Theater

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

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?

If you buy something from online auctioneer Property Room, you don't have to wonder if it was stolen. That's because it probably was. Property Room, started by a former police detective, gets its items from law enforcement property rooms nationwide. Most of its inventory of jewelry, bicycles, computers, furniture, tools, car stereos, cameras, sports equipment, portable music players and things that could best be categorized under miscellaneous -- or bizarre -- was seized from crooks.

  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.

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.

A million free theater tickets to people younger than 26? American producers will no doubt be green with envy over the British government's largesse. But reports about the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's initiative, designed to spark a love affair between Shakespeare, Shaw and Stoppard and a generation that has spent its youth blankly gazing at screens, made me wonder if there might not be another, less politically correct reason for the program. For years, there have been whispered complaints among unpensioned theatergoers about the "gray menace" -- you know, the invasion of cumbersome canes and aisle-blocking walkers at matinees, the crinkling of lozenge wrappers during pivotal plot points and that unignorable combination of listening devices and hearing aids that tend to explode just as opening numbers start getting good.

Long before the digital revolution -- I believe it might have been the Neolithic period -- theater criticism was actually published in book form. Anthologies of reviews, monographs on artists and essays on theatrical developments would sit proudly in stores that carried such not-yet-antiquated things as poetry, histories and novels. "The American Theatre Reader: Essays and Conversations From American Theatre Magazine" is a refreshingly unexpected throwback to such a literate age. Defiantly unglossy in its look and flagrantly retro in its defense of intelligent theater discussion, the collection is also a reassurance that, despite all the countervailing economic and cultural forces, there continues to exist a small battalion of theater writers fighting the good fight.

By any sound byte, 1993 has been the year of theatrical rectitude when it comes to political correctness. The changing climate of Los Angeles was reflected in the changing climate of its theater: From Anna Deavere Smith's noncommittal (and non-controversial) piece on the Los Angeles riots, "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum, to Culture Clash's raucously politicized "Carpa Clash." Like the city, L.A.'s theater continues to be eclectic, scattershot and full of creative surprise.

The Bixby Park Bandshell in Long Beach was renovated more than a year ago to serve as a venue for concerts, celebrations and picnics, but it's mostly been used as a makeshift homeless shelter and a skateboarding haven for teens. The next two weekends, however, will see it transformed into a free children's theater, part of the Long Beach Sea Festival, a summer series of beach events. On Saturday, the Long Beach Shakespeare Company will perform a condensed version of William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" for kids of all ages at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. The 45-minute story revolves around magical sorcerers and sea monsters on a deserted island.

Lighting up for dramatic effect is a no-no on Colorado theater stages. The Denver Post reports that the Colorado Department of Public Health is taking a hard line against the smoking of tobacco products or tobacco substitutes on indoor stages, following legislation enacted in 2006, now under appeal. "You simply cannot make unprotected conduct protected by dumping it into a theater context," the paper quotes assistant attorney general Lisa Brenner Freimann as saying.

The price first-time homeowner Justin Bieber paid for his new digs in Calabasas has wended its way into the public record: $6.5 million. Set on 1.3 acres in a gated community, the 10,000-square-foot main house is described as "transitional French" in style. Features include a high-ceiling foyer, library, a movie theater with stadium seating, a wet bar and a wine cellar. Just what every 18-year-old pop singer needs. Including a guesthouse, there are seven bedrooms and eight bathrooms.

Nothing seems to stop "Jungle" Jack Hanna. Facing down dangerous animals and persnickety late-night hosts, the congenial wildlife expert and dedicated conservationist in the trademark khaki suit has been TV fixture for the last 30 years. Now, despite having just undergone a double knee replacement, Hanna is doing a national theater tour that comes to the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach on Saturday. "As long as I don't have to run around too much after any animals I will be fine," he laughed by phone from his home in Montana, where he is recuperating.

