From Helen Liu Fong’s resin-based lighting fixtures for Googie coffee shops to Gilbert Leong’s pagoda-topped First Bank of Chinatown, this exhibition focuses on some intriguing and less heralded contributions to modern local architecture. More information

Grab your pith helmet and join the Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation for an expedition to the restored Hollywood movie palace. You may have seen a Disney film here, but that’s a far cry from the exhaustive tours these experts lead. More information

If you’ve ever wondered what it would have been like to watch Lucy, Ricky, Ethel, and Fred perform before a live audience, this show’s for you. Classic moments from the sitcom are re-created, including the legendary Vitavegamin episode. More information. 

A private museum at Forest Lawn-Glendale has been showcasing the treasures of L.A.’s most famous cemetery since 1951. This exhibit follows the 50-plus-year career of our favorite visual futurist, who created tableaux for Tron and Star Trek. Mead’s new work, titled Shoulder of Orion, depicts the visions of an expiring replicant from another of his films, Blade Runner.

Hitch up your wagon and toast to western expansion with Analog Salon’s latest photography showcase, which examines our fascination with the west and our perpetual need to discover what’s beyond the next hill. The opening reception features a meet-and-greet with the eight participating photographers and tunes from ethnomusicologist Marlon Fuentes. More information.

Better known as the early chronicler of New York crime, the photographer Weegee moved here in 1947 to work in movies, just as the studio system began collapsing and L.A. entered its baroque period of Bizarro. Until MOCA came along with this new exhibition, no art museum had mounted a show devoted to Weegee’s photographs of the city, a collection that includes grotesquely distorted portraits. Weegee’s camera didn’t simply freeze a moment in time; it also captured the Crowd—the incredulous spectators on the fringe of events who remain the same from coast to coast. More information.

Ed Moses’s Venice studio was the ’60s hangout for artistic misfits like Ed Kienholz, Robert Irwin, and Ed Ruscha. At 85, the painter still unites a community inspired by the rebellious spirit of his abstract expressionism. More information. 

After surviving Nazi concentration camps and Jewish ghettos, Szapocznikow turned to sculpture to exorcise the traumas of her youth. Her fragmented works address the impermanence of flesh and the immortality of bodies rendered in bronze, plastic, and stone. More information. 

Not content to be one of the great tenors, Plácido Domingo tackles the baritone title role in Verdi’s tale of politics, both personal and professional. More information.

As slashed budgets threaten the future of many arts organizations, the National Endowment for the Arts finds itself at risk yet again. LACMA hosts a conversation between museum director Michael Govan and NEA chairman Rocco Landesman about arts funding during economic downturns. More information. 

In just over a year the 11-year-old went from singing opera on YouTube to showcasing her resounding voice for millions of America’s Got Talent viewers. What were you doing at her age? More information. 

This comic opera by Benjamin Britten is the second of the composer’s three operas being performed by LA Opera to celebrate the centenary of Britten’s birth. More information.

Originally from San Angelo, Texas, the Garza brothers are fond of making up new words. They’ll branch out at the Broad, showing off their “Texican” rock and roll in an all-acoustic show in support of Rockpango, 2011’s Latin-grooved album. More information.

If a merlot tasting at a local wineshop doesn’t excite aspiring enologists, this festival presents a wide array of vintages at a historic estate. Yes, film geeks, the house served as Daniel Plainview’s domain in There Will Be Blood. More information. 

The guy behind the Borowitz Report (CBS News Sunday Morning dubbed him “the funniest man in America”) chats with one of the funniest women in America at this Writers Bloc event. What will the evening bring? Says Borowitz: “Penis jokes intermixed with Andrew Lloyd Webber songs.” More information.

For a fascinating look at the rise and fall of the Texas-born Erickson, check out the documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me. He’s the former front man for the 13^th Floor Elevators, who were pioneers of the psychedelic rock sound. Luckily, he’s risen again, releasing a CD of all-new material in 2010 and touring and performing regularly since. More information.

“Sumatran rat-monkeys infect New Zealanders with zombiism.” No, it’s not a tabloid headline; it’s the plot of Hobbit lover Peter Jackson’s supergory second film, Dead Alive. Drop in on this disgustingly mirthful midnight screening, and don’t forget to BYO barf bag. More information.

Mixing two genres of dance, South Bay Ballet has consistently produced top-tier dancers who have gone on to perform with American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey, Alvin Ailey, and other prestigious troupes. More information.

Fresh off her Broadway run in James Goldman’s beloved Follies, the tremendously talented Peters tells stories (and sings songs, of course) about her career. If The Jerk is any indication, she plays a mean trumpet, too. More information.

