5 Los Angeles classical music, art and theater offerings we’re looking forward to in 2025

Happy New Year, Essential Arts readers! 2025 is already shaping up to be a feast of a year in terms of arts and culture in Southern California, and we here at The Times are ready to eat up. Here are five of the classical music, visual art and theater offerings we’re most anticipating in the coming months:

Kaari Upson, “Untitled,” 2010. Smoke and oil on panel. Each panel: 96 x 48 in. (243.8 x 121.9 cm). Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Purchase.

(Brian Forrest)

Hammer time

Feb. 1-Aug. 24
“Head for the Hills! Selections From the Grunwald Center and Hammer Contemporary Collection,” Hammer Museum

When this exhibit opens, it will be something of a holding action — no doubt unintentionally. The UCLA museum is in the midst of wide-ranging change, following the retirement of director Ann Philbin after 25 years at the helm. The show, featuring many recent acquisitions, represents where the much-admired program has come from; curiosity is rising about where it will be going.

The exhibition was organized by senior curator Paulina Pobocha, who left her Hammer post for the Art Institute of Chicago in September after just nine months in Los Angeles. It will be the first large exhibition to open under the tenure of the Hammer’s new director, Zoë Ryan, who arrived on New Year’s Day from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

Ryan, a not-widely-known museum administrator, will have two critically important jobs to fill right out of the gate — the new vacancy in the senior curator’s office, plus the Hammer’s chief curator, a position open since the departure of Connie Butler, who left more than a year ago for the directorship of New York’s MoMA PS1.

Not to put too fine a point on it: Turnover in all three top Hammer jobs is epic. A year or two will be needed to gauge the change. Museum programs take a while to assemble and present. Still, the coming appointments will offer up revealing clues.

— Christopher Knight

Scorpius Malfoy (Jon Steiger), left, and Albus Potter (Benjamin Papac) in the San Francisco production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”

(Evan Zimmerman)

Magic for muggles

Feb.15-June 22
“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” Hollywood Pantages Theatre

It’s an obvious pick, but I’m the mother of a child with a “Harry Potter” obsession, so I’m super excited for the arrival of this stage play. The show won six Tony Awards, including best play and direction of a play when it opened on Broadway in 2018, and it began its first North American tour earlier this year in Chicago.

The touring production has the added benefit of condensing the original, two-part play into a single performance, for a running time of two hours and 50 minutes, including intermission. That might seem like a long time for kids to sit, but they do it in the theater for films, which also clock in well over two hours. The magic in the show is said to keep children — and adults — riveted, which is a spell I can get behind.

— Jessica Gelt

Gustavo Dudamel, pictured taking the stage at the Hollywood Bowl to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2023.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Bohemian rhapsody

Feb. 19-March 9
“Mahler Grooves Festival,” Walt Disney Concert Hall

In the early 1970s, cool teenagers tooled around Los Angeles in jalopies sporting Mahler Grooves bumper stickers. Gustavo Dudamel will pick up on this particular bit of L.A. youth lore with an intriguingly L.A.-centric festival of events that not only includes the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing works by Mahler and his wife, Alma (who moved to L.A. after his death), but also shows what is now a cool thing for L.A. youth. A number of student orchestras, including YOLA and ensembles from the Colburn School and UCLA, will have their own groovy “Mahlerthon.”

— Mark Swed

The world-premiere production of “Here There Are Blueberries” at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022.

(Rich Soublet II / La Jolla Playhouse)

Pictures worth a thousand words

March 13-30
“Here There Are Blueberries,” The Wallis

Moisés Kaufman’s documentary play tells the story of an album of photographs, sent to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007, that captured Auschwitz concentration camp workers going about their daily lives. When I first saw the Tectonic Theatre Project production at La Jolla Playhouse in 2022, I was unprepared for the quiet devastation of this contemplative drama, written by Kaufman and Amanda Gronich.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist, the play examines the Holocaust from the vantage of the perpetrators, training an objective eye on those who carried out the unimaginable. It dares to look at how humanity could so profoundly betray itself. The result is documentary theater at its most harrowing — and essential.

— Charles McNulty

Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford in the 1988 film “Working Girl.”

(20th Century Fox)

Let the river run

October-December
“Working Girl,” La Jolla Playhouse

Mike Nichols’ Wall Street-set comedy — starring Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver — has only gotten timelier since its 1988 release, so I’m cautiously optimistic about this upcoming stage adaptation. And if there’s anyone who can instill good faith in the screen-to-stage musical pipeline, it’s Cyndi Lauper, who composed the music and lyrics of the runaway hit “Kinky Boots,” also based on a movie. Christopher Ashley is directing the world-premiere production, featuring a book by Theresa Rebeck based on Kevin Wade’s script for the Fox film.

— Ashley Lee