Bill Raden

Opera experimentalist Yuval Sharon

A funny thing happened to Yuval Sharon on his way to a planned career as a film director. While studying at UC Berkeley, he decided to go to the opera. The production was Wozzeck by Alban Berg. To prepare, he listened to a recording at home and found his imagination fired by Berg's searing, atonal chromatic expressionism. Image after powerful image assailed him as he imagined the staging and what the performance would feel like sitting in the audience. Then he went to the opera house. Compared to his vision, the production seemed boring and bloodless, dispiritingly conventional.

The evening was an epiphany. Certainly such works deserved a better theatrical treatment than this. And he was just the man to do it.

Fast-forward to a recent, overcast morning at the Atwater Crossing complex, where Sharon stands in a raw warehouse he's transforming into the kind of opera house he imagined years before at Berkeley. It's no Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Crisscrossed by wooden ramps and dominated by seven towering, sculptural set pieces, it looks more like an art installation at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.

In fact, it is the stage for the new experimental opera Sharon is directing as the inaugural production of the Industry, the avant opera company he formed this year with his partner, producer Laura Kay Swanson. Now in the final stretch of rehearsals, the production will be a world premiere of composer Anne LeBaron and librettist Douglas Kearney's Crescent City, which Sharon fell in love with when he was programming New York Opera's acclaimed new-works showcase VOX.

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Shannon Cottrell

For more photos check out our slideshow, Sage Vaughn: Studio Tour

Sage Vaughn, one of SoCal's favorite contemporary urban naturalist painters, is tucked inside a quaint and tidy mid century modern one story studio, located right where Pasadena ends. There's a small group of mourning doves that gather daily outside his door waiting for seeds, unnervingly oblivious to the occasional hawk overhead. Prime death watch viewing if he's not busy researching other concepts of animal behavior, whether it's a Wagner opera or in an inherited collection of vintage Hustler magazines.

This particular morning, upon LA Weekly's arrival, we find red velvet cupcakes and a mean cup of joe complete with hand frothed milk waiting for us. Not a typical artist interview welcome, but our man Sage is anything but typical -- evidenced by the ski mask he always wears tucked in his back pocket.

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Star Foreman

Damien Elwood, left, with Angie Engelbart, front, and Shabnam Kalbasi

"All you really need to know about Carmen is, one, she's a Gypsy. And two, she's a slut," the singer says before beginning.

It's standing room only at the bar, where a staging of the French opera is taking place. Yes, that's right. Opera. At a bar. Specifically, the Room 5 Lounge atop a restaurant on Beverly Boulevard.

The Bizet with booze comes to Los Angeles -- by way of Brooklyn -- courtesy of the grassroots program Opera on Tap, which aims to bring to the masses the world's snootiest art form.

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