on the Couch: It may be the year for ‘famous-figure-meets-other-famous-figure’ biopics. First there’s Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, and then from Germany, there’s Mahler on the Couch, the meeting of composer Gustav Mahler and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. In this richly stylized interpretation of actual events, writer-director Percy Adlon—who also made Bagdad Café and Sugarbaby—relates the story of the complex, doomed marriage between Mahler (a supposed manic-depressive) and his wife, as seen through the oddly comic psychotherapy sessions with the most influential figure in 20^th century art and thought.

Marwencol: It’s important to see at least one documentary in any film festival, because frankly, they’re usually the best. The 2010 LA Film Fest is certainly not lacking in good-looking docs, either. But Marcenwol is by far the most curious. It’s the story of Mark Hogencamp, who suffered acute brain trauma after being attacked by a group of local teenagers. The damage left him a near-amnesiac, and he was forced to re-construct a new life for himself. This led to Marwencol, a 1/6 scale model of an imaginary, WWII-era Belgian village that Hogencamp took four years to build in his back-yard. He infused intricate storylines for his action-hero and barbie-doll villagers, many of whom stand in for characters in Mark’s real life. And just as anyone who saw Exit Through the Gift Shop can testify, every good story ends with a visit from the imperial art-world.

Café Noir: Even if you don’t speak Korean (which I do not), I recommend watching the trailer to this feature-debut from former South Korean film-critic Jung Sung-Il. The dialogue and action are deliberate and sparse, the photography is beautiful, and the editing destroys any American-borne notion that the more frantic the preview, the better the movie. In this story of unrequited love, Jung Sung-Il instead takes a page from the Godard school of filmmaking, folds it up into an airplane, and flies it over Russia into South Korea. Along the way, he references Bollywood, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Christianity, politics, and the entire history of South Korean cinema. This is a movie that foreign-film buffs, nostaligic French New Wavers, and eager dilettantes like myself shouldn’t miss.

Tiny Furniture: This, in my opinion, is probably going to be the smash-hit of the festival. It’s the semi-autobiographical story of 23-year-old, writer-director-star Lena Dunham, a film-studies post-graudate in search of herself. It co-stars Alex Karpovsky (the lovable romantic lead in my favorite movie of last-year, Beeswax), as well as Dunham’s own sister playing, well, Dunham’s sister. I’ll admit, the bitterness in me arouses suspicions of cliché about this movie, but at the same time, I’m looking forward to a young female-helmed movie that shows off young females in a more realistic light than Juno. Who knows?  It may turn out to be my generation’s The Graduate, or (and what I hope), it will turn out to be something more specific, something personal and true, something a fellow-former film/writing major can watch and say, “that’s interesting.”

The 2010 Los Angeles Film Fest runs until June 27^th. For tickets, times, and more information, please call (310) 432-1240, or visit www.lafilmfest.com.

Some would say it’s due to his undeniable talent as a playwright and illuminator of the  human soul. Others might simply attribute his omnipresence to the best marketing team in the history of the world. Me—in case you were wondering—I think it’s the elasticity inherent in his work. Pretty much anyone could read his best plays, and get anything they want out of them. Othello, for example, could easily be read as a neo-Nazi call to arms. And I won’t even get into The Merchant of Venice.

But seriously, Shakespeare is, if nothing else, adaptable—and on every level, from script to cast. This is why we see mix-gendered versions of Romeo and Juliet, and high school-set films of The Taming of the Shrew. And this seems to be the impetus behind actress, director, and producer Lisa Wolpe’s newest venture, The Wicked Wilde Shakespeare Festival. It’s a five-week long summer theatre extravaganza of adapted Shakespeare works (with one Oscar Wilde piece thrown into the mix), playing at the Miles Memorial Playhouse in Santa Monica from May 29^th through June 7^th.

Wolpe is the founder and artistic director of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, an outfit dedicated to reversing the tradition of the old Globe Theatre, and casting all women. For this festival, however, Wolpe has included the male persuasion in her own adapted and directed material, while still maintaining her playful sense of gender confusion that already runs deep in much of Shakespeare.

