And Then There Was Fun
For those who like their theatrical treats on the airy side, cotton candy is available these evenings at Beck Center. Something’s Afoot, by James McDonald, Robert Gerlach, and David Vos, a wafer-thin musical spoof, takes aim at the most insubstantial of targets: those English manor-house mysteries read by little old ladies of both sexes. Gathered…
Raisin D’tre
For the first time in a month, A Raisin in the Sun has returned to Cleveland stages. It was forty years ago that a 28-year-old black woman named Lorraine Hansberry broadened the scope of American theater by portraying the aspirations of working-class “Negroes” rather than the carnal cravings of Catfish Row exotics. Hansberry’s play is…
Middle East MeetsNear West
Cleveland is no desert when it comes to ethnic restaurants. But in The Pyramid, a small West Side eatery specializing in the traditional foods of Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and the other countries of the Middle East, local diners can discover some monumentally delightful meals. The Arabic nations share a similar cuisine, based largely…
Playback
Van Morrison Back on Top (Pointblank) I don’t know if there’s a Van Morrison fan club, official or private. Seems to me it would be superfluous, anyway. Just being a fan of Morrison makes you a member of an exclusive and secretive club. Let the general populace go on thinking he’s the classic rock guy–you…
Soundbites
South by Southwest is a little like the Olympics. The event is supposed to celebrate the amateur spirit, but mostly it’s about star power. An unsigned band lucky or good enough to be invited to the showcase competes for attention with bands playing forty other sanctioned venues simultaneously. And, dirty little secret be known, most…
Night & Day
Thursday March 25 Relive your days as a Lithuanian housewife with Pierogi: Easy and Creative, a one-night cooking class that covers the basics of making those pillows of dough (they not only taste good, they also make great coasters). It’s taught by the industrious John Stuchal, a former chef with a repertoire of 150 classes–including…
Livewire
R.L. Burnside Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early Euclid Tavern March 15 First came the pairing of R.L. Burnside with New York noise children the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. That album left a welt, but next came the slap that really left them reeling. R.L. Burnside, the real McCoy purveyor of the Mississippi blues, strumming and…
Fun With Whips
“Wanna see my new tattoo?” inquires Mistress Lauren, pulling up her Catholic-school-girl miniskirt and peeling down her underwear to reveal a tasteful design across her shaved pubes. “I got up at a quarter to twelve today,” she chatters on, as if it were the crack of dawn, “put my hair on, and came here.” “Here”…
Austin Wowers
Eight hundred miles from Austin, and one dream is dead. The woman seated behind me on the 737 departing Denver had oil-black hair streaked with fuchsia. I went out on a very short limb and asked if she was flying to South by Southwest. “Yes,” she said sarcastically, “what gave me away?” She works in…
Duking It Out
When jazz and social critic Stanley Crouch’s pen starts flowing, the blisters of indignation start rising. Consider some of his more piquant comments, which start at the top and go up from there: “Malcolm X . . . is the Elvis Presley of race politics, a pop black-power icon mistaken for a serious thinker.” Crouch…
Soul to Sell
Bob Irwin spends his days sorting through the vaults of record companies, listening to songs long ago hidden away from the general public–songs either too bad, or too good, ever to escape from the tomb. During the past decade, he has been responsible for freeing the Byrds’ best-and-rest from Columbia’s vaults, adding dozens of previously…
A Dirty-Cop Drug Movie
Ginger and Fred. Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds. To the list of unforgettable movie dance partnerships, we may now add Omar Epps, the trim, handsome young man who stars as one third of The Mod Squad, and Michael Lerner, the heavyset middle-aged actor who played the mayor of New…
10-4, Good Buddy
Dale Watson says he didn’t plan to become a rebel. It was never his intention to fight fashion. If you ask Watson, it’s more of a case of fashion fighting him. Take, for example, the time he was hired to play bass in a video for country music chanteuse Pam Tillis. Watson was asked to…
TV or Not TV?
“I hope it’s better than The Truman Show,” said the woman in line behind me at the publicized “sneak preview” of EDtv. Afterward, a man in my row declared, “That was a lot better than The Truman Show.” Pretentious high-concept films like The Truman Show often garner accolades and let down audiences. EDtv, another film…
Death of Innocents
The pictures of his daughter that 21-year-old Merunas Dautartas fishes out of an old tackle box are mostly out of focus. But, in all of them, pudgy, smiling Katelynn is clearly playful and alert. Merunas laughs as his wife, Christina, recalls how, at four months, Katelynn hated headbands and loved television, how she had started…
The Edge
Cop Tryst Goes Awry Lock a group of hot-blooded firefighters and lusty young policemen in a party facility with a generous supply of ladies and liquor, and what’s likely to happen? Something along the lines of the fracas that reportedly erupted at a downtown hotel the night of February 27, apres the first annual “Guns…
The Naked Truth
Chris Abatsas is more than happy to show visitors the souvenir he received from city officials the day they raided his West 25th Street strip club, Monroe’s Cabaret, last October. “You can see how they tore it right off the hinges,” he announces, pointing to the hollow steel door with a crumpled midsection. The story…
Letters
We’re terribly flattered that Mr. Randolph Siegel, busy publisher of the Free Times, found time to pen this warning note to one of our staff writers and have it slipped, weasel-like, under our office door. Precisely what has alarmed him is unclear. But then, Mr. Siegel has never faced any real competition. Joseph and the…
Down Mexico Way
The exhibit Mexican Prints at the Cleveland Museum of Art provides a rare glimpse into the expressive arsenals of mid-century Mexican artists who transferred the raw material of their country’s history into myth. They sought to give voice to new stirrings within the populace, and when they misfire, it’s never because their political message is…
Encore
Love, Janis. This aural and visual biography of the late rock icon Janis Joplin will neither disappoint her fans nor repel the uninitiated. The Cleveland Play House production uses two actresses to enact Joplin’s private and public sides simultaneously. The private person is played with an affecting Texas accent and endearing naivete by Catherine Curtain,…
