Songs

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

AURORA, Colo. - On May 2, D'Avonte Meadows, a 6-year-old with an infectious grin and rambunctious streak, was suspended for three days from Sable Elementary in suburban Denver for crooning "[I'm] Sexy and I Know It" to a girl in lunch line. The school declared it sexual harassment and told his parents that, because D'Avonte sang the same song to the same girl before, he is a repeat offender. The news media pounced. And Stephanie Meadows, D'Avonte's 29-year-old mother, gave her bewildered son, a special needs student, a crash course in birds, bees and sexual boundaries.

Their name conjures up the most celebrated moment of America's post-Sept. 11 military campaigns. Now the Navy SEALs belong to a grimmer chapter in history: the most deadly incident for U.S. forces in the 10-year Afghanistan war. Three months after they killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan and cemented their place in military legend, the SEALs suffered a devastating loss when nearly two dozen of the elite troops were among...

LA JOLLA - From Florenz Ziegfeld's synchronized showgirls toAndrew Lloyd Webber's roller-skating actors to aSpider-Man who flies, musical theater has often encouraged dance and movement extravaganzas. So imagine the anxiety of the team putting together the new musical, "Hands on a Hardbody," which has its premiere Saturday at the La Jolla Playhouse. The story's 10 characters are tied - figuratively - to a Nissan pickup truck. How do you take that reality and turn it into a show-stopping number?

The great promise of "Smash" was that it offered a glossy insider's look at Broadway. The equally great challenge was to create original yet authentic show tunes for the musical about Marilyn Monroe embedded inside this NBC drama. "Our job is to make it feel authentic to the theater," said Scott Wittman, who composed the original songs with Marc Shaiman. The Tony- and Grammy-winning duo, whose list of credits include Broadway's adaptations of "Hairspray" and "Catch Me If You Can," had months to compose songs for the pilot.

Although she was an Oscar-nominated songwriter, Dory Previn was better known for ballads that spoke to wounded souls. A gifted lyricist, she mined her traumatic childhood and later mental illness to write confessional songs that found an audience — and helped her heal. In one song, "Beware of Young Girls," she expressed her outrage over being left in the late 1960s by her husband and songwriting partner, Andre Previn, for actress Mia Farrow: Beware of young girls Too often they crave to cry At a wedding and dance on a grave Soon after her marriage broke up, Dory Previn had a breakdown.

"People used to say nobody can sing my songs but me — they're too personal," Joni Mitchell explained last week during a rare interview. Apparently, nobody told John Kelly not to try adapting her songs. The renowned Obie Award-winning actor and performance artist has been belting out Mitchell's songs for more than 20 years. This weekend, the New York-based Kelly concludes the L.A. run of his acclaimed solo tribute to the iconic, iconoclastic singer-songwriter, "Paved Paradise: The Art of Joni Mitchell," at Renberg Theatre.

The '60s gave us "Blowin' in the Wind," folk-poet Bob Dylan's challenge to the brutal status quo. The '70s served up Neil Young's "Ohio," an anthem of generational rage against the military-industrial machine. The '80s laid down "The Message," Grandmaster Flash's hip-hop jeremiad about the vicious cycle of race-based poverty. The '90s broke loose with Rage Against the Machine's "Bulls on Parade," a rap-rock rant targeting corporate greed and cultural imperialism. And the '00s? It's produced some memorably sardonic screeds (Green Day's "American Idiot")

'Songs and Dances of Imaginary Lands' Where: the Songs and Dances Warehouse, 8810 Washington Blvd., Culver City When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Sunday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Ends July 18. Tickets: $25-$50 Info: (323) 655-2410 or http://www.overtoneindustries.org

Patients at the end of their lives often receive their final care from hospice workers. Contrary to what the haven't-really-though-about-it-crowd might suspect, not all such care involves administering drugs. Hospice therapists in Florida team up to use a combination of music and massage to treat dying patients such as Bernard Michels, 98. He, for one, sees the merits. "It brings back memories of when I was a younger guy," he says in a South Florida Sun Sentinel story . The music-massage approach delivers more than a passing feel-good emotion.