The fest opens with A Tyrant’s Tale, Wolpe’s abbreviated take on A Winter’s Tale, with only seven actors (the original Shakespeare version has seventeen characters and spans sixteen years). Much like Othello (but funnier), the play concerns a jealous leader—King Leontes—and the borderline paranoia he suffers over his wife’s possible infidelity. The part I’m looking forward to, though, is how Wolpe interprets one of the most famous stage directions in all of theatre: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

Macbeth3, the next in the wicked, wilde lineup, is Wolpe’s highly acclaimed post-apocalyptic adaptation of Macbeth. This reworking incorporates a whiff of Hamlet into the mix as well, with the character of Satan visiting Macbeth, and leading him into his tragic torment. Why the number 3 added to the title? You’ll just have to find out.

The festival also includes a gender-bending variation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as the anthologized Lovers and Madmen, an all-female grab-bag of Shakespeare scenes. But for now, FineArtsLA is giving away a pair of tickets to just the first two shows: A Tyrant’s Tale and Macbeth3 for this Sunday, May 30^th. The double-bill begins at 2 PM at Miles Memorial Playhouse.

If you’re a regular viewer of the site, you know the rules: simply enter your first name, last name, and e-mail address into the form below, and you will eligible to receive tickets to the first half of The Wicked Wilde Shakespeare Festival, and as an added bonus, you will be automatically entered into the running for our next three ticket giveaways (hint: The Importance of Being Earnest is on the list). Why Shakespeare? Why not? Especially if it’s free.

For more information about The Wicked Wilde Shakespeare Festival, or to find out how to buy the tickets on your own, please visit their site at www.lawsc.net.

At Union Station I joined the throng of expectant “Meet me @ Metro” audience members at the west entrance. We were quickly wrangled into a circle by a company of horn-honking cops circling us on tiny red tricycles and handing out yellow sticky-note tickets. With so many characters riding the subway on any normal day, it took me a minute to realize that the faux cops were part of the show and not just a bunch of lunatics. I perked up out of my guarded public transit shell as soon as I knew the show had begun.

At the center of the circle, the Watts Village Theater artistic director, Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez, explained that the mission of this show was to redefine the Watts community as a welcoming place and to literally bring people there by using theatre. And that is what they did.

Over the next two and a half hours, twenty or so performers lead fifty audience members through the bowels of the metro, on and off of trains, out into neighborhoods, and finally to a field at the feet of the Watts Towers. We were like a mob of Hansel and Gretels following bread crumbs of narrative, history, poetry, and dance, scattered along our route through an unknown wilderness. If theatre is supposed to take you to places you’ve never been, then this show did. Physically.

More than the performances themselves, we were motivated on by the encouraging smiles and sheer effort the performers put into this undertaking. “The most amazing thing about this show is that we’re doing it,” said Mr. Aviles-Rodriguez when we began, and he was right.

The actual performances at each location were confusing, hard to hear, and underwhelming in quality. The 7^th and Metro Center stop just seemed to be an excuse for the MooDoo Puppet Theater to have a man on stilts hand out postcards for their show. In Pershing Square I was struck by the irony that the audience was huddled around a performer ranting like a homeless person about loving ShangriL.A., while we turned our backs to several actual homeless people on the edge of the circle who were asking what was going on.

But whether the performances were ‘Broadway quality’ or not was beside the point. Back at Union Station I had let my guard down and allowed myself to see more than just where I was headed. As we traveled from station to station, I saw more art in the world around me than I had ever noticed before. Los Angeles, and the Metro specifically, is full of murals, statues, and installation art that I had always walked by with indifference. Now each piece was a part of a show, and it was if a spotlight was shining on everything from Joyce Kozloff ‘s film mural at the 7^th & Metro stop to the music of the Watts ice cream truck playing behind the performers song. And maybe I wouldn’t have seen the inhabitants of Pershing square or their plight to participate in the show if I hadn’t been brought there with more open eyes.

There is so much beauty, humor, art and humanity around us every day here in the second largest city in the United States, and it took a troupe of intrepid performers taking their spectacle out of the theater and onto the street to help me see it. I thought back to my experiences on the metro before the show began and wondered how I would have experienced them differently if I had approached them with curiosity rather than fear.

The Watts Village Theater Company and their collaborators hope to make “Meet me @ Metro” an annual performance festival. If they are lucky enough to make this happen, I encourage you to take the trip. Until then, as you make your daily commute around town, imagine a spotlight once in a while showing you art where you least expected it. I promise you it will make for a much more enjoyable ride.

- By Stephanie Carrie

For more information about The Watts Village Theater Company, please visit www.wattsvillagetheatercompany.com.

me dimly lit back room—I mean, what are our 20s for? We all wonder what the other side of the lip gloss is like, right?

