The Metropolitan Museum of Art is rolling out an art Hot 100 of sorts – website videos starring 100 of the New York City museum’s curators, each of whom discusses a single work from the museum's collection “that changed the way they view the world.”

The group is shown as a hard-driving cover band working to hit it big in the promising but ultimately disappointing musical at the Ahmanson.

To all those graying rockers turned middle-class professionals streaming into the Ahmanson Theatre for "Backbeat" — I believe the technical term for this class of people is "subscribers" — a word of warning: The ads might make the show seem like the British version of "Jersey Boys," a "Liverpool Blokes" hit parade capitalizing on the greatest rock 'n' roll catalog of all time, but this musical marches to the beat of an entirely different drummer.

This post has been corrected, as detailed below.

Modern-dance choreographer Trisha Brown, who announced her retirement from creating new work last month, will bring her renowned company to Los Angeles for a series of performances at multiple venues, including the Getty Museum and the Hammer Museum, starting in late March.

The pianist demonstrates a sly hand with the often-rapid 'Sisar,' Esa-Pekka Salonen's piece receiving its world premiere.

Yefim Bronfman's recital at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Wednesday night was bookended by monumental Brahms and Prokofiev sonatas that the popular Uzbek pianist with a massive technique made much of. The occasion will gladly be remembered as the example of a prodigious performer in action, increasingly willing to plumb music's soul.

"The Black Mirror," an unusually fine group show, inaugurates Diane Rosenstein's handsome new Hollywood space. A taut and provocative visual essay, the show gathers 40 works by 21 mostly contemporary artists, including James Welling, who co-curated with Rosenstein.

[This post has been updated.]

An early still life by Vija Celmins that has been hanging in its owners' kitchen for almost 50 years will go up for auction in May at Los Angeles Modern Auctions.

A Renaissance-era panel by the artist Botticelli depicting the Virgin Mary, baby Jesus and a young John the Baptist sold for $10.4 million at a Christie's auction in New York on Wednesday. The work was labeled the "Rockefeller Madonna" by the auction house because it was once owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr.

The ethics for adding ancient works to American art museum collections became substantially more stringent five years ago when the Assn. of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) decided to set the bar higher -- prompted by complaints from Italy, Greece and other ancient lands that museums had long turned a blind eye to evidence that pieces they owned had been looted from archaeological sites.

The Lord created heaven and earth, but he also made rising and falling action. There’s plenty of cosmos and not much catharsis in “Cassiopeia,” David Wiener’s exhaustingly rhapsodic meditation on celestial and human bodies, now at the Theatre at Boston Court.

A top dancer at Russia's Bolshoi Ballet is seeking refuge in Canada following the acid attack earlier this month on the company's artistic director, Sergei Filin, according to news reports.

The ready-made edginess of hit men, hookers and gangsters is a foundation that a story can either build on or coast on. Writer-director Brian Peterson’s "The Misadventures of Rick the Strangler" at the Electric Lodge takes the lazy route with formulaic characters aimed at those who like their comedy crude and incoherent.

This week’s spate of Mozart concerts in Costa Mesa by the Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale, in conjunction with Sunday’s 257th anniversary of the composer's birth, hold special interest for this reporter. Yes, I will be at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall to hear his celebrated Requiem and several other pieces linked by the fact that they were composed during the final year of Mozart’s short life. But you'll find me embedded with the chorale, adding my modest voice to theirs.

As one of the leading tight ends in the National Football League, the San Francisco 49ers' Vernon Davis will be one to watch during Sunday's Super Bowl game against the Baltimore Ravens.

An art exhibition in Vienna dedicated to the male nude is reportedly welcoming nudists to experience the galleries au naturel after public hours. 

Jason Alexander intends to stir up laughs as he guides a pair of 1960s Jewish humor albums to the stage.

Jason Alexander is bringing a bit of the Borscht Belt to Los Angeles. The "Seinfeld" star, who's a Tony-winning actor as well as artistic director of L.A.'s financially challenged Reprise Theatre Company, is directing a new comedy-musical revue based on the 1960s humor albums "You Don't Have to Be Jewish" and "When You're in Love the Whole World Is Jewish."

Amy Herzog's '4000 Miles,' directed by Mark Rucker, is a coming-of-age drama that finds laughter in cockeyed yet utterly believable detail.

SAN FRANCISCO — Amy Herzog, a breath of fresh air on the playwriting scene, shapes her plays out of the missing pieces of conversations, the resonant silences that suggest that emotion is both too heavy and too slippery for words.