Things to do in Los Angeles today

Nature lovers, rejoice! The Natural History Museum is bringing back its annual Butterfly Pavilion, which will be open March 22 through August 23 and house up to 30 butterfly and moth species, as well as an assortment of California plants. The seasonal outdoor exhibit allows for adults and children alike to witness nature up close—we’re talking walking amid hundreds of butterflies and having them land on your arms or shoulders. You’ll need to purchase a $10 add-on ticket on top of your museum ticket in order to explore the pavilion for a half-hour.

The masters of alfresco rooftop movie viewing have returned for another season of screenings to LEVEL in Downtown L.A. Known for excellent film choices and a steady supply of snacks and booze, Rooftop Cinema Club is your snazzy, comfortable and less stressful alternative to other outdoor movie screenings. You don’t even need to bring your own camping chair—Rooftop Cinema Club provides you with your very own comfy lawn chair (with optional blankets for purchase to up the coziness). And instead of listening to the movie over loudspeakers, you’ll get a set of wireless headphones so you never have to miss a word. Find the full schedule on their site, or in our outdoor movie calendar.

It doesn’t matter if you win by an inch or a mile—or if you’re more of a fan of the street racing and respect era or heists and hackers phase of Fast & Furious: There’s plenty of familiar motorized might to behold at this Petersen Automotive Museum exhibition honoring the high-adrenaline film franchise. You’ll find roughly 20 screen-used cars and production prototypes—including ones on loan from Vin Diesel’s private collection, as well as from the late Paul Walker—on display in the second floor of the Miracle Mile museum. It’s a very Fast & Furious kind of year in L.A. between Universal Studios’ roller coaster and this 25th anniversary exhibition. While the Petersen’s exhibition is certainly encyclopedic (the selections here span the entirety of the franchise, with a particular focus on the first three films), it’s not overly academic: Brief labels will let you know the story behind the stunt car you’re staring at, but this is ultimately an opportunity to ogle American muscle cars and custom Japanese imports (as well as the franchise’s melodramatic quotes about family). Highlights on display include the 1993 Toyota Supra “Stunt #3” and 1995 Mitsubishi Eclipse driven by Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) in the original film, Dominic Toretto’s (Vin Diesel) 1968 Dodge Charger R/T and 1993 Mazda RX-7, and Suki’s (Devon Aoki) very pink 2001 Honda S2000.

When Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu made his debut feature, Amores Perros, over a million feet of film didn’t make it to the final cut (to put that into perspective, the finished two-and-a-half-hour movie used around 18,000 feet of film). Twenty five years later, some of these unearthed reels of celluloid now zip through a ground-floor gallery at LACMA as part of a multi-channel film installation. As much a piece of sculpture as it is film or video art, Sueño Perro assembles six 35mm projectors that pierce the hazy near-dark space with raw, nonlinear snippets of the movie, fed from a mesmerizing curtain of film stock speeding along sprockets. It’s an intense experience, both sonically (during the car crash that connects the feature’s storylines) and visually (dog fighting plays a pivotal role in the film, though you’ll see here some of the behind-the-scenes tricks that kept the production cruelty-free).

When I first stepped foot inside of this exhibition of decommissioned Confederate monuments and reflective contemporary art pieces, I was taken aback by the scale of it all. I’d seen the installation photos of the side-by-side statues of Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee on horseback, but as I craned my neck up at these towering tributes, they felt awe-inspiring in the most dreadful meaning of the phrase. Most Angelenos don’t need to be convinced of the immoralities of the Confederacy—but most likely haven’t been forced to come face-to-face with such Civil War iconography either. “Monuments,” displayed almost entirely at MOCA’s Little Tokyo warehouse with a single Kara Walker installation at the Brick in East Hollywood, presents tangible proof that these monuments removed from public view over the past decade were not simple, somber remembrances for the recently deceased, these were larger-than-life celebrations of the Confederacy forged in the Jim Crow era and often financed by folks seeking to twist its history. Works from 19 artists respond either directly or thematically to the many statues on display, or in some cases physically alter them: Bethany Collins’s Love is dangerous chisels pieces of the granite pedestal of a Stonewall Jackson monument into Carolina rose petals. Other graffitied or paint-splattered statues speak for themselves: The Robert E. Lee monument at the center of 2017’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia resides...

