Cultural Exchange

LONDON - Has anyone built a better "Mousetrap"? Britons just getting over celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II's diamond jubilee are now in the throes of another: the 60th anniversary of the world's longest-running play, "The Mousetrap" by Agatha Christie, England's "queen of crime" (or, with less royal pretension, "duchess of death"). What began as a BBC radio drama, at a time when postwar Brits carried around ration books and stared agog at television sets, has since become a West End phenomenon that shows no sign of stopping, though critics carp about signs of age. Sunday marks the official birthday, achieved after more than 25,000 performances, 400 actors and two dozen directors.

HONG KONG - Strung up in the Sunbeam Theatre in a gritty working-class part of this city are posters showing Cantonese opera singers, their red lips offset by chalk-white, made-up faces. In the faded lobby, where theatergoers mill on a Saturday afternoon, dozens of bouquets with handwritten messages are dedicated to the stars by fans. For four decades, this theater in North Point on Hong Kong Island has been one of the last remaining stalwarts for Cantonese opera in the city. But its existence is by no means guaranteed.

In something of a classic immigrant story, the boy from Nepal arrived in America at age 19, attended Cal State Long Beach, studied computer science and got a job in the early 1980s at then-struggling Disney, which was just beginning to use computer graphics. Over the next two decades, Kiran Joshi rose through the animation ranks, working on "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King," "Aladdin," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Atlantis" until he was eventually made Disney's head of production for several digital projects.

LONDON - In 2011, the London riots created chaos across the capital as disgruntled youth burned down buildings, looted shops and rampaged in the streets. A recent exhibition in Tottenham, the epicenter of the riots, looked at the reasons why. However, it was not the government that raised funds to set up the exhibit but a couple of dozen ordinary people whose lives had been caught up in the mayhem. "After the Riots - Happiness in Tottenham" is one of more than a hundred projects hosted on an innovative crowd-funding website that is starting to make waves across the United Kingdom.

The Sundance Institute's Latin American Screenwriter Workshop appears to be the cultural and artistic equivalent of NAFTA ("Adventures in the Cultural Divide," by Lorenza Munoz, Sept. 24). Here come Robert Redford and his minions south of the border to "support" and "nurture" filmmakers with advice on how to make the projects more appealing to Miramax, the characters more heroic. About the only promising note in Munoz's excellent article was the postscript revealing how all of the Sundance advisors' notes to the Latin filmmakers were largely (and thankfully)

— When he notices she has entered, the DJ sprays fire and smoke from an elaborate spaceship control deck onto hundreds of teenagers from the poor outskirts of this city in the Amazon. Soon, she climbs to the top of the alien structure, launching into an impromptu version of one of her manic dance songs, celebrating the pirate nature of these huge parties that launched her career. "I'm going to sample you, I'm going to rob you," she booms over the crowd, before calling out the names of the various groups holding up signs demonstrating their allegiance to a particular part of the scene.

At the seemingly fragile age of 76, his story is the stuff of Hollywood legend (Well, maybe the seamier side of the San Fernando Valley), a tale made more outlandish because it happened to a buttoned-down salary man in hyper-conservative Japan. For years, a Tokyo grandfather kept a dirty little secret from his family. Longtime travel agent Shigeo Tokuda, who resembles countless older men who ride the Tokyo subway each day, admitted to his wife and daughter that he sometimes performed cameos in small-budget films.

She was a young actress with designs on mega-stardom. But to realize her dreams, Jang Ja-yeon was resigned to take her place in the seamy realm of the South Korean sexual casting couch. In the end, the disgrace proved too much. In the seven-page note she wrote before her March 2009 suicide, the 27-year-old TV sitcom regular described how her manager forced her to have sex with industry VIPs such as directors, media executives and CEOs, many of whom she cited by name. Jang's death stunned this nation transfixed by celebrity and all its trappings.

It is one of Latin America's best-known and biggest schools, with five times more students than UCLA and a treasured spot in Mexican life as the people's house of higher learning. But to prove it really matters, the 100-year-old National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, is placing its work on the Internet. All of it. In an effort of staggering scope, UNAM hopes to upload everything it has — from 18th century newspapers and vintage films to hundreds of thousands of student theses and a still-to-be-gauged sea of classroom teaching items — and let the world have it free of charge.

