Politically outspoken musicians are always a cause for controversy. But if there was ever one American musician to represent the American ideal of achievement in the face of hardship and public condemnation, it would have been human rights activist and opera singer Paul Robeson, one of America’s most persecuted activists due to alleged ties to the Communist Party in the 1940s and ’50s. Read more...

What makes “Urinetown,” and especially the touring production that opened a two-week run at the Wilshire Theatre on Tuesday night, work so well as a musical comedy is not that it manages to make good use of its preposterous main conceit in spite of itself. Read more...

Back in the 1990s, members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology blackjack team jetted off to Las Vegas and hustled casinos out of millions of dollars using borderline illegal card-counting techniques. Read more...

The Beta Band “Heroes To Zeros” Astralwerks The Beta Band may have been introduced to you during that scene in “High Fidelity” when Rob (John Cusack) predicts he’ll sell five copies of “The Three EPs” just by playing it in the store. Read more...

Hi. My name is Sommer. And I have a gambling problem. At least, I think I might. But it’s just so hard to be sure these days. Read more...

“Right Lies” Stella Adler Complex Now through June 12 How refreshing to see a California governor who’s not Arnold Schwarzenegger, even if he’s on stage and not such a nice guy. Read more...

There’s no greater exhilaration in No-Limit Texas Hold ’em than hearing a poker player declare, “All in.” Even when the fateful words are uttered by a dirt-poor college student in sweatpants, playing in a game where “no limit” hardly amounts to a triple-digit pot, “all in” is still “all in.” From red, white and blue poker chips to Hold ’em lingo like flop, turn, river and kicker, the sights and sounds of the increasingly popular poker game are becoming ubiquitous throughout the dorms and apartments around campus. Read more...