BEST BETS Thursday 6/14

8pm

Pop Music

San Diego bluegrass trio Nickel Creek shows the effect of coming of age under the influence of innovative instrumentalist such as Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer. The group knows the importance of such standard-bearers as Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers, but they also have a willingness, and the technique, to push the music forward with astonishing musical prowess.

* Nickel Creek, Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. With California Trio, Jannel Rap. 8 p.m. $15. (949) 496-8930.

All Day

Art

As Japanese Americans growing up in post-war California, award-winning multimedia artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto offer an alternative memory to that portrayed in the current release of Disney’s “Pearl Harbor.” The Yonemotos have received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Film Institute, and were awarded the Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists in 1993. Their installation “Environmental” at [seven-degrees] art gallery consists of 14 home movie screens and a television monitor playing TV commercials from the 1950s. The show is guest curated by Carole Ann Klonarides.

* “Environmental,” multimedia installation, [seven-degrees] art gallery, 891 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday. Ends June 28. Free. (949) 376-1533.

8pm

Theater

Remember the line from “That’s Life” that goes, “You’re riding high in April, shot down in May?” Oscar Wilde could relate. In February, 1895, the Anglo-Irish wit’s masterwork, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” was first produced. The comedy of manners was full of Wilde’s spoofery of social convention and his flair for pithy epigrams. By May of that year, Wilde was ruined, sentenced to two years’ hard labor for homosexuality--the outfall of a disastrous libel suit he brought against his boyfriend’s aristocratic daddy. But in the long run--you can’t deny it--Wilde and his regaled audiences have had the last laugh. This version updates the action to the 1950s while maintaining the English setting and accents of the original.

* “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Grove Theater Center’s Festival Amphitheater, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Previews tonight and Friday, regular performances begin Saturday. Thursdays-Sundays, 8:30 p.m. Ends June 24. Resumes July 5-21 at Muckenthaler Cultural Center, 1201 West Malvern Ave., Fullerton. $14.50 to $22.50 in Garden Grove, $21.50 to $25.50 in Fullerton. (714) 741-9555.

all day

Photography

Long before letterbox and John Ford put the American West on the wide screen, the Wild West was captured by photographers who turned to panorama to document the always changing landscape. “The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs and Western Spaces,” opening today at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, focuses on these panoramic photographs of the trans-Mississippi West from the 1850s to the present through about 60 images by early photographers such as Carleton E. Watkins and William H. Jackson and contemporary photographers Catherine Opie and Skeet McAuley.

* “The Great Wide Open: Panoramic Photographs of the American West,” Boone Gallery, the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Ends Sept. 9. Tuesday-Sunday, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Adults, $8.50; seniors, $8; students 12-18, $6; children younger than 12 free. (626) 405-2100.

8pm

Pop Music

Billy Joe Shaver’s history is potholed with such events as the loss of two fingers in a sawmill accident, the deaths of his wife and his mother to cancer in 1999 and the death of his son and bandmate Eddy Shaver last year. Shaver, whose contributions to outlaw lore include writing the bulk of Waylon Jennings’ 1973 album “Honky Tonk Heroes,” carries on nonetheless, hitting the road with a new album, “The Earth Rolls On.”

* Billy Joe Shaver, with Cowboy Nation, Knitting Factory Hollywood, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., 8 p.m. $15. (323) 463-0204.