Musical

LA JOLLA -- The story of early rock 'n' roll is a truly American tale. The music probably wouldn't have been possible if not for the proximity of people from diverse backgrounds, overhearing each other and appropriating what they liked. Yet if America in the late 1940s and early '50s was beginning to come together in music, the country, in most other ways, remained deeply divided. "Memphis" -- a musical being given an exuberant, high-gloss staging at La Jolla Playhouse -- looks back on this time and finds a message at once chilling and full of hope.

A bleary-eyed Chui Hom tripped down her apartment stairs at 8 a.m. sharp and started her car. She didn't get far. The vehicle inched across Riverside Terrace, a narrow one-way lane in Echo Park, and stopped on the other side. Hom is part of Los Angeles' Great Street-Sweeping Do-Si-Do. Twice a week, residents of Koreatown, Pico-Union and other neighborhoods with more apartments than parking spaces race to their cars, hoping to move them before parking enforcement officers arrive and ticket them for blocking street sweepers.

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.

Bob Moog was a geek. And proud of it. His music-meets-electronics inventions made him a legend in the music world but not exactly a household name. Today, a Google Doodle seeks to change that, honoring him with an ultra-cool interactive doodle -- call it a Goog -- that shows the world just how "instrumental" the late Moog was.

Lesley Ann Warren's first audition for the title role in CBS' 1965 version of the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musical, " Cinderella" was an unmitigated disaster. Warren was all of 18 but had garnered great notices for her supporting role as Snookie on Broadway in "110 in the Shade," the musical version of "The Rainmaker." "Cinderella" director Charles S. Dubin had seen Warren in "110" and thought she would be perfect. (Rodgers and Hammerstein's only original musical for TV had aired live to great acclaim in 1957 with Julie Andrews in the starring role.

Typically, we go to the desert at least once a year. We love the expansive space, several of the inns and restaurants and, of course, the otherworldly foliage of Joshua Tree National Park. We also enjoy the musical legacy of Gram Parsons, the former Byrd who overdosed in Joshua Tree in 1973, at age 26, after virtually inventing the alt-country movement that would blossom two decades later. We feel these echoes and others — the twangy music, the land's natural contours, the local cuisine — when we're there.

'Billy Elliot the Musical' Where: Pantages Theatre, Hollywood When: 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 2 p.m. Saturday; 1 and 6 p.m. Sunday. Ends May 13. Tickets: $25 to $125 Information: (800) 982-ARTS or http://www.broadwayla.org

Who knew a rejection to join the fantasy team of ESPN's Bill Simmons and Matthew Berry would lead to a full-length musical? That's exactly what happened to David Ingber, whose show, "Fantasy Football: The Musical," opens Oct. 1 at the New York Musical Theater Festival. He originally pitched the idea to Simmons and Berry when they were fielding applications last year to join their basketball fantasy league. Upon being rejected, Ingber followed through with his project. The musical is set in 1991 and features Simmons and Berry inventing fantasy football.

"Magdi, Magdi," the kid yells, running in off the street. A bottle of water flies up to the loft and Magdi Ali catches it and shouts thanks. The child disappears through the sawdust and back into the sunlight. Ali scrapes his planer, pale curls weightless as snow tumble around his sandals, his glue pot simmers on a stove. He tightens strings of copper and silk until the pluck-pling of ancient music rises from his worn hands and drifts out the door. A single note. Then it vanishes.

Mitch Miller, who helped shape musical tastes in the 1950s and early '60s as the head of the popular music division at Columbia Records and hosted the hit "Sing Along With Mitch" TV show in the early '60s while becoming one of the era's most commercially successful recording artists, has died. He was 99. Miller died Saturday after a short illness at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said his daughter, Margaret Miller Reuther. A top oboist and English horn player who joined the CBS Symphony Orchestra in the 1930s and later recorded with legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski, Miller wound up his more than seven-decade musical career guest conducting symphony orchestras around the world.

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.

The financial well-being of nonprofit arts organizations typically depends on ticket-buying fans and check-writing philanthropists, but the Music Center is trying to bring complete strangers into the mix — including some who might never set foot on Bunker Hill, or for that matter, the West Coast. Its first-ever online auction is going on right now, with 36 items up for bid. They range from what you might expect — living it up at the Los Angeles Opera’s opening night gala on Sept.

Never, perhaps, was there a more fitting program for Jacaranda's motto “music at the edge” than the one served up Sunday evening: two rare works by two iconoclastic Pacific Rim composers, performed almost literally on the Rim itself at Santa Monica's First Presbyterian Church during a solar eclipse. Terry Riley's ground-breaking exercise in repetition “In C” is world-famous, but hardly anyone has ever heard its followup, “Olson III” -  which, incredibly, was receiving its large-scale U.S. premiere.

  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.

Warning: Music may be hazardous to your health. It's not just your hearing that's at risk, according to a study out Monday in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics. Teens and young adults who listen to digital music players with ear buds are almost twice as likely as non-listeners to smoke pot, the study says. And those who attend concerts or frequent dance clubs are nearly six times as likely as homebodies to go on a binge-drinking bender. These findings are based on survey results collected from 944 low-income students at two vocational schools in the Netherlands.

MIAMI - The Carnival Destiny cruise ship hasn't even left port, and half the ship's guests are already wasted. Passengers pack the lobby bar, balancing luggage with buckets of ice-soaked beer bottles, and flashing room keys that double as charge cards to keep the drinks flowing. When it's time for a mandatory safety drill, the life-saving instructions playing over the vessel's intercom can barely be heard over sounds of drunken guests stumbling over one another, spewing obscenities, cheering, slapping high-fives and yelling chants like "Ain't no party like a … Kid Rock party.

Though Carl Davis has composed scores for such films as 1981's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," over the past three decades, he's become one of silent cinema's greatest champions, composing and conducting scores for countless silent films as well as orchestrating existing scores for such silents as Charlie Chaplin's 1931 masterwork"City Lights. " In March, the U.S.-born, London-based composer earned kudos for conducting the 46-piece Oakland East Bay Symphony in his score for the restored 5 1/2-hour version of Abel Gance's 1927 epic "Napoleon.

Is a hyper-curated playlist the new house-made charcuterie? Whether a restaurant's playing Lady Gaga or Langhorne Slim says as much about the place as its Mason jar drinking glasses or farm-to-table pickle plate. And in an era when even Facebook tracks one's music choices, restaurants are paying more attention than ever to what goes with the hickory-roasted carrots - not just the za'tar -laced crème fraîche but, say, also Lambchop (the band, not the meat). When a customer walks into a restaurant - even before Jack White's "Sixteen Saltines" becomes the soundtrack for the sunchoke soup - the music sets the tone for the dining experience, says Bill Chait, the restaurateur behind L.A.'s Short Order, Picca, Sotto, Rivera and Playa, among others.