If NBC ever releases a compilation of The Roots’ performances as house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the DVD commentary track might make your player explode. The veteran Philly hip-hop band won’t finish a tune without referencing pieces of nine others. Their hyperlinked performance style is reliably thrilling, though you do sometimes want to yell at song-surfing bandleader/drummer/Twitter addict Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, “Hey, I was digging that!”
Last night, at the first of two 9:30 club dates, The Roots offered a sweaty, channel-flipping blitz, packing about eight hours of mercilessly funky rap, rock, go-go, jazz, and soul into 140 breathless minutes. Though they’ve continued to tour since they got their gig upstaging SNL alum Fallon, their return to the 9:30 still had a celebratory, school’s-out vibe. (more…)
It isn’t me you hate. It’s the holidays. I understand. I do.
An entire sub-genre of comic films and fiction make bank because this time of year has become for so many people nothing more than a season of weary obligation, stress, and exploding credit card debt. As kids, we may lie awake fearing that Santa Claus has weighed the evidence and judged us naughty. But as adults, we quake in contemplation of a vague but terrifying litany of list-related penalties far worse than a lump of coal in a stocking.* Consider, oh Constant Reader, the social or professional consequences of omitting someone from the greeting card list — assuming you still bother with that — or the holiday party evite. I bet plenty of people fear the terrible price of these sins of omission more than they fret about being overlooked themselves. (more…)
Wherein what is intended as a brief endorsement is buried ‘neath seven longish paragaphs of rambling reminiscence.
Less than six hours until the blessed day arrives, the Christmas Spirit is upon me.
I wish I could say the Christmas Spirit is an impulse towards charity and forgiveness. As an unmarried, childless, over-30 boy, however, I am forced to admit that I have more often thought of the Christmas Spirit the way I’m thinking of it now: as the odd pairing of tranquility and giddy excitement Christmas engendered within me as a child. The reason I’m feeling an echo of that sense of wonder is at least partially because of a cynical, violent, profane comic book, one with a heart as black as the finish on a Glock pistol.
I started reading comics in 1987, and my personal celebration of Christmas -– my holiday gift to myself, delivered faithfully each December regardless of whether my year’s conduct could be classified as “naughty” or “nice” –- has incorporated a comics binge ever since. (more…)
The stage-musical adaptation of Mel Brooks’s beloved 1974 horror film spoof Young Frankenstein will haunt the Kennedy Center Opera House through the holidays, and it’s an utterly explicable choice for this season of multi-generational out-of-town guests: bland and familiar even if you’ve never seen the movie, offering neither challenge nor much reward.
Sporting a brow even lower than that of the stitched-from-corpses creature at its center, and with about as much to say, the show — which began its 14-month Broadway run two years ago — represents Brooks’s attempt to repeat the success of The Producers. As with that 1968 film-cum-2001 Broadway smash, Brooks once again joined new music and lyrics to a story he brought to the screen more than three decades earlier. (more…)
Karen Wright (foreground) and Max McLean in The Screwtape Letters. (Jonny Knight)
Actor and dramatist Max McLean was thinking hard about hubris versus humility even before he had a hit show on his hands.
“According to [C.S.] Lewis — and he gets most of his ideas from John Milton —pride is the first sin, the real sin,” McLean says. “All other sins are byproducts of that.”
The star of The Screwtape Letters — a wickedly seductive adaptation of Lewis’s 1942 novella about a senior demon in Hell advising an apprentice demon on Earth as he tries to effect a man’s damnation — has reason to be cautious. His show, which is of course about the very process by which a man may be corrupted, is enjoying boffo success. It begins a return engagement at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Landsburgh Theatre tonight. (more…)
Just how retro is the strain of handmade country-blues peddled by Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs? During their ramshackle hour-long set at IOTA last night, the guitarist/percussionist/singer Lawyer Dave introduced two different tunes as “a song about domestic abuse,” and in neither case did he follow-up with a Chris Brown joke.
Violence between lovers has always been one of the major themes of this music, of course. No one goes to counseling in the blues! (more…)
Chestnuts roasting. Jack Frost nipping. Yuletide carols being sung by the self-described “Mexican Elvis,” and folks dressed up like luchadores — mask-wearing Mexican wrestlers. Isn’t that how that one goes?
