"The Mother… With the Hat" is not the actual title of the exhilarating Stephen Adly Guirgis play now at South Coast Repertory, but it's the best I can do without bringing down the strong arm of the censor. Hard as it might be for casual cursers to believe, naughty words still have the power to offend.

Guirgis knows this on a deeper level than most. His characters throw the profanity equivalent of Molotov cocktails at one another. They're foulmouthed artists, spinning obscenely colorful invective to inflict as much damage as possible on their targets. But their ability to hurt is in...

The brain drain continues: Rebecca Morse is leaving her job as associate curator at MOCA for a post with the same title within LACMA’s photography department. She will start her new position on Feb. 1, replacing Edward Robinson and reporting to photography head Britt Salvesen.

Morse graduated from SUNY Purchase in 1993 and...

The beat goes on at the Pasadena Symphony as the venerable orchestra continues to search for a new music director, evidently in no particular hurry since the post became vacant in May 2010. The New York City-born Tito Munoz, 29, is one of the contenders; apparently management and the players liked what they saw in 2011 and invited him back for a second look Saturday at Ambassador Auditorium.

Last time, Munoz was impressively expressive in Elgar’s “Enigma Variations”; this time he again did his best work of the afternoon in the large-scale post-intermission offering, Brahms&...

"Family Guy" on Fox gave its satirical regards to Broadway on Sunday in a new episode in which Brian and Stewie face off as rival playwrights battling for supremacy in the Griffin household. 

Sunday's episode featured several theater-world references, including comedic homages to Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" -- another play about creative jealousy -- and Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire." It also featured fake cameos by playwrights David Mamet, Alan Bennett and Yasmina Reza.   

Brian, the Griffin family dog, finds local fame when his new play "A Passing Fancy" is a hit at a local...

"Les Misérables" won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy film on Sunday, adding to the movie's already considerable awards momentum. The movie adaptation of the honored stage musical also picked up awards for actors Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway.

But "Les Misérables" failed to win in the category of original song. "Suddenly," penned by the original musical's songwriters, lost to "Skyfall," written by British pop singer Adele and Paul Epworth for the latest James Bond movie. The new song for "Les Misérables" was written by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michael Schönberg and Herbert Kretzmer.

G...

"Picnic," the 1953 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by William Inge, is getting a rare revival on Broadway from the Roundabout Theatre with a cast of young, good-looking actors paired alongside more seasoned veterans.

Maggie Grace, who appeared in NBC's "Lost" and the "Twilight" movies, stars alongside Sebastian Stan, who was in the shortlived USA series "Political Animals." They are joined by Ellen Burstyn (who was also in "Political Animals"), Mare Winningham and Elizabeth Marvel.

Scott Gold, who recently directed Theresa Rebeck's "Seminar" on Broadway and in L.A. at the Ahmanson Theatre, has...

"Fierce Beauty," the Jacaranda concert Saturday night at First Presbyterian Church in Santa Monica, was important. And it was important in several ways.

It began what will be a week of considerable attention on Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös. A major figure in Europe, he is too little recognized in the United States and his appearances here are infrequent. The Los Angeles Philharmonic's upcoming "Focus on Eötvös" mini-festival is meant to help mend that neglect.

With demanding pieces by Eötvös and the famed late Hungarian composer György Ligeti, "Fierce Beauty" was the most...

Last time around the focus was Southern California's art history; now homegrown architecture is getting its time in the sun. Getty Trust leaders are announcing Monday the final roster of exhibition and event partners in its Pacific Standard Time spinoff, Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in Southern California, slated to run April through July.

They will also be releasing the specific grant amounts given to various museums and institutions: roughly $3.6 million in all. Eight exhibition partners received grants from $260,000 to $445,000 to help mount shows and publish...

Inspiration can come from anywhere. Even a cardboard box company.

In 1950, the Container Corp. of America launched an advertising campaign called "Great Ideas of Western Man." The series, which ran for three decades, paired quotes from leaders in philosophy, science and politics with artwork from modern artists.

A new exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center uses the same technique but focuses on Jewish artists and phrases. "Voices & Visions" features 18 posters inspired by quotations from Jewish authors and scholars. The show is free to the public and runs through March 17. After Los...

Ninety-six works by 26 artists from the United States, Europe and Asia, brought together to illuminate a big — but overlooked — idea.

"Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962" is vintage MOCA. A boldly thoughtful, revisionist exhibition that focuses on destruction as a creative force, it's the sort of show that has long distinguished Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art.

The project is also vintage Paul Schimmel, who organized "Destroy the Picture" and edited its substantial catalog. But the exhibition's closing on Monday will mark the end of his 22-year tenure as the...

The music of Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös isn't "easy" in any conventional sense. A typical Eötvös piece sets the listener adrift through swaths of treacherous soundscapes and shimmering dissonance, usually without the aid of melody.

Though often challenging, his music is also playful in an intellectual way — a childlike romp through a music-theory sand box. This is evident in the title of his new concerto "DoReMi," which was written for the violinist Midori and will have its world premiere Friday in a concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The piece is...

NEW YORK — Sixty years ago next month, playwright William Inge's "Picnic" opened on Broadway, establishing the Kansas-born playwright as one of the theater's brightest lights, considered the equal of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.

The play, in which a sexy young drifter causes havoc in the lives of the women of a small Midwestern town, won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle award that year. Two years later, "Picnic" became a successful Oscar-winning film starring Kim Novak and William Holden.

Inge felt he had to do something about all that success, so...