Encore
The Clue in the Old Birdbath. Red Hen’s production resurrects nubile teen detective Nancy Drew, here dubbed “Tansy True.” Adolescent literature’s beacon of girlish pluck and ingenuity is rendered here as a salty, torpedo-breasted assassin of male domination. With an all-female cast, the work is teeming with lesbian subtext and carnal allusion. Some high-powered little…
Apples Frittered
The gourmet in you will surely scoff. But the baby in you may coo in delight at some of the sweet and simple foods served at the Apple Farm Restaurant in Brunswick. The folksy dining hall is a 1984 addition to Bill and Jane Eyssen’s down-home apple empire, Mapleside Farms. Although the enterprise began modestly…
Side Dish
The ink had barely dried on our glowing October 14 review of Michael Herschman’s innovative restaurant Mojo (2221 Professor Street), when an alert reader at CWRU informed us that Herschman had changed the concept. The disappointed diner reported that the list of tapas-like “small plates,” which once made up the entire menu, had been shortened,…
Tudor Revival
Randy Newman’s recent Bad Love is the most intimate, revelatory album of a career spent hiding behind gross, hysterical caricatures. Gone are the rednecks and fat boys and senators from Utah; gone are the hateful men who, the singer-songwriter always insisted, were not him. They’ve been replaced now by the man who writes love songs…
Having His Cake
Archer Prewitt is one of the hardest working musicians in Chicago’s fertile indie rock music scene. A few years ago, the guitarist/singer/songwriter/comic book artist moved into the neighborhood with his lounge jazz outfit, the Cocktails, and now he lends his guitar and composition skills to the rock and electronics of Chicagoland favorites the Sea and…
Leading by Example
Howard Quincy Bunch was minding his own business, running an errand at the office-supply store. Or was he? Minding his own business, that is. A local actor/poet/singer craving creative challenge, Bunch spotted playwright Fred Taylor, head of C-Town Performing Arts, nearby. “I was being nosy,” admits Bunch with a sheepish, I-didn’t-mean-any-harm-by-it laugh. “He was making…
Scratch Fever
At September’s Technics DMC World Finals DJ competition held at New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom, the atmosphere was more charged than in past years. It was the first time the world finals had been held in the United States. Maybe the electricity could be attributed to the presence of all the New York b-boys in…
A Show of Hands
If you think Cleveland Indian Omar Vizquel has elevated dives, catches, and double plays to an art form, you should see what he can do to a canvas. Visitors of the upcoming Agnon Art Show will see the slick fielder’s trademark grace and style as applied to three oil paintings displayed with the works of…
Livewire
Uz Jsme Doma Nyabinghi Dance Hall, Youngstown October 25 Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong for Uz Jsme Doma, a band from the Czech Republic that was making its first appearance in Youngstown. For starters, the turnout at the club — which, by the way, has one of the best jukeboxes…
Found Highways
And now . . . a G-rated movie from David Lynch! No, Lynch hasn’t lost his mind. He hasn’t gone soft in the head. And he hasn’t sold out to the smiley-faced bean counters at Disney. While the notion of America’s King of Weird — the man who brought us Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks…
Playback
Rage Against the Machine The Battle of Los Angeles (Epic) While it’s not much of a surprise, the new Rage Against the Machine album rocks. It rocks hard and in so doing thrashes its competition (Foo Fighters, Stone Temple Pilots, Bush, etc.) without really breaking a sweat. Amid such sorry musical surroundings, Rage reminds us…
The Men Who Did Too Little
In the eyes of the general public, Michael Mann is still best-known for Miami Vice. He has received a great deal of critical acclaim for films about serial killers, Mohicans, and bank robbers. So who would have guessed that his most engrossing and suspenseful film to date would be a story of corporate espionage and…
Soundbites
The opening of Roots, Rhymes & Rage: The Hip-Hop Story at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on November 11 will be surrounded by a flurry of related programs. The first of these events, held last week, was a local fashion and talent show. A total of 15 acts, including Jahi, Chachi, Rising Son,…
Pull the Strings!
The first rule of Being John Malkovich is you do not look at the poster for Being John Malkovich! Sorry to crib from that inferior tale of incredible shrinking men, but really — avoid that poster, despite its curious, clinical design, until after you’ve seen the movie. Plot-spoiling critics are harmless compared to what these…
King Maker
Enjoying a Guinness and a break from covering the carnage in Yugoslavia, writer Terry Sheridan leans forward to set the record straight. The subject is his late friend and colleague Jim Parker, the colorful soldier and former Plain Dealer columnist who provided the creative spark behind the movie Three Kings. “Parker wasn’t a major, he…
The Million-Dollar Challenge
Just after 1 p.m. on a bright Sunday in October, a group of academics and free-thinkers are transforming an ordinary classroom at Baldwin-Wallace College into a controlled test environment. Everything falls into place rather quickly, leaving them with nothing much to do but nervously check their watches and rearrange chairs and tables. By 1:15 the…
Edge
Another week, and another masterful diversion by Imperial Mayor Mike White. Two months ago, it was a phantom band of white supremacists in the police department diverting attention from White’s handling of the Ku Klux Klan. Conveniently, last week’s Columbine conspiracy at South High came just as the mayor was being hammered for helping engineer…
Hazy Recollection
At the turn of the century, an American novelist named Booth Tarkington was spoken of in the same breath as Mark Twain. How times (and tastes) change. Were it not for Orson Welles’s classic 1942 film based on The Magnificent Ambersons, Tarkington would be even less known today. Almost a hundred years ago, a talented…
No Great Shakespeare
Somebody needs to call an ambulance to tend to the wounded performers of Beck Center’s traumatized Romeo and Juliet. They’ve been impaled between the Renaissance daintiness of Zeffirelli’s 1968 film and the funkiness of Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern Miami free-for-all 1996 movie. The evening leaves no victors, just a few tenuous survivors. Director Shelley Butler instills…
Stark Raven Lunatic
All is not despair on the theater front. The Cleveland Play House, in order to keep its subscribers well-oiled and purring, has, besides a well-stocked bar in its club, the Millennium Series: tantalizing one-week productions of juicy virginal scripts that have the potential to bestow ecstasy on generations of future playgoers. Eric Coble’s Under the…
