Leave it to Sam Shepard to flout W.C. Fields’ advice — “Never work with children or animals” — by brazenly casting a live lamb in “Curse of the Starving Class,” his desolate, bilious, hilarious and heavily symbolic portrait of a California farm family in crisis, which is being revived at Open Fist Theatre Company.

Naturally, Juju (as the lamb is identified in his head shot in the lobby) steals the show. The night I went, Juju’s well timed bleats got laughs that even Fields couldn't have imagined, and at intermission, nobody discussed the set (which Victoria Profitt has realized creatively while staying true to Shepard’s description), the staging (by the skillful director Scott Paulin), the talented cast, or the significance of “Curse” in Shepard’s oeuvre and American theater.

We spoke of Juju.

It’s not as if Shepard wasn’t warned. And of course, he’s too canny and tongue-in-cheek a playwright not to have planned the whole thing. The actors are obviously in on the joke. Kevin McCorkle, as Weston, the repulsive alcoholic father, plays off the woolly diva’s interruptions so skillfully that his soliloquy becomes a dialogue. The son, Wesley (Ian Nelson, who has a young James Franco thing going), casually sweeps up Juju’s droppings — very considerate for somebody who has just urinated on his sister’s 4-H project and will shortly butcher the lamb (offstage, thankfully).

Indeed, the most jarring aspect of “Curse” is that every person is horrible. It’s as if Shepard is mocking our expectation that a struggling American family will be like the Joads in “The Grapes of Wrath”: noble, unlucky patriarch; loving mother struggling to keep the family together; son of few words but pure heart; dreamy, writerly daughter. 

Instead we get the monstrous Weston (he’s actually even more odious when he reforms and starts talking about the beauty of life), a venal mother (the tremendously entertaining Laura Richardson) who enthusiastically betrays her children; alternately dutiful and destructive Wesley; and a daughter (the precocious Juliette Goglia) who at first seems like the family’s only hope (well, except that the 4-H project she’s so dedicated to involves eviscerating her pet chicken) but proves the craziest of the bunch.

The play’s undeniable power lies more (as in Greek tragedy) in its bleak evaluation of the human condition, its fertile symbols (the eerie blue light of the empty refrigerator that the characters keep opening), and the astonishing quality of its language. Open Fist’s production keeps faith with Shepard's mysterious vision. But they might want to hire a less attractive lamb.

 -- Margaret Gray

 “Curse of the Starving Class,” the Open Fist Theatre Company, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends June 4. $35. (323) 882-6912 or www.OpenFist.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

Photo: Kevin McCorkle, Ian Nelson with Juju the lamb, and Laura Richardson in "Curse of the Starving Class." Credit: Maia Rosenfeld

An ode to the happy accident, Melanie Willhide’s exhibition at Kaycee Olsen Gallery is dedicated to the man who stole the artist’s computer and erased its hard drive. Willhide eventually got it back and attempted to recover the data, only to find that her image files were corrupted. Rather than despair, she took misfortune as an opportunity, further enhancing the picture’s distortion in a collaboration of sorts with the machine.

The results are inkjet prints that are the equivalent of visual stuttering. Bodies — seemingly a favorite subject of Willhide’s — are fragmented into hard-edged, repeating slices. A woman in a bikini becomes an elongated stack of open mouths and breasts. Two other women are nothing but heads hovering over nondescript towers made of the same chunk of information repeated over and over. In another print, a muscled man holds a woman up over his head, but their bodies are segmented and interrupted by stripes of hot blues, greens and pinks.

In some cases the images recall early postmodern collage, the striated effects of video distortion, or sleek geometric abstraction. But more interesting is the way in which they reveal the processes of a digital “mind” that doesn’t work in the same way that ours do. In these images, it becomes exceedingly clear that the computer thinks, not in terms of overall form, or light and shadow, but in relentless rows of data. All digital images are created line by line, without regard to pictorial cohesion. Any pixel is as good as any other. On a basic level, Willhide’s work asks what we are looking at when we look at an image. It used to be brushstrokes on canvas, light hitting a chemical emulsion, or dots of ink on paper. Now, more often than not it is points of light, distanced from any direct physical stimuli, that coalesce into recognizable forms — or not.

