Behold the marvel that is my first Washington City Paper cover story, all about the Capital Fringe Festival at Five and What, Exactly, That Milestone Means If Indeed It Means Anything, Which I Conclude Upon Some Reflection Than It Does. On the cover is Darrow Montgomery’s fine portrait of CapFringe executive director and co-founder Ms. Julianne Brienza.
Usually when I post a link to something I’ve published elsewhere, I try to put back in some material I had to jettison from the published version of the story. There’s enough leftover here to stock double-CD reissues and “special edition” DVDs until the CapFringe turns ten, because I waaaaay overreported this thing, but happily I will be using all that stuff on CP’s Fringe & Purge blog, which I may already have mentioned that I’m editing.
My heartfelt thanks to the CP editors to helped make this piece sharper and tighter. They really know their stuff, those guys.
You can download a PDF of the whole, glorious package, photos and all, if you really like fringe, or Julianne, or me.
Look, we both know I’ve never been the most prolific blogger in the knife drawer. Infrequently I’ll feel moved just to writestuff, but most of the time this place is little more than scrapbook full of links to pieces I’ve published elsewhere, sometimes pimped out with bonus content, sometimes not.
I write now to warn you that for at least the next three weeks, my stewardship of this space is all but certain to hit a truly deplorable new depth of negligence. That’s because I’ll be shacked up a few blogs down the block at Fringe & Purge, the Washington City Paper‘s destination for coverage of the fifth annual Capital Fringe Festival, which kicks off — that’s a sports reference, theater-folk — tomorrow. Seehere, you; I started before I even said. Keep reading →
ITEM! Big changes in the New Pornographers’ setlist between nights one and two at the 9:30 this time, as advertised. Newman kept speaking to someone upfront who had apparently provided his or her own list, from whence, said Newman, he’d culled three or four songs the band wouldn’t have played otherwise, and that they’d likely keep playing. It’s worth noting that over the course of the two nights, we heard seven of Mass Romantic ‘s twelve, wow. Is the New Pornos’ nostalgia phase now upon us? Perhaps. Perhaps not: They played eight from the new Together last night, too.
Last night’s show was about 15 minutes shorter than Tuesday’s, too, owing to less dead time between songs. There was at least as much banter as the first night, but it was faster and funnier. Keep reading →
(Two-thirds of) The New Pornographers. From Canada!
Who was it who said that 90 percent of success in life is showing up? Was that Woody Guthrie? Allen Ginsberg? Vince Lombardi? Brian Eno? T-Pain? It was somebody smart, and he or she was almost certainly discussing a concert by The New Pornographers, Canada’s pop musical Justice League whose legend far eclipses that of any of its individual superheroes (with the eternal exception of the exceptional alt-country chanteuse Neko Case). When the group can field its complete nine-strong roster — a feat they haven’t always managed when playing Our Nation’s Capitol — the results are seldom less then splendid. Keep reading →
You ain't got the gumption to use it. But he'll find it.
Summer in our Nation’s Capitol is long and hot and squishy and hot and suffocating and sultry and hot. Also, it’s been known to get a little warm on occasion, those occasions being July and August. But the sticky season is not without its pleasures. Screen on the Green, the beloved outdoor film series on the National Mall, returns next month to showcase another eclectic menu of classic flicks on four consecutive Monday evenings. Keep reading →
You could be forgiven for being a little wary of Thurgood, George Stevens, Jr.’s one-man stage biography of the Hon. Thurgood Marshall, as performed by Laurence Fishburne. What’re the odds a grade school-to-grave account of the life of the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, boasting a star of such Zen-like solemnity that you totally believed him about us all being pickled, hairless pod-dwellers plugged unawares inside The Matrix, could be anything more than plodding hagiography? Great for high school history and government classes, but nothing made with such worthy intentions could possibly be any fun. Right?
Sez you. Point one, Fishburne, reprising his role from a Broadway run two summers ago, is as impish and avuncular as he is authoritative. Whether lurching across the stage with on a cane or channeling LBJ’s puffed-up, Lone Star imperiousness, he’s a captivating presence for every second of this 95-minute monologue. Point two, the story of Marshall’s life — one Stevens seems to have taken a strict-constructionist, if anecdotal, approach to interpreting — is simply a hell of a story, so rich in incident and character (and names — his Uncle Fearless gets a lot of play here) and humor and triumph that it seems too good to be true. Keep reading →
So there was Conan at DAR Constitution Hall last night, dressed in what he said was Eddie Murphy’s catsuit from Raw, possibly signaling his awareness of the perils that await the comic who lets his moment of cultural primacy go to his head. Raw came out in 1988. Eddie Murphy’s last good movie was, I think, Boomerang, from 1992.