The way Louie Pérez remembers it, there was nothing more all-American than growing up Mexican American in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Yes, there were serious economic and social roadblocks to Latinos joining the middle-class mainstream. But Pérez and his friends danced to the same music as their non-Latino peers, wore the same clothes - Sonny and Cher furry vests, anyone? - and tuned in and turned on to the same groovy counterculture experiments. They stood shoulder to shoulder for the same social causes, and many of them died fighting in the same southeast Asian war. "The Chicanos in the '60s didn't live in a vacuum," Pérez, principal lyricist and multi-instrumentalist of the legendary East L.A. rock band Los Lobos, said recently.

"The Avengers," as you may have heard, is the biggest thing to happen to America since World War II but, you know, louder and more troubling. At the end of the matinee I witnessed, audience members actually cheered, believing what they'd just seen was some sort of documentary. Manhattan had been saved, which is almost always a cause for celebration, though I met this one New Yorker the other day at the rent-a-car place: swaggery young Italian guy, you know the type. The New Yorker said he didn't like L.A. because "ders nuttin' to do hair," which translates roughly into "there is nothing to do here.

EVENTS For its latest mind-bending avant-garde circus act, Les 7 Doigts de la Main explores inner dream life with "PSY," a culture-colliding mix of Chinese and German stage traditions with elaborate contemporary aerial work. It's meant to evoke subconscious panic, and the ways we eventually overcome them — but if you just want to watch bodies in incredible motion, it's quite a show as well. Irvine Barclay Theater, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Thu.-Sun.Times vary. $25-$45. thebarclay.org.

To baby boomers, Barbara Bain is best known for the two TV series she did with her ex-husband, Martin Landau: "Mission: Impossible," for which she won three consecutive Emmys (1967-69) as the coolly efficient agent Cinnamon Carter, and the 1975-77 British sci-fi action-adventure, "Space: 1999," which aired in the U.S. in syndication. But despite her TV and feature film work, Bain is really a theater animal. She honed her craft in the 1950s in New York with the legendary Lee Strasberg, who remains a strong influence on her. "Lee was a very important teacher," she said.

David Joyce marched his way to the front of the U.S. immigration line using his pocketbook, sinking half a million dollars into a Vermont ski resort. The British citizen had spent years in a futile effort to secure green cards for himself, his wife and their 9-year-old son so they could relocate to sunny Florida. Then, a fellow emigre tipped him off to a little-known federal program that helps foreigners gain permanent U.S. residency by investing in American businesses. Graphic: Number of investors' visas to U.S. "In six months, we had our green cards," said Joyce, 51. "Considering everything we've been through, this was easy.

Never did the day laborers vying for work along an oil-stained Home Depot parking lot expect an offer like this. Two directors -- carrying clipboards and a camera for profile shots -- showed up with a pitch fit for a wannabe L.A. actor: A big foundation gave money to form a traveling theater company, and day laborers would be cast for the roles. It wasn't exactly the paid job they hoped for, but at least there would be free dinner, a bus pass and a chance to see new cities.

In the end, the Oscars just couldn't leave Hollywood. After entertaining multiple offers to relocate the event, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Tuesday that it would keep the Academy Awards at the theater at Hollywood & Highland, negotiating a new 20-year deal with the CIM Group, which owns the complex. CIM also announced that Dolby Laboratories had signed on as the new name sponsor for the complex's 3,400-seat theater, taking over from Kodak, which had filed for bankruptcy.

The owners of the Battle of the Dance dinner show had hoped to catch the wave of tourists from nearby Disneyland with family-friendly entertainment boasting European dancers and a gourmet meal of smoked salmon salad, filet mignon and a "decadent" dessert. But when the paying customers failed to materialize in the numbers foreseen, they cut the number of dinner shows, amped up the volume and turned to a different crowd. There was a "topless DJ," go-go dancers and an appearance by an adult film performer to entertain late-night partygoers in Anaheim's manicured resort district.