Two seasons ago the New Orleans Opera Association presented “West Side Story” as one of its offerings. This season the association goes all the way back to the roots of the Bernstein musical; all the way back to Shakespeare’s timeless love story of Romeo Montague and Juliette Capulet.

“Romeo et Juliet,” Charles Gounoud’s French-language operatic adaptation of the Shakespeare play, will be performed by New Orleans Opera on Friday, November 20 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, November 22, at 2:30 p.m. in the Mahalia Jackson Theatre of the Performing Arts. English supertitles (translations) will be projected above the stage and good seats are still available.

She is been called “The Voice of the Century” and “The People’s Diva” and few who have heard her sing will dispute those contentions. With some of the most outstanding honors and achievements an opera singer could ever hope to amass in a lifetime – let alone twenty years -- Renée Fleming has very few worlds left to conquer. Very little she hasn’t done yet. And very few singers in the centuries-long history of opera have sung in more prestigious venues before more audiences in more leading roles.

The planned expansion of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans’ Downtown Warehouse Arts District is on target for its official grand opening five days before Veteran’s Day, as construction of the $300 million project moves rapidly forward toward a November 6 ribbon-cutting.

The expansion, which will more than quadruple size of current museum, will feature four pavilions depicting the various campaigns of the war and the four branches of the armed services, a public parade ground, a state-of-the-art theater offering a multi-sensory cinematic experience, a USO-style entertainment venue and a full-service restaurant.

The “Day of the Dead,” a traditional Mexican celebration similar to All-Saints Day in the U.S., will be commemorated with a series of special events at the Old U.S. Mint, a division of the Louisiana State Museum, from Tuesday, October 27 through Saturday, November 7.

The occasion will be celebrated with authentic Mexican and Mexican Indian arts, music, food, and family fun. All events are free and open to the public.

Anyone who was born the year the New Orleans Opera Association held its first Wine Auction would be turning the legal drinking age this year. However the history of the storied musical art form in New Orleans goes much further back than that.

Back over 213 years, to be exact; to the year 1796 when the first opera was staged in the city.

That momentous event will be commemorated when the Junior Committee of the Women’s Guild of the New Orleans Opera Association stages its 21st Annual Wine and Spirits Auction on Thursday, October 29. The location of this year’s fundraising event is no coincidence. The Inn on Bourbon Street in the Bourbon Ramada Plaza Hotel, at the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon streets in the heart of the French Quarter, stands on the site of the old French Opera House that burned down on December 4, 1919 and was never rebuilt.

The great years of New Orleans-style Rhythm and Blues and Rock and Roll from the 1950s and 1960s are celebrated in a musical extravaganza this coming Friday and Saturday, October 23 and 24 at 8 p.m. when “Joint’s Jumpin’” returns to Harrah’s Casino Theater for its fourth staging. The three previous stagings – two in 2008 and one in May of this year – were sellouts or near-sellouts, so the show is coming back around again by popular demand.

A premium selection of songs by Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Huey “Piano” Smith, Chris Kenner, Lee Dorsey, Shirley & Lee, Aaron Neville, the Dixie Cups and other great New Orleans performing artists will be sung by a cast of six talented New Orleans vocalists (three male and three female), backed by nine first-call musicians. Pianist Larry Sieberth doubles as the ensemble’s musical director.

Publisher: Arthur Hardy Enterprises

New Orleans, as most of us know, is a city with character and a city with characters – plural. Few people knew this better or captured it more poignantly than Angus Lind.

During his 32 years as a columnist for the Times-Picayune Lind reigned unchallenged as “The Damon Runyon of New Orleans.” A longtime admirer of Runyon’s, Lind would undoubtedly be flattered by the comparison and honored to have his name mentioned in the same sentence. Like his idol, Lind specialized in writing about “Runyonesque” characters, but in New Orleans rather than in New York.

This book is a collection of 60 of the “Best of . . .” columns among the five or six thousand that Lind had published in the T-P since the late 1970s. Over that long span of time, which ended with his retirement earlier this year, his column became one of the paper’s best-read features. To say he had a knack for capturing the essence of the unique New Orleans patois and its quirky characters with strange but colorfully descriptive nicknames would be an understatement. Like the recently departed Antoinette K-Doe who, in promoting a legendary New Orleans character – her husband Ernie – became a legendary New Orleans character herself, so too did Lind.

Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera of love, betrayal and – of course, as in most operas – death, comes alive once again as the New Orleans Opera Association presents Tosca for its 2009-10 season opener later this week.

The three-act dramatic opera will be performed on Friday, October 9 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, October 11 at 2:30 p.m. on the Placido Domingo Stage of the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts in Louis Armstrong Park. Tosca will be sung in Italian with English supertitles (translations) projected above the stage.