BEIJING - Orgies and anal sex hardly seem the usual fodder of traditional Chinese folk art, but that is exactly what one Chinese artist is depicting in a series of provocative paper-cuts that are now being exhibited in Los Angeles for the first time. Paper-cuts originated in Eastern Han Dynasty China (AD 25-220) and are hung on windows or doors for good luck. But instead of the usual decorative flowers and birds, Xiyadie, whose pseudonym means "Siberian Butterfly," portrays graphic and daring depictions of homosexual love - long considered taboo in China.

COLOGNE, Germany - On a street corner in the old part of Cologne, a boy of 9 or 10 approximates Christmas songs on his trumpet. Around him, the elaborate huts of the Altstadt Christmas market play a siren song audible only to ladies of a certain age and their long-suffering husbands. Booths selling the usual beeswax candles, Russian dolls and kitchen utensils made of olive wood you can find at any market are interspersed with those offering Battenberg lace, lamps made of wood veneer and various other hand-crafted items.

LONDON - Has anyone built a better "Mousetrap"? Britons just getting over celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II's diamond jubilee are now in the throes of another: the 60th anniversary of the world's longest-running play, "The Mousetrap" by Agatha Christie, England's "queen of crime" (or, with less royal pretension, "duchess of death"). What began as a BBC radio drama, at a time when postwar Brits carried around ration books and stared agog at television sets, has since become a West End phenomenon that shows no sign of stopping, though critics carp about signs of age. Sunday marks the official birthday, achieved after more than 25,000 performances, 400 actors and two dozen directors.

BEIJING - Behind a scrappy red door in an old Beijing hutong, or alleyway, stands a derelict late-Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) courtyard house. The expansive space, with open ceilings that give it the feeling of an abandoned abbey, has had myriad incarnations. Believed to have started as the luxurious living area of Manchu nobility, it was turned into a school, then a plastic factory, then a hostel. Now sunlight pours through broken windows onto edgy artworks temporarily there for a design festival.

BUDAPEST, Hungary - "The Sixth Coffin" has been officially buried. Derided as anti-Semitic agitprop, this work by recently deceased Hungarian playwright-politician-polemicist Istvan Csurka has been the focal point of controversy until it was finally scrubbed from Budapest's Uj Szinhaz's - or New Theater's - new season. But how this production (think: the Hungarian equivalent of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion") ever got anywhere near the performance schedule of a major municipal venue in the first place is part of a larger drama involving this country's leadership and its assault on culture.

  Join us at noon today for a live Google+ Hangout chat with sportswriter David Wharton and deputy sports editor John Cherwa. Wharton was in China with the UCLA men's basketball on their recent historic trip. The trip to China was a trial run, the start of what could be an annual exchange between the Pac-12 and the Federation of University Sports of China. Pac-12 officials are eager to foster relationships with a country where they might someday broadcast games and sell merchandise to a basketball-crazed populace.

  Join us at 8:15 a.m. today for a live Google+ Hangout chat with sportswriter David Wharton, who is in China with the UCLA basketball team, and Times sports editor Mike James. [ Update at 8 a.m. : The chat has been canceled because of technical difficulties. Our apologies for the cancellation.] The trip to China represents a trial run, the start of what could be an annual exchange between the Pac-12 and the Federation of University Sports of China. Pac-12 officials are eager to foster relationships with a country where they might someday broadcast games and sell merchandise to a basketball-crazed populace.

"You need to create blur to create desire," Jean-Charles de Castelbajac says in English, at a swanky restaurant in the center of Paris. The manager teases him about a TV appearance as he walks in and shakes hands with a famous French actor. Later, leaning in off his seat, the 61-year-old fashion designer and artist of noble birth excitedly talks about projects and the changing fashion business. "You like to see a man you understand in one minute? If you want to be seduced you don't like some blur?

GRAHAMSTOWN, South Africa - Of all the work presented at this year's National Arts Festival, one of the art world's better-kept secrets, a piece by conceptual theater artist Brett Bailey drew some of the most eager gazes. But audiences quickly averted their eyes when the horrors of the work became known. That's because "Exhibit A" showed them something almost unimaginable - a human zoo. Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, colonial conquest of southern Africa yielded not just land and goods; it led to the discovery of what Europeans considered a new "subspecies" of man: black Africans.

MEDELLIN, Colombia - The actor's comb-over, the mincing walk, the flat speech cadence and murderous, reptilian glare are all too reminiscent of one of the most powerful criminals who lived. The large number of Colombian eyeballs glued to a new prime-time telenovela about the life and times of Pablo Escobar, highlighted by actor Andrés Parra's bravura performance, shows that the late drug narco still fascinates more than 18 years after he died on a Medellin rooftop in a shoot-out with police.