Arts

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

"The View" 10 a.m. Thursday, ABC: performance from “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “Open Call” 9 p.m. Thursday, KCET: Fine Cut Festival of Student Films: Hosted by mezzo-soprano opera singer Suzanna Guzman, “Goat Rodeo Live: Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile” 10 p.m. Friday, KOCE: The four string virtuosos combine bluegrass and classical music at a concert at Boston's House of Blues. “Burt Wolf: Travels & Traditions” 5:30 p.m. Saturday, KLCS: The Great Rivers of Europe: Cologne to Zell: A museum dedicated to mechanical musical instruments; Lorelei Rock; the city of Zell.

PHILADELPHIA - Saturday the Barnes Foundation opens its new museum here on the busy Benjamin Franklin Parkway. With hundreds of Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos, it's just up the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose officials were instrumental in pulling strings to make it happen. Anticipation has been running high. Eight years ago a local judge granted permission for the incomparable art installation to relocate from its unique home out on the Main Line, available to anyone who wished to visit.

Nearly a decade ago, an improbable dream came true for Deaf West Theatre and its founder, Ed Waterstreet. The small, L.A.-based company went to Broadway with its signed and spoken version of the musical "Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. " Even as he savored their success, Waterstreet had another dream - creating an original musical inspired by Edmond Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac. " What better tale for his theater to tell than one that explores the universal desire to express oneself?

There's so much to praise in the blissful Broadway revival of "Follies," which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre on the heels of its numerous Tony nominations, but let's pay homage first to the sheer sophistication of the show itself. After experiencing "Follies" again - an adult entertainment if ever there was one - I flat-out refuse to accept any more jukebox substitutes. One doesn't often talk about architecture when writing about musicals, but the most impressive thing about "Follies," beyond Stephen Sondheim's bejeweled score, is the ingenious way it is constructed.

In ABC's new thriller "Missing," a former CIA agent whose child has been kidnapped springs out of retirement with guns, martial-arts skills and primal parental passion blazing. If that sounds familiar, well, it was also the plot of the 2008 film "Taken," which had Liam Neeson tearing through Paris to extricate his daughter from the clutches of a sex-trafficking ring. In "Missing," the gender roles are reversed. When Michael (Nick Eversman), a student studying abroad in Rome, goes missing, his mother, Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd)

With her first book on stitchery, needlework instructor Erica Wilson revived a craft and helped invent a publishing category. Her 1962 hardcover book, "Crewel Embroidery," both popularized the pursuit and helped transform her into "America's first lady of stitchery" as she built a multimillion-dollar embroidery empire through her needlework designs, television shows, books and stores. The volume also marked something of a turning point in publishing. It was the first needlework title released by Scribner's, a surprise smash hit that eventually sold about 1 million copies.

LONDON - Posthumus, the protagonist of Shakespeare's "Cymbeline," marched through the Herculean columns of the Globe theater, stopped abruptly at the front of the stage and looked up at an audience of hundreds - most of whom didn't speak a whisper of the language they were about to hear. His voice boomed, and he raised his arms and curled his hands into fists. "All these people have come from the newest country in the world," shouted actor Francis Paulino Lugali in Juba Arabic, "and this country is South Sudan!"

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

At the world premiere Thursday night of Anne LeBaron's darkly mysterious, troubling yet weirdly exuberant and wonderfully performed new opera "Crescent City," a young Reveler in the production frolicked a few feet from where I was sitting on a folding chair along the perimeter of the experimental art space, Atwater Crossing. She wore a skirt fashioned out of the Arts & Books section of this newspaper, and she was close enough that I could read a few crumpled lines. But she was hardly there to make me or any other Angeleno feel remotely at home.

Southwest Chamber Music's L.A. International New Music Festival is more a Los Angeles interstitial new music festival. Skirting touristy Europe, these Southwesterners are not interested in inclusiveness but in filling gaps that very much need filling. Monday's installment, the third of the festival's four concerts at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall, did feature two admired L.A. composers who do not lack local institutional attention. Anne LeBaron, on the faculty at CalArts, happens to be the local composer of the moment with her breathtaking opera "Crescent City" currently in production and a piece on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's opening Hollywood Bowl concert in July.