Singer and actress Julie Andrews has listed the Brentwood house she owned with her late husband, director and screenwriter Blake Edwards , for $2.649 million. Less than a month after coming on the market, the tidy white home with gray shutters is already in escrow. The traditional-style house features a family room and living room with French doors opening to a fanciful garden that appears to be "practically perfect in every way" to borrow a phrase from "Mary Poppins. " The formal dining room has a cathedral ceiling and glass walls.

BERLIN - Magdalena Kozena, one of today's most versatile mezzo-sopranos, has never chosen a predictable path. With her flair for Baroque music, flexible voice and striking looks, she won comparisons to the Italian diva Ceclia Bartoli shortly after she signed with the Deutsche Grammophon label in 1999, yet she quickly proved herself an equally coveted interpreter of Romantic music, championing Czech composers such as Janacek and Martinu along...

"Headhunters,"the new Norwegian thriller based on the novel of the same name by Jo Nesbo, tells the story of a wealthy but insecure executive recruiter who moonlights as an art thief to support his posh lifestyle. Years before "Headhunters" was an international box office success or a bestselling book, Nesbo was living his own double life as a stockbroker at the Oslo Stock Exchange and rock musician with the band Di Derre (translation: "those guys"). "I was seen as this sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," said Nesbo, 52, on the phone from his native Oslo.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a musical with less dramatic tension than "Million Dollar Quartet" anywhere this side of a "My Little Pony" touring show. The production that opened Tuesday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts really just wants to let the good times roll, so you can be glad it devotes only about 10 minutes of its 105-minute running time to drumming up token conflicts between Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash and their visionary producer, Sam Phillips.

NEW YORK - Anyone out there heard of George and Ira Gershwin? Well, apparently, the brothers - long dead, if I'm not mistaken - have a "new" musical comedy, which opened Tuesday at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway. The show, which stars Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara, is called "Nice Work if You Can Get It," but please don't get the idea that the songwriting legends have been granted a second coming. The only miracle going on here is a marketing one. A treasure-trove of tunes by the Gershwin boys has been repurposed into a wobbly jukebox musical, with a hot-off-the-press book by Joe DiPietro ("Memphis")

For legendary Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar's 75th birthday, a very special guest was invited onstage to perform with the onetime Beatles cohort. Shankar's accompanying orchestra members set down their instruments as she walked onto the New Dehli stage, sat down with her own sitar and performed a 15-minute solo set. In front of 2,500 people, Anoushka Shankar, Ravi's daughter, had made her musical debut. She was 13. "It was utterly terrifying," Shankar says of her big premiere in 1995.

Ben Jaffe, the tuba player and creative director for the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, was sitting in his Faubourg Marigny house one spring morning, drinking fresh-brewed New Orleans chicory coffee and worrying about the oil spill. He and music producer Bill Lynn had just watched oil executives blame one another for the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster, and Jaffe, who comes from a long line of jazz musicians, was sick of it. He glanced over at a glum Lynn, and as if by instinct, they started riffing on a standard New Orleans tune, "It Ain't My Fault."

Over the years, "The Simpsons"on Fox has engaged a few Broadway talents in guest spots -- Stephen Sondheim, David Mamet and Mandy Patinkin all have put it vocal cameos. The series even paid tribute to Bob Fosse in a few episodes, with an obnoxious choreographer character named Chazz Busby. The latest Broadway talent to visit Springfield will be Robert Lopez, a co-writer of "The Book of Mormon," according to a report in Playbill. Lopez apparently has penned a new song that will be performed on the April 29 episode, titled "A Totally Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again.

"Open Call" 9 p.m. Thursday, KCET: 100 Voices: A Journey Home: Hosted by mezzo-soprano opera singer Suzanna Guzman, "Open Call" features a wide variety of productions from profiles of artists. "Soulful Symphony With Darin Atwater: Song in a Strange Land" 11:30 a.m. Friday; Noon Wednesday, KCET: Artistic director Atwater conducts an 85-member orchestra in compositions exhibiting styles ranging through gospel, jazz and symphonic music. "Il Volo Takes Flight" Noon Friday, KOCE: The Italian teen vocal group performs classical and traditional Italian songs at the Detroit Opera House.