Conan is even rocking Eddie’s odd pose from Raw in the first photo there. My phone is to a real camera what I am to a real photographer, but I figured you’d want to see these anyway on your way over to checking out the City Paper’s Arts Desk debrief of the DC stop on Conan’s almost-done Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour. (SPOILER: It was good, but not great, but we liked it anyway.)
This discussion, which I failed to grasp was being “recorded” and would be presented to you, the reader, with minimal editing, stars Benjamin R. Freed and CP arts editor Jonathan L. Fischer and one Christopher T. Klimek, whom I suspect may have been drunk for at least part of it. It’s choppy and discursive and long-winded and confusing, but that’s all part of the choppy, discursive, long-winded fun. Keep reading →
Better than Sleigh Bells, not as good as Broken Social Scene. My Click Track review of last night’s Broken Bells gig at the 9:30 Club is here and also here. I regret to inform you there was no sign of Christina Hendricks at the show.
So I lucked into an advance copy of Stiff author Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Set for publication in August, the book shows us the cosmic lengths to which space agencies must go to replicate off-world conditions here on Earth for the purposes of testing their equipment — and more to the point, the puny, hungry, fragile humans who rely on it to survive in a place nature clearly never meant for us to reach.
I haven’t read any of Roach’s prior books, but it took her about a sentence and a half to seduce me with the humor and sense of wonder she brings to her uncluttered reportage of complex scientific stuff. One chapter talks about an experiment called Mars-500 wherein Moscow’s Institute for Medical and Biological Problems locked would-be astronauts in a mockup spacecraft together for 500 days, the span of time required, using current technology, for a manned ship to journey to the Red Planet and back.
The test subjects faced simulations of the various emergencies they might have to cope with on a real Mars mission, but the primary purpose of the experiment was examine the psychological effects of so long an isolation. An similar experiment the IMBP hosted in 1999-2000, using an eight-member, coed, multinational crew, ended early. There was unwanted French-kissing and, in a separate incident, writes Roach, “a fistfight that left the walls spattered with blood.” Keep reading →
No time to blog, Dr. Jones; I gotta catch a bus up to New York to reconnect with my NEA theaterfolk.
But: Hey, remember that scene from 1992′s admittedly unmemorable Lethal Weapon 3, wherein Mel Gibson and Rene Russo’s two tough LAPD cops fore-play by comparing their battle scars? My review of Woolly’s Gruesome Playground Injuries, which develops that premise into a full-blown “unsentimental, nonlinear anti-romance” spanning 30 years, is right here.
And now I shall return to collaborating with G-Weld on the Broadway musical adaptation of Die Hard with a Vengeance. Happy Memorial Day, God bless you all, and God bless the United States of America.
Matthews, Goodall, and Reynolds at Constituion Hall Thursday night
Fifty years ago, British primatologist Jane Goodall arrived in what is now Tanzania to observe the behavior of chimps in the wild, discovering them to be creatures of far greater intellectual and emotional sophistication than the scientific community had believed. Twenty years ago, Dave Matthews put a band together in Charlottesville, one that became enormously popular while affirming the frat boys who formed his core audience early on are no more sophisticated than anybody thought.
Okay, so it isn’t just frat boys (current and expired) who dig Matthews’s slurry, swampy, rhythm n’ stew: Like it or not, Matthews is pop’s biggest draw of the 21st century by total tickets sold. At DAR Constitution Hall last night, Matthews marshaled his cult for good, performing a career-spanning acoustic-duo gig with frequent sidekick Tim Reynolds to benefit the Jane Goodall Institute’s conservation efforts. Keep reading →
So, I’m in an unlikely place for the next 22 hours or so: a spa hotel in Palm Springs. I’m seeing a lot of wonderful friends this trip of old and recent vintage, but none of them save for the two brides are at this wedding. S’okay: Everyone I’ve met so far has been lovely, even the girl who called me “JFK Jr.”, and I’ve brought plenty to read. There’s a bar at the pool, and you can get massages or facial treatments or play golf (maybe, no, hell no) if you’ve got the dough and are into that stuff.