--Sharon Mizota

Kaycee Olsen Gallery, 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 837-8945, through May 7. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. www.kayceeolsen.com

Photo: Melanie Willhide, "Beefcake and Betsy," 2011. Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Kaycee Olsen Gallery.

The streetwise milieu of New York's 1980s sneaker culture forms the metaphoric instep of "Shoe Story" at Theatre of NOTE. Although Ben Snyder's 2008 fantasia sometimes stumbles over tone and context, it's laced throughout with admirable thought.

"Shoe Story" traverses a storefront emporium, strikingly abstracted by Sibyl Wickersheimer's footwear-laden scenic design.  Current-day Foot Locker-esque worker PeeWee (Norm Johnson) gets mugged for his designer kicks, dumped by nominal girlfriend Sarah (Nikki Brown), and enigmatic narrator O.G. Mar (Justin Alston) alludes to a Reagan-era tragedy to boot the plot out of the box.

We flashback to two Yu's Shoes employees -- idealistic Juney (Johnson) and pragmatic Rob (Richard PierreLouis) -- who cope with lookie-loos and shoplifters, covet top-tier items and stay afield of world-weary Yu (Michael Yama), their Korean boss.  Juney's romance with single mom Sabrina (Brown) and a yearning for the holy grail of sneakers centers the narrative, Yu's reactions to the Jewish building owners and collegiate dreams for his daughter providing cultural counterpoint.

Billed as an "urban fairy tale," Snyder's hybrid is at heart a coming-of-age parable in sociological break-dance mode. Director Maureen Huskey fashions the episodic narrative into an impressive modernist package, sharply accentuated by Bryan Maier's sound, Matt Richter's lighting, Hunter Wells' costumes and the videos by Maier and Anthony Puente.

Huskey's ensemble, which includes Julian Evens, Alex Elliott-Funk and Craig muMs Grant, is adept, bouncy and versatile, despite a recurring clash between naturalistic and stylized approaches. Understandable -- Snyder's sidewalk argot and elegiac poetry adorns a relatively foreseeable storyline, which softens the last degree of impact. Still, merely the venue's proximity to countless local vendors indicates "Shoe Story's" Hollywood aptitude. Hype-beasts and sneakerheads, take note.

-- David C. Nichols

"Shoe Story," Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 21. $22. (323) 856-8611 or www.theatreofnote.com. Running time:  2 hours.

Above: Norm Johnson and Richard PierreLouis in a scene from "Shoe Story." Credit: Darrett Sanders

Each year, the Ojai Music Festival selects a new music director whose job is to choose the programming for the annual new-music event held in the hills of Ventura County. Soprano Dawn Upshaw will lead this year's festival, which will take place June 9 to 12. For the following three festivals, organizers have announced that pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, choreographer Mark Morris and pianist Jeremy Denk will serve as music directors for 2012, 2013 and 2014, respectively.

Andsnes will lead next year's festival, which is scheduled to take place June 7 to 10, 2012. The pianist has chosen to collaborate with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotjin, pianist Marc-André Hamelin, conductor-composer Reinbert DeLeeuw, clarinetist Martin Frøst and actress Barbara Sukowa.

The Ojai Music Festival focuses on contemporary and cutting-edge works by composers both living and dead. The festival is run by Thomas W. Morris, who is the artistic director.

This year's festival, curated by Upshaw, will feature a staging of George Crumb's "Winds of Destiny (American Songbook IV)," directed by Peter Sellars; a new commission by American composer Maria Schneider; and performances of music by music by Leos Janácek, Peter Sculthorpe, Beethoven and Prokofiev.

Past music directors at Ojai include John Adams, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Pierre Boulez, Michael Tilson Thomas and the group eighth blackbird.

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-- David Ng

Photo (top): Leif Ove Andsnes. Credit: Los Angeles Philharmonic

Photo (bottom): Dawn Upshaw. Credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times

In her first solo exhibition in the U.S., Berlin artist Daniela Comani presents three projects at Charlie James Gallery that exploit the malleability of digital imagery to reveal shifting definitions of gender and history.

