Chris Bennion Photo

See also:
*New theater reviews, including our take on Jekyll & Hyde
*Photos of last year's Edwardian Ball

Jekyll & Hyde opened at Hollywood's Pantages Theater last week as part of a national tour preceding the musical's return to Broadway this April. Directed by Jeff Calhoun and starring Constantine Maroulis and Deborah Cox, this latest incarnation of Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse's musical comes with a new look, one that is as modern as it is vintage.

Indeed, this reinterpretation of the Robert Louis Stevenson tale bears some resemblance to what we've seen at major nightclub events in Los Angeles over the past few years. Like such gatherings as Edwardian Ball (coming up this weekend) and Labyrinth of Jareth, Jekyll & Hyde visually fuses together the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the present day. It's a stage filled with corsets that are more special-occasion goth than prim Victorian, and laboratory scenes trimmed with steampunk details.

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Josiah Golojuh

WIP Featured Artists Meirav Haber, Kevin McTurk, and Sam Koji Hale

A movie must be completed before its screened, right? Not according to Graphation.

Last night, in Downtown Los Angeles' Hive Gallery, the independent film group kickstarted their first installment of Works In Progress by presenting three unfinished films to an audience. The focus of the WIP series is less on product and more on process.

"We want these things to be educational," Andrew McGregor, who comprises half of Graphation, explained during an after show interview. "We've shown finished works in the past, and the questions are always, "How did you come to this conclusion, this destination?" We want to be a resource to the creative community. With the digital revolution, you can make your own movie with an iPhone, but what does that actually mean unless you know how to shoot a film with your iPhone."

McGregor, clad in a cacophony of of patterns and capped by his signature, Jughead-esque felt crown, hosted this evening of movie demystification with his creative partner Josiah Golojuh. This initial WIP showcased a troika of filmmakers specializing in puppet based storytelling. Several dozen attendees crowded into the gallery to watch these artists present hand crafted claymation characters, field questions concerning their creative journeys and screen rough scenes from their infant projects.

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Liz Ohanesian

The TARDIS outside of Clockwork Couture

Wednesday afternoon, Clockwork Couture, the Burbank boutique dedicated to steampunk and neo-Victorian fashion, celebrated the official grand opening their new Main Street digs. A small crowd of locals dressed in corsets, bustles and exquisite hats was there for the debut. So were Burbank's mayor and the city's Chamber of Commerce. Donna Ricci, known as Captain Donna, posed with a big red ribbon and oversized scissors in front of the store. Behind her was a DIY British-style police box, known to Dr. Who fans as a TARDIS. Her husband had only finished work on the TARDIS that morning.

The store is impeccably packed. In between the rows of bloomers and frock coats are shelves and display cases filled with perfumes and oils, one-of-a-kind hats, stationary and jewelry. A Christmas tree stands in a corner, decked out in cameos, faded photographs and airships. Stockings that resemble old-timey ladies boots hang next to the tree.

But Clockwork Couture is more than a boutique. It's a place to foster community. In the back, there's a meeting room outfitted with props made by performance group The League of S.T.E.A.M. Locals working on arts, education or entertainment projects can book time here for free. People have already used it for fundraisers, classes and script-readings. The room even served as a backdrop for the cover of L.A. Weekly's Best of L.A. 2012 issue. In the front of the store, there's a small kennel where Clockwork Couture houses rescued animals until they can find proper homes.

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Tanja M. Laden

Fraggle Rock

When she was 12 years old, Beth Barrial had a life-changing experience in a park after dark with some friends.

"A scent passed me by that sparked a strange, unfocused memory from early childhood," she describes. "I had a sudden recollection of one perfect moment of joy and complete freedom, unfettered by worry, responsibility or care, and it was truly a moment of contact with the sublime."

Not unlike in Marcel Proust's famously extended account of eating a madeleine and drinking some tea in his early-20th century work Remembrances of Things Past, Barrial realized that the scent is what triggered her memory, so she immediately became enamored with the sense itself: "I pursued my interests in fragrance the old-fashioned way -- through apprenticeship. I had no intentions of turning my interest in perfumery into a career. It was something I loved, and something I wanted to learn and experience for the sake of that love."

But she has turned it into a career. Together with her brother Brian Constantine, Barrial started Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab in 2000 in the back room of her then-boyfriend Ted's Echo Park apartment. That boyfriend is now her husband, who's since launched Black Phoenix Trading Post, which deals in dry goods, beauty products and other stuff related to the fragrance line. Together, the trio still runs a family-owned business that specializes in making one-of-a-kind products inspired by specific memories, pop-culture icons and a wide variety of other unusual sources.