I can’t decide whether Don Draper would bring Betty on vacation here or one of his mistresses. It’s definitely a hipster kind of place, whatever that may mean to you. There are guys wearing fedoras, and I like all the music I’ve heard coming from the pool area and in the restaurant where I drank my pot of French-pressed coffee this morning, and I haven’t felt compelled to comb my hair since before I got on the plane two days ago. Keep reading →
“Cast thy nighted color off,” Hamlet’s mom Gertrude, hastily remarried to his fratricidal uncle Claudius, begs of her mournful son. She might have been speaking to Joseph Haj, director of the Folger’s slick and unencumbered new gloss on what we’re used to thinking of as the Bard’s most psychologically complex play.
James Kronzer’s blocky, all-white set offers the first clue of what we’re in for, a visual metaphor for the production’s clean simplicity. Elsinore? Try Apple Store. Deposed King Hamlet’s ghost (a suitably traumatized Todd Scofield) has scarcely begun lobbying his son for vengeance before we see it isn’t just the castle that Haj and star Graham Michael Hamilton have lifted from the shadows: It’s the once-overgrown psychological landscape of the melancholy Prince himself.
Clear-cutting decades or centuries of accumulated inference — Hamlet’s Oedipal lust for Gertrude, his existential disdain of action for action, his self-awareness as a participant in a fiction — this feels like Hamlet for beginners, but that’s no slight. Unburdened of contradiction and played almost as a straight-ahead potboiler — close as it can be without cutting out Hamlet’s iconic half-dozen soliloquies, anyway — the show feels fresh, like a revelatory solo acoustic take of a song you’d thought you could never stand to hear again. Keep reading →
I spent a couple of hours last week on the phone with two money lenders, one in California and one in Michigan. I’ve known I would eventually need to refinance the mortgage on my one-bedroom condo since I first got my mortgage. This, everyone assured me at the time, would be no big deal.
I’ve been putting it off, at my own expense, obviously, because I find this nexus of subjects — real estate, money, permanence — at once tedious and unfathomable and kind of morbid. I know people who spent years boning up on this stuff before buying a residence, or, you know, diving into the market — mature, financially responsible adults who pay attention to interest rates and property values the way I pay attention to what bands are coming to town. For them home-buying is a long-term, consuming occupation, the way planning a wedding is for other people. (Well, a lot of the same people, probably.) While mastering some 101-level finance is surely due diligence for the biggest monetary commitment most folks of my socioeconomic pedigree ever make, it never interested me. Yes, I do know. And I’m sorry. The brain wants what the brain wants. Keep reading →
Because the abstract of my already-short Click Track review of Jakob Dylan’s Friday-night 9:30 Club show with Neko Case and Kelly Hogan would be, “Okay, but too many samey-same slow songs and not enough Neko!,” I am re-posting this very distinct, very fast 2009 Jason Creps photo Campfire Noir Knockout with Twizzler (Or Is That a Red Vine?) in an attempt to balance the scales. Keep reading →
What’s with the photos? Well, My City Paper review of the Belfast-set Kenneth Branagh play Public Enemy ran yesterday. It’s a confused and often confusing show, a very uneasy meld of character study and political parable. While writing about it I thought back to when I visited Belfast in May 2007.
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These political murals fascinated me. They were not subtle. The painting was often crude, the messages cruder. They were heartfelt as a heart attack, and they were everywhere. Keep reading →
So Elvis Costello is playing in town tonight. I am a fan. I admire a lot of things about Elvis besides the fact that he’s written hundreds of songs, a very high percentage of which I find listenable, dozens I think are pretty great, and at least a handful I don’t know how I lived without. (Not ’til I was 22 did a pal give me a copy of the The Very Best of Elvis Costello & The Attractions, if you can believe.)
Admittedly, my can’t-live-without E.C. playlist does not include anything from, say, the album he made with Anne Sofie von Otter, or the one he made with Burt Bacharach. But I commend his adventurousness and versatility, and especially his work ethic: He’s always giving songs away, interviewing Lou Reed or BruceSpringsteen or Bill Clinton on premium cable, singing on other people’s records, teaching himself musical notation 20 years into his career, composing a ballet, making unaccountable cameos in movies like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, writing an opera, and here and there tossing off another perfectly nasty rock song like it’s nothing. Dude always has four projects cooking and and nine more on the back burner, and he seems to pay for his collection of funny hats by flying around playing concerts that seldom repeat a setlist and regularly clock in around two-and-a-half hours. So: Respect.