The most facile is a series of 52 book covers that Comani has altered, substituting feminine subjects for male ones. Some are relatively subtle—“Mr. Dalloway,” “L’étrangère” (the feminine of Camus’ “The Stranger”) — while others are heavy-handed: “Queen Kong” ... and you can imagine what "Moby Dick" became. The works hint at entrenched assumptions about what is properly “masculine” and “feminine,” but they do little more than skim the surface, coming across as merely cute.

More successful is the series “Happy Marriage,” a sequence of black-and-white photographs depicting a married couple cooking together, brushing their teeth, holding hands on the beach. Despite the popular notion that couples, over time, begin to resemble each other, these two look uncomfortably alike. Even a cursory inspection reveals that both roles are played by Comani, differentiated only by dress and a five o’clock shadow. This quiet dissonance doesn’t blow gender roles out of the water, but it does create playful ripples.

The show's standout, however, is "It Was Me -- Diary. 1900 - 1999," a running list, printed on a mural-size banner, of historic moments recounted in the first person. Beginning on Jan. 1 ("I founded the Communist Party of Germany in Berlin."), there is an entry for every day until Dec. 31 ("During a New Year's party I flee Cuba. Thus ends my regime."). The list eschews conventional chronology, imposing the days of the year as an ordering device on moments plucked from throughout the 20th century. By listing them as if they all happened in the course of one year and recounting them in the first person, Comani not only gives history the intimacy of a diary, but reminds us how it continually re-surfaces in the present.

-- Sharon Mizota

Charlie James Gallery, 975 Chung King Road, L.A., (213) 687-0844. Closed Sunday through Tuesday. Through June 4. www.cjamesgallery.com

Photo: Daniela Comani, "Happy Marriage #10," 2008. Credit: Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery

“Before Stonewall, an even braver group of guys stood up to the plate before there even was a plate,” an actor proclaims near the end of “The Temperamentals,” the uncompromisingly heartwarming docudrama about an underground gay rights organization in the 1950s (now at the Blank Theatre Company).

It’s generous of playwright Jon Marans to recap his message for audience members still puzzling it out, but how could anyone be unclear about the play's message after being hit over the head with it for two hours?

Not that the story of the short-lived but prescient Mattachine Society isn’t fascinating. We still have a long way to go in achieving equal treatment for gays (viz. Proposition 8), but things have been worse, and this production vividly dramatizes the suffocating closet of a restrictive era. Kurt Boetcher’s set, a two-level stage against a black brick wall, evokes the seedy places where “temperamentals” had to congregate, and director Michael Matthews’ stylized opening, in which men in trench coats and fedoras stalk each other with a mixture of menace and seduction, could be a film noir sequence. 

The lights come up on two men talking politics in a diner. When one presses his foot on the other’s, the other panics. It’s amazing that in this context (homosexuals whose sexual identity was discovered were routinely harassed, abused, fired, jailed and institutionalized) the eccentric Harry Hay and fledgling fashion designer Rudi Gernreich (yes, the one who became famous for the “topless bikini”) started such a radical movement. 

But although it has a good story to tell, “The Temperamentals” gets weighed down by its comprehensiveness. There are too many scenes in which people disagree with Hay (Dennis Christopher), only to be converted with startling rapidity: “We can’t do that.” “Yes, we can!” “You’re right!” Matthews tries to enliven these static confrontations by having the men get into a line to demonstrate their revived unity, or pump their fists in the air while chanting slogans. Sometimes they even break into song, not very well. In an absurd dream sequence, Hay confronts all the women in his life, played by the four other actors in long skirts. None of these embellishments disguises that we’re basically watching a history lesson in five voices — especially in the coda, in which the characters take turns fondly telling us what happened to each other later in life.