For those of you who haven’t yet adventured to the other side—and for those of you who have—this Friday affords a great opportunity for the voyeuresse in us all. In conjunction with Outfest, LA’s famous gay and lesbian film festival taking place in July, the UCLA Film and Television Archive will showcase the documentary montage film Triple X Selects: The Best of Lezsploitation. Director Michelle Johnson puts the “appropriate” back in appropriation, splicing spicy scenes from 60’s and 70’s lesberotica films—movies made by men, for men—into a romping 48 minutes of camp and cunts (don’t worry, nothing too explicit) that any woman is sure to enjoy. An open discussion with Johnson (aka Triple X) will immediately follow—so you can find out where to get the full versions of the films for later viewing.

Proceeding the discussion, you’ll have the chance to stick around and check out a classic lezsploitation flick, Just The Two of Us (1970), director Barbara Peters’ peek into the secret lives of housewives whose husbands are out of town.

So let that dirty little old man inside of you step out for a night, girls. And fellows—just, bring a date.

By Helen Kearns

The movie will screen at The Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, 7:30pm, Friday April 20^th. Visit the UCLA Film & Television website for ticket information.

First, a stop in Paris at the Petit Palais.  The Parisian museum brings to the fore the artistic achievements of none other than Yves Saint Laurent.  Curated by Florence Muller and Farid Chenoune, the exhibit, called Yves Saint Laurent Retrospective features gowns, menswear, some of the designer’s treasured personal items used in creative pursuits, and it highlight themes used throughout the many collections in Saint Laurent’s illustrious career.  One ticket to France, please! {Global Post}

Onto Italy.  In Milan, our very own Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition has commenced.  Founded in 1993, Domingo’s opera competition is meant to find the cream of the crop amongst new talent in opera.  The singers represent not only a range of vocal categories (from coloratura soprano to the lowest bass), but also an array of countries around the world.  The competition ends May 2 (this Saturday), so you’ll have a new vocalist’s career to follow starting Sunday, May 3rd.  We have a feeling it will be meteoric.  {Culture Monster}

Not to shower the French with too much attention, though they don’t mind, Sotheby’s has made quite the announcement prior to the upcoming auction season.  The storied (and once thought lost) private collection of legendary Parisian art dealer Amrboise Vollard is set to meet the auction block.  His career was spent promoting such up-and-comers as Picasso, Cezanne, and Renoir and Vollard’s collection includes not only paintings, but such enticing items as prints, drawings, and artist books.  The sale will be held in London on June 22, so brush up on your British colloquialisms.  {ArtInfo}

Back at home, there is much to celebrate.  Dig into your pockets just a bit to buy yourself a ticket to the Architecture and Design Museum’s official Grand Opening!  For $75, you’ll mingle with a veritable who’s who of the architecture and design world in LA at the reception tomorrow night (April 27), (hint: you can also find them anywhere from Father’s Office to Tar Pit on weeknights), check out the first exhibit, and bid on things at the silent auction.  {A+D Museum}  Also, if you haven’t uploaded his schedule into your iCal already, Gustavo Dudamel has returned to the LA Phil – he’s conducting pretty regularly from now through May 8 on a number of concerts all worthy of splurging for tickets.  {LA Phil} This is your last chance to see LACMA’s exhibit Renoir in the 20th Century.  The exhibit closes May 9. {LACMA} Last, but certainly not least, turns out that parodies of Wagner and his Ring Cycle abound.  LA Times’ Culture Monster shows us the best of the best. {Culture Monster}

Just a few days ago, my friend, colleague, and fellow opera student/patron Nicole C. wrote an article for our beloved site on the current German invasion of Los Angeles arts institutions, Das Ring Festival ist Upon Us.  According to Nicole, the LA Opera has spent a whopping $32 million dollars producing the definitive Ring Festival, including its production of the four operas that comprise Wagner’s famous Ring Cycle (a feat unto itself), and a wide selection of events, exhibitions, and concerts at many of LA’s cultural havens. As a Wagner aficionado and someone who thinks German culture is wunderbar, I gladly hopped on this Nordic bandwagon and visited LACMA’s current exhibition Myths, Legends and Cultural Renewal: Wagner’s Sources.