Of course, Elvis’s productivity and idiomatic wanderlust are the selfsame qualities that can make him seem like an annoying magpie, especially to listeners who only want to hear him spit venom about Liv Tyler’s mom while keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas open up the throttle. Keep reading →
When Joe Louis took only 124 seconds to knock out Max Schmeling in 1938, it was one of the most historic sports triumphs of the 20th century.
Schmeling, a reluctant representative of Nazi Germany, had defeated Louis two years earlier, and the Reich’s propagandists had proclaimed that result — Louis’s first professional loss — as a demonstration of Aryan supremacy. The rematch was broadcast in dozens of languages. In dispatching Schmeling, Louis became a hero to a world that trembled before the ascendant Nazi war machine, and the first black man to achieve broad acceptance as a symbolic ambassador for the United States.
Leon Major, artistic director of the Maryland Opera Studio, was five years old when his father turned on the radio to hear that fight. It was over in less time than it took Major’s dad, a tailor in the shtetl, to get a glass of tea from the kitchen.
Now 77, Major isn’t quite sure whether he remembers the match firsthand, or if he heard about it later. Memory is funny that way, especially when we’re very young. But Major vividly recalls Louis’s career-ending loss to Rocky Marciano in 1951.
“That incident stayed with me, because it was so devastating to so many people,” Major says. Even Marciano had looked up to Louis — he visited the fallen champ backstage after the fight to apologize for beating him.
Four decades would pass before Major began thinking seriously about making Louis’s life the subject of an opera, but once the notion seized him, it wouldn’t let go, even after numerous composers and a librettists turned the commission down. Some even suggested an opera about Jackie Robinson instead. Keep reading →
When he was writing Rooms: A Rock Romance, the two-person musical that premiered at Alexandria’s MetroStage in 2008 before going on to a warmly-reviewed off-Broadway run last year, Paul Scott Goodman inserted a layer of remove from direct autobiography: He based the show’s female character, rather than her male paramour, on himself.
When he returns to MetroStage this weekend, he’ll have no such veil.
Son of a Stand-Up Comedian is the story of a moment in the life of Paul Scott Goodman as written and performed on 12-string guitar by Paul Scott Goodman, 22 or 52 years in the making, depending. The composer/lyricist began working on his solo musical — which he performs in front of a microphone, concert-style, “a rock-and-roll raconteur kind of thing” — in the middle of 1988, when his wife, director Miriam Gordon, was pregnant with Shayna, their first child. Now 21, Shayna is set to graduate from Sarah Lawrence College next month.
“That summer was one of the hottest on record in New York,” Goodman says in the Scottish brogue he’s retained since moving to Manhattan in 1984. “I was working on my first musical, trying to get it on. I was trying to be a father, trying to be a writer, trying to be a husband. It was very trying.” Keep reading →
Chris Klimek, itinerant roustabout, writer-of-fortune for The Washington Post, The Washington City Paper, The Washington Examiner, and, um, DCist. Performing arts stuff, mostly, at present, but interested in lots else. Dreamin' big. Workin' hard. Protein. Chin-ups. And the like.
Feel an odd blend of affection for the pal who lent me this icing device & suspicion she's fucking with me. Also coldness in left shoulder. 45 minutes ago
Ain't no party like a shoulder-icing party 'cause a shoulder-icing keeps me connected to an AC power outlet. And a beer cooler. Via hoses. 55 minutes ago
LIVE from this comically elaborate shoulder-icing conraption I've just, ah, fired up courtesy of @rjreporter... It's SATURDAY NIGHT! 1 hour ago
@MauraJudkis Wait, that was real life? CRAP. People always tell me stuff like this AFTER THE FACT. (Nice to meet you, too. Bunbury.) 1 hour ago
Chicks dig that guy, but I think he looks kinda Claymation. RT @daveweigel: Inception? I Joseph Gordon-Loved it! 5 hours ago
... will get your epistle to a member of my staff. Due to the overwhelming volume of my capriciousness, personal replies may be impossible. Nah, totally kidding. Be polite, punctuate, and I'll almost certainly write you back.
