Arts District: Scene's Arts Blog

As one critic observes in this PBS documentary, "It’s so weird that there’s nothing gay about the Broadway show Xanadu, but it feels like the gayest show I’ve ever seen on Broadway.”

Sexuality aside, the show has a sense of camp that manages to simultaneously celebrate and lampoon the state of broadway theatre and pop culture, all with a soundtrack that just about everyone already knows. You and your family can be there when the Broadway tour comes through Playhouse Square, because we’ve got a family pack of four tickets to give away to the person who can answer any of these questions:

1) Who was the Xanadu songwriter's and the name of his popular British symphonic rock band?
2) Xanadu is considered a remake of what Rita Hayworth movie?
3) Name the film's original choreographer and went on to direct the first 3 "High School Musical" movies.
4) EXTRA CREDIT: Xanadu was a song written by what 70's Progressive rock band, and what was the name of the album it appeared on?

To win the tickets, e-mail your answers to freetickets@clevescene.com with Xanadu in the subject line. Be sure to include your name, address, age & phone number!

Zerbinetta is a girl who takes life as it comes. If one lover doesn't work out, as far as she's concerned, you can just find another. Here's Natalie Dessay singing her famous aria from Richard Strauss' Ariadne Auf Naxos, a 2004 production in Paris.

Scene has free pairs of tickets for the Cleveland Institute of Music's performances of Ariadne Auf Naxos next weekend. Performances are Thursday, the 25th, Friday, the 26th & Saturday, the 27th. If you want a pair, just send your name, address, and a phone number to freetickets@clevescene.com.

And read more about the CIM production here:

http://www.clevescene.com/cleveland/getting-really-high/Content?oid=1841523

The Great Lakes Theatre Festival is going all bestial this Spring with a couple of shows featuring man-beast creatures: You've got your Shakespearean donkey, queering relations in the fairy world of Midsummer Night's Dream, and you've got your tabloid headline grabbing tale of Bat Boy: The Musical with music and lyrics by Laurence O'Keefe and a story by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming.

Bat Boy opens April 8, and Midsummer Night's Dream opens April 22, so you've got plenty of time to plan. Performances run through May 16.

And if you're reading this, you're in luck, because we've got free tickets to either of these shows, and we're just itching to give them to you. But of course you've got to play the game.

Perhaps you remember that beloved bastion of truth-telling, the Weekly World News. Hardly a week at the grocery store checkout line goes by that we don't mourn the loss of that paper with its stories of big foot, alien abduction, and believe it or not weirdness. It's where Bat Boy gets its mojo.

E-mail me your favorite real or invented headline for the Weekly World News, and we'll hook you up with a pair of vouchers for free tickets to either of these GLTF shows. They're good for any performance other than opening night for either of these shows. You just take them to the Playhouse Square box office and swap them for your tickets.

So: E-mail mgill at clevescene.com with your headlines, and I'll hook you up with some free tickets.

Scott Pickering radiates energy, and you can see that on the walls at Brandt Gallery, which are almost completely covered by paintings in a career retrospective show he’s calling “eyeball chatter.”

Beginning with works he did when he was not yet a teenager (including a color-by number clown done at age 12, which already shows that he’s only a little bit interested in working within the lines, and a lot interested in the texture of paint) it spans roughly 35 years of his vividly colorful output.

He mostly works in acrylic and pastel, often recycling foam core and other paintable surfaces from his company, Exhibit Builders. The thick, layered, and scratchy textures that result serve his subject matter well. There’s almost always a living figure—be it a person or some other animal—and they often seem to be shrieking the madness of the world.

By themselves these pictures are just plain fun to look at, but the installation at Brandt takes their effect into another realm: they are crowded on the walls, frame to frame, and sometimes overlapping, just about floor to ceiling, without much space between them. The presentation is an extension of the work itself. Just one frustrating thing about it: Scene Art Director Ron Kretsch and I both found that the pieces we most wanted to buy were not being offered for sale.

You’ve got one more chance to see his reckless joy ride of a show at its closing reception during this month’s Tremont Art Walk. Pickering, who’s been about as prolific in music as in visual art, will be dividing his time between this show and another he’s involved in (at Asterisk Gallery)—which is further testimony that he just can’t stop making stuff. Check it out from 6 to 10 p.m. Friday at Brandt Gallery (1028 Kenilworth, brandtgallery.org, 216.621.1610). Free.

In the last half century or so a wave of community theatre has rippled out through the suburbs in the wake of sprawl. The strength of a community theatre is an easy barometer of community life, if not a precise one. It means a bunch of volunteers have the time and energy to pool their talents (for better or for worse), and put on a show. All the better if they’re doing it on behalf of kids.

That will is alive and well in Collinwood, in the upstage Players. The children’s theatre company, run by volunteers, was founded in 1995 with thirty kids. They now have 150. They come from all over the east side- Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Bratenahl, Euclid, Eastlake, Mayfield, Mentor, Richmond Heights, Willoughby, Concord and Willowick. They’re gearing up for a production of Alladin, Jr.. Performances are March 26th - 28th at the Slovenian Workmen's Home (15335 Waterloo Rd. Collinwood).

To help pay the bills, they invite folks to the UpStage Artisan Alley, a craft sale offering handcrafted bath and body products, hand-painted keepsakes and magnets, rock-n-roll inspired art prints, jewelry, candles, crocheted items, rock-n-roll posters, fused glass items, photographic art, ceramic keepsakes, eco-friendly items and, of course, more. All proceeds help fund Aladdin, Jr.

The sale is from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, at the Slovenian Workmen's Home. For information, go to upstageplayers.com, or upstageartisanalley.blogspot.com.

It's amazing what you can say just by juxtaposition. For example, that cello virtuoso and occasionally straight up trippy musician Matt Haimovitz—as seen here

is performing this cello concerto (Shostakovich No. 1, as seen here with Tina Guo and the State of Mexico National Symphony)

for free with City Music Cleveland in churches around town this weekend.

I heard him Wednesday night at Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights. You like heavy metal? You think words like "muscle" and "vicious" belong in discussions of classical music? Check this out. Remaining performances are:

7:30 p.m. Friday at Willoughby United Methodist Church, 15 Public Square, Willoughby

7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Shrine of St. Stanislaus, 3649 E. 65th St., Slavic Village

and

2 p.m. Sunday at Elyria First United Methodist Church, 320 Middle Ave Elyria.

Go to citymusiccleveland.org for deteails.