You may have come across Danish artist Thomas Dambo’s massive troll sculptures—which he makes from reclaimed wood and hides in nature to encourage people to get out and enjoy the outdoors—on Instagram. But you don’t need to book a trip to Denmark to see the gentle giants. The 87 acres of Palos Verdes’s South Coast Botanic Garden are currently home to 12 of the whimsical figures, and you can glimpse them all with your general admission ticket. For $33, you can take a guided walking tour of the Twelvelings (with general admission included). To see the trolls in a different light, one night a month, the gardens will host the Canopy Club—an after-hours dance party in the woods with pop-up performances, food and drinks ($34–$50).

Artist Ralph Steadman—known for his unmistakable illustrations, cartoons and collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson—has imbued his work with political, satirical, environmental and spiritual threads throughout his six-decade-plus career. Now, on the eve of his 90th birthday, you can see 149 of Steadman’s works, including some influenced by Los Angeles, for free at the Torrance Art Museum—it’s the only Southern California stop on the show’s national tour. If you’re feeling inspired, you can embark on your own off-the-page adventure, thanks to the exhibition’s accompanying interactive Gonzo Art Trail (find details here).

A display of over 30 mummified people and animals is back at the California Science Center; after the exhibition debuted there back in 2010, it traveled through the U.S. and Europe before returning to L.A., which is the final stop on its tour before the artifacts are returned to their lending museums. This time around, you can see a selection of specimens never before shown in Los Angeles. Mummies are, of course, most often associated with ancient Egypt, and while Egypt is represented here, you’ll also see mummified remains that were discovered in Germany, Hungary, Peru—even the University of Maryland, which in the 1990s carried out the first ancient Egyptian-style mummification performed in 2,800 years. Memorable artifacts include the two Peruvian “bundle” mummies making their West Coast debut, amulets and organ jars (just like you learned about in history class), an ancient Egyptian cat mummy and a shrunken (but still very cute) sloth head. Be warned, though, that as you make your way through the different rooms, the displays become more macabre and, dare I say, haunting, with mummified organs and babies—so make sure you (and any kids in attendance) know what you’re getting into before visiting the exhibition. The museum’s IMAX theater will be screening the complementary 40-minute Mummies 3D: Secrets of the Pharaohs, and if you buy combo tickets for both the exhibition and film, you get a small discount on both.

There’s a lot of history to unpack in Here Lies Love, the disco musical about the rise and fall of former Filipino first lady Imelda Marcos: not just the long and winding story of Marcos, but the long and winding story of this show itself. Here Lies Love began as a 2010 concept album with music and lyrics by the Talking Heads’s David Byrne and additional beats by Fatboy Slim. In its 2013 Off Broadway premiere, the audience moved around amid a fully immersive, 360-degree staging; similar productions followed in London and Seattle. When the musical moved to Broadway in 2023, producers spent millions of dollars to radically transform the Broadway Theatre into a gleaming nightclub space. Here Lies Love’s Los Angeles premiere at the Mark Taper Forum, where it is playing through April 5, is the first attempt to mount the show in a traditional proscenium space. Director Snehal Desai occasionally places actors on platforms within the audience, but that’s very different from the immersion in previous versions. Time Out awarded both the Off Broadway and Broadway productions four stars; theater critic Adam Feldman, reviewing the “sensational” staging of the latter, noted that “audience members—often literally standing in the middle of the action—get swept up in the shifting tides and undertows of history.” In the absence of that dynamic, the storytelling isn’t always strong enough to create a satisfying theater experience.  Photograph: Jeff LorchAura Mayari and the company of ‘Here...

The popular Netflix comedy about a Korean-family-run corner store was actually inspired by this stage play, which arrives in L.A. with a monthlong run at the Ahmanson Theatre. The production is playwright and Appa actor Ins Choi’s “love letter to his parents and to all first-generation immigrants who call Canada their home.”