First with the bad news: after visiting two of LACMA’s box offices and confusing three separate security guards in what seemed a futile attempt to be directed toward this exhibition, I started to believe that the existence of the show was some sort of myth or legend. I was starting to feel as if LACMA’s heart was not in this exhibit, but finally, my fourth attempt at harassing a museum guard proved victorious, and I was led to a small, dark, hidden room, approximately the size of a walk-in closet.

The good news: even though tiny, the exhibition did teach me something about the essential role that myths and legends play in cultural renewal.  Reinvented and passed down through the generations, myths and legends are a constant inspiration to artists.  Germany’s mythological heritage was best captured in the 19^th Century in the work of Richard Wagner.  Wagner’s operas utilize subject matter from the Edda (a collection of Norse tales from the 13^th Century), and on the Nibelungenlied (verses rooted in pre Christian oral traditions, which in the High Middle Ages were codified into an epic poem). During Wagner’s time, these once lost and forgotten traditions were renewed upon the discovery of manuscripts, which contributed to the renewed German national identity and the development of Romanticism.

The exhibit begins with a series of sixteen postcards (c. 1894-96) based on the watercolors of Emil Nolde.  I have always been mesmerized by mountains and the monsters that inhabit them; my favorite part of The Matterhorn ride at Disneyland was when the Abominable Snowman lumbers out from behind a cropping of rocks to growl a warning to the bobsled team whizzing by.  Nolde apparently shared my dangerous attraction to mountain creatures.  His paintings portray the anthropomorphization of Germany’s alpine peaks and reveal the fantastical presence of mountain monsters.  Some of my favorite scenes within these postcards were silly, cartoon humans running away from the spirit of the mountains, while the faces of old men, with their long white beards serving as the snow capped summits, laugh maniacally.  I was able to understand why this series of postcards became so popular in modernist Germany, for the realm of fantasy came to life, and the spirit of Mother Nature was more attainable than ever.

On the far wall of the exhibition, Henri Fantin-Latour’s Tannhauser on the Venusberg (1864) represented the international fascination with the legends utilized in Wagner’s work.  Latour, who considered himself a French Wagnerite, fell in love with Wagner’s operas in the early 1860s after attending a performance of Tannhauser.  His painting is a study in modernist technique, and reveals the incident when Tannhauser, a knight and poet, finds the secret home of the Venus of Teutonic legend.  In this painting, Latour offers an alternative to popular genre painting and achieves unison of gestures, staging, and poetic sources.  The painting itself looks like a drowsy, unconscious dream state, perfectly representing the transformation of myth to reality.

The finale of the exhibition is Achim Freyer’s set design and installation, based on the prototypes for the LA Opera’s 2010 production of the Ring Cycle.  Freyer, the director and designer of the the Ring Cycle, belongs to the post-World War II generation that felt alienated from a national culture left in ruins and misrepresented by the horrific plunder of the Third Reich.  In an effort to redeem his culture, Freyer strives to recuperate the idea of Wagner for our own age. The abstraction of his drawings brings to mind the sense of the absurd and the surreal, but also eliminates any specificity of time by pulling the audience into an everlasting present. A true Wagnerite, he managed to never waver from the composer’s stage direction and vision.  His allusions breathe life into his productions, and withhold a sense of universal significance. Just as Wagner hoped for his Ring Cycle to be eternal, Freyer’s representations are freed from the constraints of time.  Too bad the installation looked like a makeshift Halloween haunted house in some wacky neighbor’s garage.  I can only imagine Freyer throwing a fit at LACMA’s sorry production value.

In all honesty, this exhibition is worth seeing if you’re an avid German history fan, or like me, get embarrassingly excited about anything and everything Wagner. Otherwise, I might advise that you spend your weekend doing something else. With a little bit more time, PR effort, and space, the exhibition could have been much more enlightening and rewarding.  I give LACMA credit for joining the Ring Festival effort, but for Pete’s sake, what good does it do if you can’t find the exhibition?

-By Brittany Krasner

Myths, Legends and Cultural Renewal: Wagner’s Sources is on view through August 16^th. Visit http://www.lacma.org/art/ExhibWagnersSources.aspx for more information.

“I have another pair of pants just like these…except they’re red with green stripes, and they’re shorts.”       Steven Wright

Like the legendary comedian Steven Wright says, there’s not much difference between long pants and short shorts; one just shows a little more leg, and allows for more colorful patterns. The same goes for full-length, comedic films, and well…shorts. Because if there’s anything the Internet has taught us, it’s that 2-minute clips of cats playing keyboards, or British kids biting fingers, or animated Lizards talking gibberish can be just as entertaining and popular as any 90-minute, big-budget Apatow rip-off out there.

