But you'll need an online guide and a good navigator to put together a week of the best theater. My group -- fellows at the USC/NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater -- spent a lot of time on a bus.

''You have to dig and find,'' says Jim Royce, marketing director for the Center Theatre Group. ``If you can get past Universal and Disneyland and Lego Land, getting down to the cultural level, there are many things to do.''

Underemployed thespians aren't the only artisans feeding the stages: Screenwriters, producers, tech people, directors and all lovers of scripts can spark a production.

''In this town you have creative people in film or TV, and sometimes those folks have great gaps in their work load,'' Royce says. ``It's a wild mix of talent and ideas. Anybody who wants to put up a play can do it. There are not a lot of barriers.''

CLASSICAL TWIST

At Glendale's A Noise Within, a theater that specializes in the classics, I saw The Taming of the Shrew set in 1950s Italy. The swinging soundtrack of Rosemary Clooney and Louis Prima and an interesting balancing of the show's obstreperous main characters helped take the misogynist sting out of Shakespeare.

Prima was the main subject of Louis and Keely: Live at the Sahara, an original musical by Jake Broder and Vanessa Claire Smith at the Geffen Playhouse that was fun but light.

Unsurprisingly for an actor's town, comedy and improv thrive in Los Angeles. I caught the Groundlings' hysterical Sunday night sketch comedy, which featured a great homoerotic take on The Wire.

The Upright Citizens Brigade offers ''mind-bending oddball comedy,'' Morris says. ``There's a lot of wit in the city.''

The left coast is generally more open to female and other outsider voices than the East Coast establishment. Two major shows I saw were directed by young women, Lydia (Juliette Carrillo) and Mauritius (Jessica Kubzansky) at the Pasadena Playhouse. The latter play, by Theresa Rebeck, is a New York import, but the L.A. production was brought alive by the gutsy performance of lead actor Kirsten Kollender, a hitherto unknown Cornell graduate lured west a year ago. Kollender's original star turn was an example of how L.A.'s talent pool amplifies its theatrical offerings.

Meanwhile, over at Santa Monica's City Garage, The Bourgeois Gentleman rather unceremoniously blew up and blew apart the town's bimbo image in high camp fashion. ''May the sour rain of plenty moisten the garden of your lap forever'' one powdered character said to another. Exactly.

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