To the actors’ credit, they’re fun to watch. John Tartaglia is enjoyably flamboyant, playing “sweet, funny Bob,” as the character calls himself, to the campy hilt. Christopher as Hay has a convincing restless energy, although he can come off as grating rather than persuasive. Erich Bergen as Gernreich is an elegant Viennese with a slightly distracting accent. Occasionally the characters’ obsession with Judy Garland, as well as the admiration the script bestows on Hay for affecting a woman’s scarf and yachting cap (his final appearance in a flowered sun hat is played like a canonization), threaten to turn a moving struggle into “Queer Eye for the Straight Underground Resistance.”

“The Temperamentals” may not be quite a play yet, but it is a sweet, heartfelt, often charming homage to a truly brave group of guys.

-- Margaret Gray

“The Temperamentals,” Blank Theatre Company, 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends May 22. $26 Thursday and Sunday; $30 Friday and Saturday. Contact: (323) 661-3903 or www.theblank.com. Running time: 2 hours.

Photo: Erich Bergen and Dennis Christopher in "The Temperamentals." Credit: Greg Gorman

Mari Eastman has always been a likable painter, interpreting banal ornamental imagery and decorative motifs with a confident, breezy hand and a liberal sprinkling of glitter. Her paintings are pretty and a bit twee, and I never found them very interesting, until now. The works in her latest exhibition at Cherry and Martin are still casual, airy and assured, but they carry a sharper charge that feels almost violent.

Eastman takes things commonly seen as precious and renders them, well, not so precious. “Tiger Mother With Cub Under Cherry Blossoms (Joseon Dynasty)” is a sloppy rendition of a popular Korean motif. (It may also be a sidelong nod to Amy Chua’s book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which recently fanned the flames of Chinese-mother stereotypes.) Eastman’s loose brushwork is not only an unfaithful copybut suggests a kind of blurring or loosening of the image. No longer tightly rendered, the familiar picture is freed in a sense from its predictable appeal and conventional meaning, and becomes something new and undefined. However, the canvas is also adorned with small Swarovski crystals, a gesture that pulls it back into the orbit of trite beauty and value.

Elsewhere, the artist has violated the surface of the canvas itself. A painting of a vase of flowers looks straightforward until you realize it’s riddled with small punctures. But these tears actually make pictorial sense, functioning as negative space that helps to define the flowers in an otherwise misty image. Although Eastman literally pokes holes in decorative imagery, these violations simultaneously destroy and support the picture.

By contrast, the cuts in “Tina on Her Birthday” are visual, rather than actual. Tina’s face is depicted as a potpourri of overlapping eyes, lips, noses and fingers. And though her feathery headdress and pleated clothing are painted in oil, her unruly features are crudely drawn in ballpoint pen. On a psychological level, the work captures the sensation of being pulled in multiple directions, or of inhabiting different identities. In terms of the sentimental conventions of portraiture, it denies the very thing portraits are designed to capture: a stable, personal “essence.”

Eastman performs a similar transformation on an icon of 1970s middle class decor: the owl. The basic shape of her bronze candleholders recalls the stylized, pointy-eared, round-eyed bird that graced many a kitchen or dining room. But, as in her paintings, the recognizable image has been blurred, streaked and smothered in a rain of mushy marks. The resulting object is almost scatological and decidedly uncute.

In a similar vein, Eastman has created a selection of animal-shaped jewelry. In place of the typical cats and birds, her creatures of choice include worms, ferrets and hammerhead sharks, all lovingly detailed and attractively shiny despite their associations with decay, disease and danger. By deploying the trappings of preciousness against expectations, Eastman turns the banal into something messy, unpredictable and interesting again.

--Sharon Mizota

Cherry & Martin, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 559-0100, through May 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.cherryandmartin.com

Photos: Top: Mari Eastman, "Tiger Mother With Cub Under Cherry Blossoms (Joseon Dynasty)," 2011. Bottom: Mari Eastman, "Owl," and "Owl," both 2011. Credit: Courtesy of Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles; photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

Many months in the making, Morley Safer's profile of Eli Broad for "60 Minutes" is scheduled to air this Sunday.

A teaser is already on the CBS website, with a shot of Broad at last year's MOCA gala and the following plug: "Broad sets the standard for philanthropy. He's given away over $2 billion and plans on leaving even more to charity before he dies. But along with the billionaire's name, his advice and oftentimes his control are usually part of the deal."