You can draw a straight line, in terms of architectural history, from William Randolph Hearst'ssprawling estate in San Simeon to the corner of Broadway and 11th Street in downtown Los Angeles. It was at that downtown site in 1913 that Hearst commissioned architect Julia Morgan to design a headquarters for his Los Angeles Examiner newspaper, which he'd founded in 1903. Morgan produced one of the most remarkable designs of her prolific career, a 103,500-square-foot Mission Revival building draped with Italian and Moorish touches, including domes covered in yellow and blue tile.

There's a flicker of uncertainty in Danny Burstein's friendly brown eyes as he greets a reporter backstage at the Ahmanson Theatre, as if he half-expects her to step around him on her way into the dressing room of one of his "Follies" costars. "When I heard that The Times wanted to talk to me, I said, 'Are you sure?'" he says, after being persuaded that he, and not Ron Raines, Victoria Clark, Jan Maxwell,Elaine Page,or any of the show's other big guns, is meant to be the subject of this interview.

Long Beach Opera's new production of Osvaldo Golijov's "Ainadamar" comes at an important time. The opera is a meditation on the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca's murder by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, which is ever relevant, especially in the way the work echoes the current situation in the Middle East. But there is another reason why this opera matters right now, despite LBO's somewhat slapdash production at Terrace Theater Sunday night. Golijov has been going through a bad patch, and we need to be reminded why the music world would be unwise to lose faith in him. He has missed deadlines, including for a violin concerto that was to have been premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic a year ago. He has also come under attack for plagiarism by "gotcha" critics who miss the larger context of his work and what makes it so culturally rich and pertinent.

  The artistic sagacity of Stephen Sondheim met the personal veracity of Elaine Stritch on Saturday, when "Elaine Stritch Singin' Sondheim … One Song at a Time" strode into Walt Disney Concert Hall, leaving venue and audience ineffably transformed. In her Disney Hall debut, Stritch and this acclaimed 2010 Café Carlyle salute to the master of American musical theater didn't so much seize the house as subsume its regard and send it back tenfold. Visibly charged by the capacity crowd's ovation, Stritch opened with "I Feel Pretty," weaving her sandpaper Sprechstimme around Sondheim's lyrics to wryly irresistible, post-Noel Coward effect.

While promoting the movie"Battleship"in Tokyo last month,U.S. ArmyCol. Greg Gadson found himself face-to-face with a stunned reporter. "He thought I was computer-generated," said Gadson, a burly former West Point football player who walks with the aid of futuristic-looking titanium prosthetics. "He thought my legs were movie magic. " There was no CGI needed for Gadson's performance as a wounded combat veteran in "Battleship" - both of his legs were amputated above the knee after he was injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq in 2007.

NEW YORK - James Corden is in the throes of a New York moment. He's in a hit Broadway show, the London import "One Man, Two Guvnors," and though he's been down this road before with "The History Boys," a more high-minded British comedy that became a smash on the Great White Way, this time he's the star and all eyes are on this generously proportioned funnyman - a cherub posing as Puck, or is it the other way around? Part of the secret of Corden's comic gift is that he combines innocence so naturally with mischief.

"The Raid: Redemption" is a slam-bang, knock-your-socks-off action bonanza with some of the most peerlessly shot, performed and choreographed fight sequences you're likely to see on screen. Welsh-born writer-director-editor Gareth Evans ("Merantau") proves a visionary force, grabbing hold of the audience with a barrage of virtuoso set pieces that are both hide-your-eyes violent and mind-bogglingly stunning. The Jakarta-set film lays out its do-or-die mission in a few brief, well chosen sentences and never looks back.

LAS VEGAS -- Dana White was upset and wanted to make something clear. Last Friday night, as White attempted to lounge inside his office building where cable network FX films live fights for the Ultimate Fighting Championship's reality show, "The Ultimate Fighter," he wanted to return to the topic of mixed-martial-arts journalism. As president and chief promoter of the UFC, White seeks as much attention as possible for his organization, but occasionally — if not often — he is chafed by the accuracy of online reporting by MMA writers.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama Alison Bechdel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 290 pp., $22 First things first: If you haven't read "Fun Home," Alison Bechdel's 2006 family memoir in comic form, drop everything and get a copy right away. In its pages, Bechdel does the miraculous: tracing deftly and with nuance her complex, claustrophobic relationship with her father, an English teacher and closeted gay man who died in 1980 (in what was either accident or suicide), shortly after Bechdel came out as a lesbian.