Seasonal Boughs of Folly
While meditating to my Barbra Streisand Christmas album, I was in a quandary as to how, after nine annual viewings of the Great Lakes Theatre Festival’s A Christmas Carol, I could possibly review its tenth-anniversary production with the freshness and wonder of the inner child it was intended for. Just as Babs got to “Jingle…
Encore
Angels in America. In two parts that collectively run six hours, Angels in America is a great emotional investment that pays dividends in both entertainment and enlightenment. It evokes Reagan’s America as a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape and may be thought of as a thinking man’s Star Wars. Dobama has performed a miracle in taming this…
Transparent Wonders
Ever since the Star of Bethlehem dazzled the original cast of wise men, Christmas has been synonymous with special effects. Following in this tradition, the Cleveland Play House has rendezvoused with some technical wizards to fashion a holiday spectacular out of H.G. Wells’s evergreen The Invisible Man to make eyes gaga and mouths agape. The…
Little Vico Is Big on Style
It’s six o’clock, and outside, a sharp November sleet cuts through the gathering darkness. Inside, the Young Turks in their black suits are congregating around the bar, talking loud, laughing louder, and drinking their martinis, up, with a twist. Every few minutes, one steps away from the others, flips open a cell phone and places…
Playback
Metallica Garage Inc. (Elektra) Nearly two decades have passed since the world’s most popular metal band got its start. This collection of 27 songs serves as an essential guide to the fearless foursome’s current and past creative paths, a sort of Metallica Cliff’s Notes. All eleven cover songs on disc one were specifically recorded for…
Night & Day
Thursday December 10 No matter how solemnly intoned, that story about walking to school ten miles backwards in a blizzard is getting a little slushy. But starting tonight, kids can hear a fresh batch of “back in the day” stories from old, crotchety people (and some young, non-crotchety people) at Hale Farm and Village’s Holiday…
Makin’ the Scene
Terry Stewart was introduced by co-chairman Lee C. Howley as a man willing to crawl to Cleveland to become the new CEO and executive director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Stewart corrected Howley when he took the podium: “When I said I’d crawl here, I said I’d crawl naked.” Stewart,…
Collector’s Edition
If there is a heaven for paper clips and drinking straws and dolls missing an arm, it must be inside two towering wooden cases that stand like apartment buildings for ladybugs in artist La Wilson’s backyard studio. And each ladybug apartment hosts a ladybug universe: flea-circus-sized Tabasco bottles cluster in one; a hill of yellowed…
Livewire
The Dave Holland Quintet Diamondback Brewery December 3 A good bassist rarely wants for work. A great bassist, just about never. Since signing up for the Miles Davis internship of a lifetime at age 21 and playing on such influential records as Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way, Dave Holland’s bass lines have accompanied…
Rave New World
Can rave be saved? SAFMOD, a Cleveland experimental art and dance ensemble, believes it can. Composer Neil Chastain, a co-founder of the group, explains that the techno/house dance movement, once the province of the trendy underground, has been corrupted by crass commercialism. “The music has been too much of the same stuff,” Chastain laments. “There’s…
Life After Flannel
There are plenty of reasons why the members of Seven Mary Three are drinking in the middle of the afternoon. Aside from the fact that they have the day off, this once-promising Florida group has fallen on bad times. It wasn’t too long ago that they were hailed as the next up-and-coming rock band, riding…
Golden Shower
First of all, if you’re among the benighted who’ve never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 shocker Psycho, stop reading at the end of this paragraph. A movie review, even one as incisive and elegant as this, is no way to be introduced to Hitchcock’s horror masterpiece. Your assignment is to rush right out and rent the…
The Boy in the Window
Hubert Sumlin was Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist from 1955 until Wolf’s death in 1976. It was one of the most fruitful partnerships in music history. Wolf’s deep growl of a voice and Sumlin’s innovative guitar work made the Howlin’ Wolf band one of the most popular in Chicago in the 1950s and one of the most…
In the Name of the Father Figure
How vulnerable children are! And how wounding life can be. The Thief, a Russian film set in the post-World War II Stalinist era, was one of five nominees vying for the 1997 Academy Award as the Best Foreign Language Film. (It lost to Character, from the Netherlands.) Written and directed by Pavel Chukhrai, The Thief…
Ghosts in the Machine
Fans of synthesizer-based pop music haven’t had much to be excited about in the ’90s. With the sole exception of Depeche Mode, all of the ’80s synthpop bands that helped define the sound of that decade have either broken up or been driven back underground. Many members of the old analog guard have been releasing…
Fusion for the People
John Medeski of Medeski Martin & Wood sees jazz as a label, a preconception, a tool of the critical establishment. Like many musicians before him, Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington among them, he rails against the pigeonholing and the straitjacketing. Of course you guys are jazz, say the critics. Well, quasi jazz. Groove jazz. Sub…
Out of the Shadows
Darlene Love is a legendary singer who isn’t a household name. It was Love who sang lead on such classic Phil Spector-produced girl group anthems of the early 1960s as “He’s a Rebel,” “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” and “Da Doo Ron Ron,” songs that Spector credited to the Crystals, a group Love had…
Police State Pinch
All aboard, class! Today’s subject is your eroding personal freedom, and Professor Mouth has lined up a field trip. Our first stop is Rootstown High School, where we’ll learn about your First Amendment freedom of expression. Oops, we can’t teach that here, since three students were just suspended. Their crime? They refused to turn their…
Death Be Not Proud
OK, I’ll admit it: I cried the other night when Jimmy Smits’s character, Det. Bobby Simone, finally gave up the ghost on NYPD Blue. My girlfriend called me right after the episode–aptly titled Hearts and Souls–aired two Tuesdays ago, and she was shocked at how shook up I sounded. She couldn’t believe that underneath this…
Letters
Cashroomhead Mushroomhead member Skinny stated, “We don’t do this to make money …” If this is the case, why does Mushroomhead charge $10 for admission to their shows, and why are their T-shirt prices so high? I’ll tell you why. Their dumb gimmick allows them to charge such outrageous prices. The fact that Mushroomhead has…
The Straight Dope
The difference between being a drug addict and a Straight Dope addict is that I can only get an occasional fix of the Straight Dope. You make me laugh hard enough to forget the pain from the ruptured disks in my back. Monday is when the Internet releases the Straight Dope; I seem to need…
Starr Struck
Guerrilla artist Robbie Conal has been slapping his sardonic political posters on the sides of buildings and bus shelters ever since Nancy Reagan told the Cabbage Patch Kids to just say no. He’s done parodies of presidents (“Men with No Lips” featured a pursed-mouth Reagan) and TV anchors (“Winken, Blinken, and Nod,” with a snoozing…