George Clooney, Martin Sheen, Matthew Morrison, Jamie Lee Curtis, and others team up for a reading of Academy Award winner Dustin Lance Black’s play about California’s Proposition 8 trial. Proceeds benefit the American Federation for Equal Rights. More information.

From Nathanael West’s imagined conflagrations to the recent Hollywood fires, our city is no stranger to flames. With talks by arson investigators and a crime lab tour, the Los Angeles Visionaries Association explores troubled psyches that regard L.A. as a pleasure to burn. More information.

With 18 novels, five movie adaptations, one comic book series, and book sales totaling more than 33 million, Picoult knows a thing or two about crafting best-sellers. She discusses her 20th effort, Lone Wolf, about medical ethics and life with a wolf pack. More information.

Everyone is celebrating the centennial of Woody Guthrie’s birth this year, so you’d think we would have run out of his never-recorded lyrics by now. Not so. Jim James is My Morning Jacket. Jay Farrar is Sun Volt. Will Johnson and Anders Parker have collaborated with both. All four have teamed up to write songs and record an album titled New Multitudes, with lyrics by you-know-who. Apparently a lot of the songs they chose came from Guthrie’s experiences when he lived in Los Angeles. More information.

Artistic director Ronald K. Brown presents the West Coast premiere of On Earth Together, set to the music of Stevie Wonder. Brown’s company, which weaves traditional African dance with contemporary choreography, also performs Grace, a work created for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. For an additional fee, there’s a dance party—with a cocktail reception and live DJ—immediately following the opening-night program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. More information.

When Juan José falls asleep while cramming for his U.S. citizenship test, the past comes to life. Visions of Sacagawea, Bob Dylan, and Teddy Roosevelt offer him a comically twisted—and truthful—history lesson in this Culture Clash production. More information.

ASK CHRIS PICK: What do you get when a chef, an artist, an architect, and an industrial designer hit the runway? Find out when the A+D museum showcases fashions imagined by the likes of Wolfgang Puck, John Baldessari, Richard Meier, Karim Rashid, and many others. After the models finish strutting, the designs will be auctioned off to benefit the museum. More information.

You can’t call their music bluegrass, even though the instrumentation makes you want to. These guys go where no string band has gone before. Chris Thile of Nickel Creek teamed with talented old friends to push the envelope on folk, bluegrass, and country. A move to New York for some of the guys inspired a new approach to songwriting, and they came back to L.A. to record their latest CD, Antifogmatic, as a true collaboration, with L.A.’s beloved mad-scientist performer Jon Brion producing. More information.

In the tradition of the Who’s Tommy comes Green Day’s rock album transition to Broadway. More information.

Another “Pacific Standard Time” event—this one with a literary twist. L.A. writers Bernard Cooper, Joyce Farmer, Lynell George, Marisela Norte, and Michael Tolkin talk about what it means to be a writer 3,000 miles away from the country's publishing capital. L.A. Times book critic David L. Ulin moderates. More information.
 

This free World City at the Music Center program is aimed at children and families. The featured performers are Peruvian folk dance champions Inca Son (“sound of the Incas”) and the Ccanto Scissors Dancers, who perform a ritual acrobatic dance (with, yes, scissors!) that originated in the southcentral Andes. More information.

Nancy Baker Cahill’s solo exhibition at PMCA, titled Fascionmas, includes works that depict imaginary growths and reference ultrasounds, electron microscopy, and prehistoric cave paintings. Ask Cahill about her unusual inspirations when she drops by the museum to talk about the show. More information.

ASK CHRIS PICK: If William Mulholland hadn’t laid pipes to suck up all that delicious water from Central California, we wouldn’t be here to enjoy this exhibition. In collaboration with Woodbury University, the A+D museum examines new infrastructure, urbanism, landscape, and architecture proposals to enhance our perpetually arid region in the 21^st century. More information.

The recent bad press for the Susan G. Komen foundation (its VP just stepped down) hasn’t stopped the organization from holding its annual fund-raiser. Over the past 15 years in L.A., the Race for the Cure has raised $8.9 million, which goes toward breast cancer screening, education, and treatment. Get movin’. More information.

Ani DiFranco has released a new CD: Watch out. Which Side Are You On?, whose title track is a reworked version of a classic Pete Seeger song, includes 11 new tunes by the righteous babe, who is backed by a stellar group of musicians, some from acclaimed New Orleans groups. More information.

Two Tony winners—composer Brown (Parade) and actress Rose (Caroline, Or Change?)—join forces for an evening of Mr. Brown’s music in a show that was first performed at New York City’s Birdland. More information.