L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight was interviewed for the segment. It will be interesting to see who else in the L.A. art world was willing to step up and talk.

--Jori Finkel

www.twitter.com/jorifinkel

Updated, 6:20: CBS News provided a brief excerpt from the story late Thursday. In this exchange, Safer asks Broad about his critics.

Broad: Well, I am a perfectionist, and things I do know something about, I do get involved.

Safer: We’ve talked to a number of people who say that you can turn into a bully?

Broad: I don’t think I am a bully. But on the other hand, I’m not a potted plant either.

Safer: No, I am sure you’re not a potted plant. But  these people who say some pretty unkind things about you will not talk publicly. They clearly are scared of you?

Broad: I don’t know why they’re scared of me.

Safer: Well because you’re a rich guy, and therefore a powerful guy, and you’ve got a temper?

Broad: I’ve got strong views on things.

Safer: But even your good friend Frank Gehry says, "Eli can be a real pain in the ass."

Broad: I can understand why Frank could say that, because I am impatient, and patience has its limits.

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Photo: The Broads at home with Jasper Johns' "Flag" from 1967.  Licensed by VAGA, New York. From the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times

It's been a long road to Broadway for "Sister Act," the stage musical based on the hit 1992 movie starring Whoopi Goldberg. The show premiered in 2006 at the Pasadena Playhouse, then moved to the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta the following year. In 2009, the musical debuted on London's West End and spawned a U.K. tour.

On Wednesday, "Sister Act" finally opened in New York at the Broadway Theatre, in a revamped production directed by Jerry Zaks, who did not direct the previous stagings. Though Goldberg is on board as a producer, the role of Deloris Van Cartier -- a lounge singer who enters a convent as part of the witness protection program -- is played by Patina Miller, who starred in the  London production. Tony winner Victoria Clark plays the convent's disapproving mother superior.

Mixed reviews for the tryout runs have led producers to hire playwright Douglas Carter Beane to spruce up the book by Cheri Steinkellner and Bill Steinkellner, which moves the story to Philadelphia in the 1970s. The original songs by Oscar-winner Alan Menken and Glenn Slater evoke R&B and gospel.

Critics have responded mostly with praise, but not everyone was a convert.

Bringing together the worlds of graphic design, architecture, art, anime, manga, fashion, urban design, robots and more, Little Tokyo Design Week, set for July 13-17, promises to be a broad and colorful survey of the latest in Japanese visual culture.

The five-day festival is the first of its kind in Los Angeles, and is being led by Hitoshi Abe, chairman of UCLA's Department of Architecture and Urban Studies. Participating institutions will include the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Japanese American National Museum and the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center.

Abe said at a press conference Thursday that the festival had been planned before the recent earthquake in Japan and that organizers have added a small exhibit devoted to photography and interviews with the daily recovery efforts in the Tohoku area. (Abe hails from Sendai, one of the hardest hit cities in Japan.)

City Councilwoman Jan Perry said she hoped the festival would add to Little Tokyo's vitality and attract people who don't normally visit the neighborhood.

The festival will take over the majority of the Little Tokyo neighborhood, dividing the area into four informal zones dedicated to different themes: 1) fashion and body; 2) robots, toys and manga; 3) graphic design and media art; and 4) architecture, product design and furniture.

As part of the festival, organizers will place 25 steel shipping containers throughout the public plazas in Little Tokyo. They will act as temporary gallery spaces devoted to various disciplines, including architecture, contemporary art, robots and Pecha Kucha, a specialized form of cultural discourse.

One of the container shows will be devoted to the recent earthquake and tsunami. The show will feature photo essays in a collaboration with the Kahoku Shimpo, a Sendai newspaper. The focus of the show will be on the daily struggle of citizens in the aftermath of the disaster. There are also plans for the exhibition to travel around the U.S.

Abe said organizers of the festival were discussing possible fundraising efforts for earthquake and tsunami relief.

The closing-night ceremony July 17 will feature the Golden Astroboy Award for the best designer installation, determined by a jury of artists, designers, critics and more from L.A. and Japan.