An American in Vienna
It’s reassuring to experience Old World legends renewing their claim while a new legend stakes out his own territory. Reuben and Dorothy Silver respectively act and direct in the Jewish Community Center’s production of Old Wicked Songs by Jon Marans. The theatrical equivalent of Chippendale furniture, the Silvers can be depended on to be sturdy,…
Heck’s Rises From the Flames
It’s been one heck of a year for Heck’s Cafe. A January 13, 1998, blaze didn’t destroy the historic brick building in Ohio City that has been the restaurant’s home for the past quarter-century. Nevertheless, the fire took a heavy toll on the kitchen and caused extensive smoke damage throughout the restaurant’s three small dining…
Makin’ the Scene
With Al Gore rumbling like a refrigerator on wheels to the 2000 presidential nomination, it’s worth remembering wife Tipper’s crusade to cleanse her daughters’ boombox of lyrics she found objectionable. The censorship front has been relatively quiet in recent years, but that’s no reason to think it can’t reawaken, even if the Gore kids have…
Playback
The Neville Brothers Valence Street (Columbia) The slinky grooves and rhythms that the Neville Brothers have been laying down for nearly 25 years have always taken their good old time getting to where they’re going. A calming vibe inherent in the music makes their best work seem like little vacations wrapped in song. The paradox…
Gear Strippers
Cyde’s music is described as schizophrenic. The fourteen tracks on the regional band’s new self-titled CD sound as though nearly as many different bands performed them. Not surprisingly, Cyde’s musical influences are an eclectic mix: the Police, Miles Davis, and Jane’s Addiction, mainly. They enjoy jazz-oriented music, big band, and swing. What makes Cyde work–its…
Dirty Boulevard
Six guys holed up for four days in a windowless building in the heart of a crummy San Francisco neighborhood. That might sound about as fun as spit, but for the members of New Orleans funk band Galactic, it was heaven on a cracker. They’d only had two days to record their first CD, Coolin’…
Planned Obsolescence
In 2076, three hundred years after the American Revolution, a dapper young reporter informs citizens of Edgecrusher’s escape from a Securitron containment facility. In order to bring the rebellious faction’s hero back into containment, Securitron releases the mechanized Smasher/Devourer and the Enforcers. They move without emotion, tearing apart buildings and squashing anti-Securitron factions in their…
Call of the Weill
It is sometimes said that there were two Kurt Weills–the avant-garde German classical composer and the prolific broadway tunesmith. Weill (1900-1950) was the ultimate crossover artist, writing serious concert music–symphonies, chamber pieces, and famous satirical operas that shocked 1920s Berlin audiences–and memorable show tunes (“Mack the Knife,” “September Song”). For decades, pundits have wearisomely weighed…
Justice Served
March 1985. The Palomino, North Hollywood. Onstage: Lone Justice, pounding out a Parton-meets-punk mutation of country-rock that had seduced an entire city of music observers. The Next Big Thing. They play stomping blue-collar tales (“Working Late”) and brokenhearted weepers (“Don’t Toss Us Away”). They showcase “Ways to Be Wicked,” a catchy-as-hell rock tune given to…
Night & Day
Thursday January 28 The last Warren Zevon sighting was in 1996, when the piano fighter resurfaced in boxed-set form (which really doesn’t count, does it?) with I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Now he’s on tour–with no new CD to support, just a lifetime of electrostatic little numbers (including “Werewolves of London,” “Excitable Boy,” and “Bad…
Son of a Son
One doesn’t have to be a history buff to know that the root of the blues is human misery. Poverty, prison, discrimination, exploitation, and rootlessness–facets of black experiences both in the rural South and the industrial North–became the basis for the songs sung by folks trying to forget such oppression. But the aforementioned miseries are…
Portrait of the Artist as a Sexual Man
“I just find it all so bizarre,” notes John Maybury, popping a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it in what appears to be one quick flip of the wrist. “All those issues of ‘being out’ and ‘are you in?’ We should have gone beyond that by now. I know it’s still an issue, but…
Livewire
Kirk Franklin CeCe Winans Trin-I-Tee 5:7 CSU Convocation Center January 21 While the life-sized Kirk Franklin spent more than ample amounts of time on stage, several times during the show, he gave up the stage to his alter egos: two giant Kirk heads projected like benevolent twin Wizards of Oz on the screens hanging from…
How Strange Fruit Got Its Groove Back
Between the current nostalgia for platform shoes and the epidemic of midlife crises that has so many baby boomers in its grip, director Brian Gibson’s Still Crazy just might be able to find an audience among the disturbed, the deafened, and the disenchanted. It is, after all, the comic tale of a fictional British glam-rock…
The Pretenders
Authenticity can be a bitch. In order to recreate the look of Shout at the Devil-era Motley Crue, the members of the tribute band Looks That Kill took album covers to a local leather shop. The studded, multicolored costumes were custom-made at $1,000 a pop. The band scoured record conventions for concert footage, but most…
Extreme Sports
“Oh thank you, Dick Dynamic, for that live report from the roof of MBNA headquarters in Beachwood. Live team coverage continues as we go to Bonnie Booster, live from Al Lerner’s private limo on I-271. Bonnie?” Zap! We interrupt this syrupy stream of establishment-controlled hype for a News Orifice Mouth special report. We’ve got Iron…
The Straight Dope
In your column on Chinese foot binding [October 23], you mentioned that small feet have been prized in many cultures, using as an example “Cinderella’s tiny glass slipper.” While your point is well taken, you missed a chance to mention the story behind Cinderella’s unusual footwear. In the original folktale, Cinderella wore (in French) “une…
Letters
What Bellacore Really Meant Although we appreciate it tremendously when we receive a write-up in a publication as important as Scene, we feel it is as important to point out that Gordana Vucenovic’s article about Bellacore [“A Twinkie in the Eye,” January 14] was laced with inaccuracies and errors. First: Vucenovic misrepresented how we feel…
Crazy Like a Fox
Artist Carroll Sockwell’s life story reads like a psychiatric case study, and the danger is that one might view his work, a cross section of which is now on display at Case Western Reserve University’s Mather Gallery, as the product of a sick man. This would be a mistake. Although Sockwell committed suicide in 1992…
Encore
The Smell of the Kill. The Cleveland Play House has come up with a stylishly nasty black comedy. In the course of a dinner party, three men (all, admittedly, bastards) manage to become locked in a cellar meat freezer. As they frantically bang on the ceiling, their wives leisurely debate whether or not to save…
