Rent Check
Rent is a riveting story of life in the shadow of AIDS, but mostly it rocks, with a score that reverberated on Broadway when the play premiered seven years ago. Centered around a group of HIV-stricken young artists living in a New York City tenement, the show is based on Puccini’s La Bohème, a 100-year-old…
Bad Teeth, Good Times
TUE 1/6 Anthony Grabowski eats, sleeps, and breathes English. No wonder his weekly tribute to Queen Liz and her subjects has turned into the popular U.K. Tuesdays at Mercury Lounge. The sound of Brit bands — from ’80s favorites the Clash and the Eurythmics to modern rockers Radiohead and Coldplay — wafts from the speakers,…
Sunny Day
1/6-1/7 You don’t have to tell Les Bowen how to get to Sesame Street — it’s in a theater filled with screaming kids, ready to rip the feathers off his Big Bird outfit. In Sesame Street Live: Everyone Makes Music, music teacher Jenny, who’s just moved to the block, unpacks and discovers that the truck…
Pre-Partying
TUE 1/6 LeBron James has done more than light up Gund Arena — he’s lit up the entire Gateway neighborhood. On game nights, the district’s bars are now crammed with visitors looking for quick eats, cheap brews, and a good time. We’ve scoured them for the best options; try one out prior to Tuesday’s game…
Holy Comics Convention!
SUN 1/4 A few years ago, comic books were going the way of vinyl records. In the era of the internet, computer animation, and 128-bit video games, the concept of telling stories with static pictures and words on paper seemed positively archaic. Then Hollywood stepped up. “We’ve seen a huge growth in our attendance since…
That Is Rock and Roll
1/7-2/29 Jerry Leiber once said (about himself and songwriting companion Mike Stoller), “We didn’t write songs. We wrote records.” That they did. And plenty of hit ones. Their rock-and-roll catalog is the centerpiece of Smokey Joe’s Café, a 40-song revue of the pair’s classic R&B and rock hits from the ’50s and ’60s, including “Hound…
Second Opinions
Bill Gallo — Even dedicated art-house regulars missed Pavel Lounguine’s Tycoon: A New Russian when it was released this fall, but this intrigue-spiced tale of a ruthless yet surprisingly sympathetic Russian oligarch worked equally well as a crime thriller and a course in Russian fiscal policy (or the lack of it) in the chaotic years…
Weepers by the Dozen
It can be easy to assume that all the critics at a particular publication are more or less of the same mind, but that’s not the case here. We’re just too damn stubborn to take our colleagues’ views into consideration, which is why, when coming up with a collective cinematic best-of-the-year list, there was plenty…
She’s Gonna Have It
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year — which often seems advantageous — you may have noticed that there’s a pugnacious air of defiance among today’s young women. Far be it from a film critic to attempt an essay on gender studies, but hey, look around: These femmes aggressives aren’t the…
Boom Town
Not since the halcyon days of Nine Inch Nails and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony in the early ’90s has Northeast Ohio had a better year in music than it did in 2003. Kent’s Black Keys were nominated for the prestigious Shortlist Award and toured with Beck. Cleveland metal combo Chimaira sold close to 60,000 copies of its…
A Year That Trembled
Back in January, New Line Cinema released Final Destination 2, a horror movie in which the antagonist was the unseen hand of death itself. All the main characters knew their time was up, but they didn’t know how or when, so they existed in a constant state of fear, never knowing from which angle the…
Round Two
The Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles festival will return to Cleveland June 4 and 5. The concert, dubbed “Six Pack Weekend II: Who’s Up for Another Round?”, brings 14 of the world’s premier metal bands to the Odeon. “Cleveland’s one of the top metal markets in North America,” says Mark Gromen, Six Pack Weekend director…
The Full . . . Mindy?
Britain’s latest assault on the Yank funnybone is a spirited, hard-trying farce called Calendar Girls, plucked straight out of a 1999 headline and dolled up with all the heartwarming charm we’ve come to expect from recent films made by our former rulers. Essentially a chick flick for middle-aged women — nothing wrong with that, is…
The Year in Music
In 2003, old became new and nü became old. Underperforming records from Korn, Limp Bizkit, Staind, and the Deftones slapped a toe tag on neo-metal, while many of the year’s most celebrated albums were reissues or vault recordings from such greats as Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, and the Beatles. Even critical favorites, such as OutKast,…
We Laughed, We Cried, We Puked
Whether the subject is politics, sports, or the arts, year-end recap articles have always been popular in journalistic circles. And why not? Looking back allows the writer to spew lots of random, quirky opinions (see below), throw bouquets and brickbats at certain people and events (see below), and craft a handful of supposedly clever subheads…
City of Class
Hipsters often lament Cleveland’s willingness to jump on trends only after they’ve been stomped to death and buried. But Punch views this as unassailable evidence of our cultural superiority. Case in point: the latest trend careening through clubland, the $90 glass of tequila. Yes, in cities supposedly way hipper than ours, tequila is gaining ground…
Chew on This
With apologies to Forrest Gump, years are like tossed salads: There’s stuff you liked, stuff you didn’t, and probably a thing or two you never expected to find inside the bowl. For dedicated diners, 2003 was no different. Here are some of the highlights. Here and gone Watching a restaurant fail is always ugly, but…
Step Right Up
Step Right Up The statesman speaks: You said I look like George W. Bush and I dressed in a sharp pin-striped suit [“The War at Home,” December 10]. Great work — if you were a fashion reporter. But candidate Ed Herman actually said, “At this stage of the game, all you have to do is…
The Year in Pictures
Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler at Blossom. B.B. King at Scene Pavilion. Cobra Verde’s John Petkovic at Scene Pavilion. Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea at Blossom. Iron Maiden’s Janick Gers at Blossom. Frontman Anthony Kiedis of Red Hot Chili Peppers at Blossom. Gene Simmons and Kiss at Blossom. Mike Herrera of MxPx at the Agora. Guitarist…
Monsters’ Ball
At 4 foot 10, Raegan Brierton makes a pretty convincing three-year-old. As the pigtailed Boo in the touring production of Monsters, Inc. , she’s the only human face on a rink full of multilimbed ogres and nine-foot beasts. “Everything’s larger than life and super-sized,” she says. “It doesn’t matter where you’re sitting, because you see…
This Week’s Day-By-Day Picks
Thursday, January 1 There’s only one thing to do today: Watch bowl games. Here’s an easy-to-follow schedule: 10:55 a.m. — Crawl out of bed; seek pain relievers and beer. 11 a.m. — Festivities commence with the Outback Bowl (Iowa vs. Florida) on ESPN. 12:30 p.m. — Off to NBC to check on the Gator Bowl…
