Not Even Classics Last Forever
In little more than a year, the silver will be polished, the napkins will be folded, and dinner will be served for the last time as Classics, one of Cleveland’s premier restaurants, prepares to meet the wrecker’s ball. The restaurant, along with the Omni International Hotel where it is located, is going to be razed…
Night & Day
Thursday November 19 That silver lame zoot suit is just dying for an occasion. “I’ll wear it next year,” you say, but next year never comes. Here’s an idea: Dust it off before it decomposes, then head on down to the Grog Shop for a straight-ahead swing show by San Diego’s Hot Rod Lincoln. If…
A Classic Confrontation
Classics manager Barbara Rulli confirmed last week that, after twelve years of serving fine continental cuisine, the award-winning restaurant is coming down, along with the Omni International Hotel in which it is housed. Cleveland Clinic spokesman Rob Whitehouse said the decision to raze the Omni, which the Clinic owns, was made to meet the “urgent…
A Pointless Exercise
From his childhood guitar teacher, Mike Hovancsek learned the value of experimentation. At his first lesson, he recalls, the “sadistic bastard” fired off a lightning-fast glissando, then ordered him to play it, too. “When he did it, it sounded like somebody speaking in [his] mother tongue,” Hovancsek says. “When I did it, it sounded like…
Blue-eyed Soul Stirrers
“Oh my God, there’s a whole parade of little kids walking down the street, all in their Halloween costumes. That’s awesome!” Afghan Whigs bassist John Curley enthusiastically mentions the trick-or-treat festivities taking place outside of his Cincinnati home. “There’s a little Indian, a cowboy, but nobody really outrageous–no devils or witches, so it must be…
The Young Ones
“The baby boom generation is a 300-pound gorilla,” observes Agnes Wilcox, director of the play SubUrbia, which opens November 19 at the Cleveland Public Theatre. “We have the jobs, we have the money. We need to look more seriously at the younger generation’s concerns.” SubUrbia, the 1994 play by Eric Bogosian, takes a serious look…
Bud Man
“I’m lucky that I’m not in the same boat as Michael Stanley,” says local blues musician Colin Dussault. “He was trying to become a pop star. I’m still sticking to the blues thing because there is always going to be an audience for the blues.” Averaging four to six gigs a week for the past…
Touch of Evil
Before Universal released Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil in 1958, it added some new scenes, and fiddled with the editing and the soundtrack–all without the director’s consent or cooperation. Crushed after screening a pre-debut cut of the film, Welles fired off a 58-page memo to the studio, detailing his objections, and pleading with Universal to…
Slumber Party Crashers
Let’s consider the phenomenon of rock and roll for a moment. The movement started with a small group of white Southern weirdoes playing “black” music in the mid-’50s, or in the case of Bill Haley, a revamped country crooner playing charged-up Chicago blues. It shocked, it frightened, it entertained. So now, some forty-odd years later,…
Reign Check
Even students of English history may have trouble sorting out the palace intrigues and intra-governmental conspiracies that fill Elizabeth, the handsome new production about Queen Elizabeth I’s ascension to the British throne in 1558. With the bewitching Australian actress Cate Blanchett (last year’s Oscar and Lucinda) in the title role, the film follows Elizabeth’s transformation…
Livewire
Garbage Girls Against Boys Agora Theatre November 10 It’s amazing to remember that three years ago, Garbage was notable as a slickly produced weekend excursion for a trio of experienced producers, the most notable being alterna-grunge board wizard Butch Vig (Nevermind, Siamese Dream). My, how the worm has turned. Garbage has now become a successful…
The Camera Loves Them
Holed up with his Sidney Bechet records, old flannel shirts, and dog-eared copy of War and Peace, Woody Allen has made a second career of shunning fad, fashion, and fame–and of ostensibly keeping to himself in the most populous city in the United States. No nouveau-grooveau glitz or designer drugs for our Woody, no sir.…
Makin’ the Scene
A press conference was held at Gund Arena November 12. Cavaliers coach Mike Fratello was there. Was the end of the NBA lockout nigh? Hell no. Before his Thursday night show, Billy Joel fielded questions about his recently announced induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Earlier in the day, Joel inspected the…
Starr Chamber
Here we go again. Enemy of the State is Fascism in America 1998, Chapter Four … or Five … or whatever we’re up to. It readily invites comparison to The Siege, but for better or worse its goals are more mundane. While The Siege seems like an ideological agenda driving a film, Enemy of the…
Playback
Jewel Spirit (Atlantic) Jewel is the cool big sister. Pretty, worldly, focused, talent to spare. Young women want to be her; young men know they’ll never have her. She could be anything. She chooses, you almost sense, to write and sing songs. Too bad Ms. Kilcher didn’t bring this level of sophistication to Spirit, a…
007 on Trial
Bond met the blank eyes of the body on the floor. And the eyes of the man whose blood-group had been F spoke to him and said, “Mister, nothing is forever.” –From Russia With Love, by Ian Fleming The splashy ad that appeared in Weekly Variety on October 14, 1996, was standard movie-industry fare. Evoking…
The Mouth
Cockpit Cram There’s an old saying that goes, “A jackass is a horse designed by a committee.” Yep, that makes it tough to pin the blame on the right donkey. Any wonder why politicos love to surround themselves with committees? And here’s the latest. Mayor Mike White has appointed an “Air Service Issues Review Committee”…
The Straight Dope
When I watch a movie on television or videotape, there is sometimes a statement that this movie has been formatted to fit my screen. My question is, how do they know what size my screen is? –JHahnUSNR, via AOL They don’t know, chum. They don’t have to know. But they know the proportions of your…
Letters
Radio Free Cleveland This letter is in response to the November 11 issue, in particular, the letter from Anthony Parrish, “Thundering at the Buzzard.” I have to start and say this guy’s a freak. How dare you knock something that’s free? The radio is full of choices of what and whom you can tune to.…
Beautiful Ohio
OK, sports fans, this is it: the weekend our formerly top-ranked Buckeyes face their annual humiliation at the hands of those creeps from Ann Arbor and turn into Cooper’s Poopers. (Actually, they already did two weeks ago, by rolling over and playing dead for a bunch of nobodies from East Lansing!) It doesn’t matter what…
Eyes and Dolls
Dismembered dolls and factory rejects fascinate painter Amy Swartele, who revels in the detritus of material culture. Grotesque and humorous, her work is a postindustrial update of the bizarre visions of hell by 15th century Dutch painter Hieronmyus Bosch. The new painting professor at Baldwin-Wallace, Swartele is a native of Belgium, and just moved here…
Senescent Side Show
Entrepreneur John Kenley, producer of over a thousand plays and founder of a summer theater dynasty, is the closest embodiment we have to Billy Wilder’s Norma Desmond. Approaching the century mark with a career that stretches all the way back to 1920s vaudeville, the chorus of an Al Jolson musical, and the office of the…
A New Kind of Theater
Cleveland has become a city full of little renaissances: new teams, new hotels, and even a new Scene. Every mom-and-pop diner and ramshackle shack is being gentrified for the millennium. To add to the bustle, right between the downtown frat-house frolic of Cabaret Dada and the off-Broadway prestige of Coventry’s Dobama, in the heart of…