Enter the 2^nd annual L.A. Comedy Shorts Film Festival, the largest of its kind in the U.S., taking place this weekend. Festivities kicked off on Thursday night at the Downtown Independent Theatre, but run until Sunday, with a Closing Night Red Carpet Awards Gala at Elevate Lounge, hosted by the Sklar Brothers. Until then, here’s a quick list of sure-to-be hilarious events in store:

Saturday, April 17, 11:00 AM: Panel discussion, aptly titled “Famous People Talkin’ About Sh*t.” Featuring comedians Bob Odenkirk, Happy Gilmore hottie Julie Bowen, actors Missi Pyle and Michael Jai White, and of course, Mark Hamill (what panel would be complete without him?), the 60-90 minute-long Q&A session promises to be the longest event of the Fest.

Saturday, April 17, 1:00 PM: Another block of shorts, this one called “You Got Schooled,” and screening such films as “Sex Ed” and “Campus Cops.” Actor Oscar Nuñez rumored to be in attendance.

Saturday April 17, 10:00 PM: Celebrity Beer Pong at Lucky Strike Lanes VIP Lounge. Bet you never thought you’d see Aisha Tyler chugging a beer alongside Reno 911! star Carlos Alazraqui.

Sunday, April 18, 10:00 AM: “I Write, I Produce, Therefore I Am,” a panel of established comedy writers and producers (Thomas Lennon, Robert Ben Grant, Laura Kightlinger, Linwood Boomer, and Rodney Barnes) talk about how to set up your own shop.

Sunday, April 18, 4:15 PM: More short, funny films, and the last of the festival. This block goes by the title of “Take This Job and Shove It,” and includes, among others, a short called “Frank DanCoolo: Paranormal Drug Dealer.” You pretty much can’t go wrong with that.

Of course, there is oh so much more to see, the specifics of which can be viewed at the festival’s website, www.lacomedyshorts.com. Tickets for individual screenings and panels are $12 each. Day passes are $50. But get them fast, because events are quickly selling out. Comedy, as they say, is all about the timing, and what better time to see a bunch of short-timed comedy, while all your other, cooler friends are at Coachella?

There’s one truth I’ve yet to unveil.  I’m not really a Wagner fan.  Yes, Wagnerites, Tristan und Isolde is undeniably gorgeous and the famous aria at the end, “Liebestod,” is truly glorious.  But his Ring Cycle, which features four full-length operas from Das Rheingold to Gotterdammerung, is simply not my cup of tea.  Putting personal preference aside, though, LA Operas tour de force Ring Festival is a triumph of peering into what makes such an infamous piece of classical music tick.  There will be, over the course of the next few months (now through June 2010), lectures detailing Wagner and his influences paired with art exhibits, free film screenings “for opera lovers,” and of course, full length masterful productions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.  In full.

The Cycle itself is four operas, each longer than the last.  There’s Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, which LA Opera produced during their 2008/2009 season and Siegfried and Gotterdammerung which both go up this season in June, finishing out the Cycle.  All four productions were designed by the controversial and avant-garde set director Achim Freyer and will be performed under the very accomplished tutelage of conductor James Conlon.

The Ring Festival is a huge accomplishment for the arts in Los Angeles.  Not only will it bring arts lovers of all shapes and sizes to our fair city, but it also derives its allure from many of LAs various attractions from food trucks (like Let’s Be Frank hotdogs) to the Hammer Museum and from LACMA to Griffith Park Observatory.  There’s rarely a better reason to cross the city in a German-and-opera-filled fury as there is now.

The show on at the Geffen Playhouse, Nightmare Alley, is also connected to the Ring Festival.  Running now through May 23, the show is based on the 1946 Gresham novel about the dark, wild world of “carnies, cons, and clairvoyants.”

The full schedule is about as long as a novel, proving again that LA Opera has gone above and beyond with this Festival.  Ticket prices range from free to $10 to $2000 (for really good front orchestra seats at the opera itself, calm thyself).

Regardless of my personal relationship with Mr. Wagner, when I say enjoy the show, I really do mean it. Really. Enjoy… Just make sure you bring your flask.

The Ring Festival has begun! Click here for more information on the Festival and click here for information on the Cycle itself. Click here to see the LA Times’ complete guide to the Ring Festival.