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Jena Ardell

If there's any sign that festival fashion trends are going mass-market, it's that Burning Man, the ultimate outlier festival, has now provided inspiration for this summer's TopShop makeup line. Burning Man is merely the next event in a series of festivals to undergo large-store treatment -- think of LF stores' guide to Coachella, or endless fashion blog posts about "that perfect festival dress from Urban Outfitters."

But unlike most summer festivals, Burning Man is less about watching beautiful people and more about turning yourself into one by means of "radical self-expression," one of the ten official principles of the festival. That translates to kitting yourself out -- the crazier, the better. An additional challenge is dressing to survive the desert conditions of Black Rock, Nevada, in which 100+ degree weather, sandstorms, winds, rain and even ice are all fair game.

In that case, what do you wear? LA Weekly spoke to longtime Burner and self-styled playa expert Dusty Bacon (his Burning Man pseudonym), who runs Dustycouture.com, a blog dedicated to fashion at Burning Man.

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Shannon Cottrell

The League of S.T.E.A.M., when they aren't fighting Victorian ghosts and monsters

See more photos in Shannon Cottrell's gallery, "The League of S.T.E.A.M. Prepares for San Diego Comic-Con."

In 2008, Robin Blackburn decided to make a ghost costume to wear to the annual masquerade Labyrinth of Jareth. She wanted her husband, Nick Baumann, to make a ghost costume as well. Instead, he chose to dress as a "Victorian-era ghostbuster." They got some friends to join them, went to the ball and the costumes were a hit. By the time Labyrinth of Jareth rolled around the following year, The League of S.T.E.A.M. had evolved into a bona fide group of performers.

We've been on the trail of the League, a motley crew of steampunks ghost and monster hunters, since we first met several members at Malediction Society's Steampunk Ball in 2009. That year, they returned to LOJ with a zombie butler and a variety of fantastic heroes in tow. Not long after that, they took the lead at San Diego Comic-Con's steampunk panel and then made their public performance debut aboard the Queen Mary for Pyrate Daze.

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Mistress of the Shattered Path

The circus came to Venice on Saturday night, where an almost exclusively female coterie of performers enchanted a small crowd under the stars with a bill of sultry music, inspired clowning and acts of derring-do.

An accordion-heavy array of Bulgarian drinking songs performed by the trio Demonite Na Khaosa set the otherworldly tone of the evening, which unfolded in an Abbot Kinney lot transformed by sculptor and Mistress of Cermonies Robin Murez into the moonlit fairyland of Robin's Sculpture Garden, an intimate performance space where the organic and the industrial collide to great effect.

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Photo by John Frame, courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

When people ask John Frame what his work is about, the curators of "Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame" write in the show's catalog, "he feels that the real answer should be that it isn't about anything. That is not to say that the work is meaningless, rather that it carries the meaning in its own ways and on its own terms."

The particular 'works' the curators are referring to are not the sculptures this California artist started producing in the early 1980s, when he first emerged as a historically and literary-minded figurative artist, but a collection of movable, posable dolls, stages and props that Frame has been working at since 2006 out in his idyllic home studio in Wrightwood, deep in the Angeles National Forest.

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Check out more of Shannon Cottrell's photos in "LACMA's Muse 'til Midnight Gets Neo-Victorian."

Known for his portraits and, specifically, his realistic approach of depicting the male body, Thomas Eakins championed the use of photography and motion capture photography as an aid to painting. Right now, you can see a smattering of his work, including the photographs, sketches and studies that led to his large oil paintings, at LACMA.

Shannon Cottrell

"Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins" opened in late-July and will continue through October 17. With this exhibition in mind, LACMA's fourteenth annual Muse 'til Midnight event was a neo-Victorian fete. It was a party that made perfect sense, combining the work of a maverick of the Victorian era with the L.A. underground's current fascination with the retro-futurism of steampunk.

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Good god almighty. Steampunk dildos?! As the lovely girl who sent me this link said, "Yes, you read that right." And steampunk vibrators.

These babies are courtesy of one Lady Clankington, who invented the world's first steampunk sex toys. Oh wait, that would be, the world's first steampunk sex toys available for purchase. Who knows what you guys are making out there. Lady Clankington's vibrators and dildos are retro-futuristic, Neo-Victorian and hypoallergenic.

Yes, these "infernal devices" are for real.

No, she will not make a holster for your pre-existing dildo.

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