Well, that’s how it went at the 9:30 club last night, where Los Straitjackets — an ace surf-rock quartet out of, um, Nashville, despite their custom of performing in those sharp Mexican wrestling headpieces — were the house band for a bizarro 90-minute Christmas party hosted by East L.A. novelty singer/activist El Vez, who made good on his promise to spread “Santarchy,” and James Brown-like front splits, to the masses.
You could even call it a traditional program of holiday fare, assuming the Burlesque is the tradition you mean. (more…)
Dave Lovering and Kim Deal of The Pixies. Photo by Kyle Gustafson.
I have a lot of thoughts about the play-a-classic album (or a new album) in sequence trend, and I got to discuss some of them in my Blurt! debut, a review of The Pixies’ Doolittle show here in DC. You can see more of Kyle Gustafson’s photos from the concert on his site.
Francesca Faridany’s Rosalind and John Behlmann’s Orlando.
All the world’s a stage, except when it’s a film set.
The Shakespeare Theatre’s new production of As You Like It, the philosophizing romantic comedy set largely in a curative mystical forest, has adopted the trappings of an altogether different wood, one that no one ever accused of being good for you. (That’d be the one that starts with Holly.) The show begins ingeniously as a flickering silent film with title cards, but quickly assumes the props and types of a modern movie shoot, with boom-mic operators and cameramen and headset-wearing production assistants scurrying between scenes. We even hear Ted van Griethuysen growl “Cut!” now and again. (more…)
By Thursday morning last week, I had made up my mind to give the show Bruce Springsteen played in Baltimore on Friday night a pass. My attempts to procure a ticket through honorable means had failed. The aftermarket bidding for general admission tickets to the arena floor, where my friends would be, had inflated beyond my rationally justifiable price range. I’d already seen the great man perform with the E Street Band twice in 2009; five times in the last 24 months. That’s enough Boss, surely.
Even before I was a semi-pro critic, I was skeptical of superlatives. To me, they always reduced criticism to mere marketing. I don’t even like the year-end lists nearly every professional critic is compelled to compile. So that’s why, after returning home in the small hours of Saturday morning having experienced a concert that left me elated like no rock show has in years, I hedged. “One of the three or five best gigs I’ve ever seen,” I wrote in a excited Facebook post before going to bed.
But after chewing the matter over in the cold, clear light of a couple of days, I’m prepared to go all in: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s first show in Baltimore since 1973 was the best concert I have ever attended, by The Boss or anyone else. (more…)
Solas Nua’s current production of Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs runs only 60 minutes, and you’re relieved when it’s over. Not because it’s bad — on the contrary, it’s a work of sparkling, propulsive genius, astutely staged and brilliantly performed.
But know this: Its brilliance is of the combative, exhausting variety. Its pace? Frenetic! Its language? Formidable. Our protagonists/narrators, Pig and Runt, don’t communicate in mere Irish slang, but in their own intimate, infantile, often impenetrable argot, one that recalls the Russian-influenced dialect Anthony Burgess concocted for his novel A Clockwork Orange. (Malcolm MacDowell memorably cooed it while terrorizing London with his “droogs” in Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation.) (more…)
AMC’s slimmed-down reimagining of The Prisoner began its three-night run last night — somewhat shakily, it must be said. Still, if you’re any kind of a fan of what I called “the 1967 British spy-fi, allegori-stential cult TV series,” you’ll want to check out the City Paper’s Arts Desk Blog, where the great and good Glen Weldon and myself debrief at taxing length RE:the merits and demerits of the new series.
Big fun dissecting this stuff with G-Weld. Pity about show.
The 68-year-old Boy from the North Country born Robert Allen Zimmerman has been trying to break his own myth since the mid-60s, when he alienated fans of his early folk albums by plugging in and rocking out. Since then, his muse has come and gone, but his contrarian streak – most recently indulged on the month-old Christmas in the Heart, whereupon the Jewish-born troubadour snarls his way through yuletide standards with psychotic zeal – has been a constant.
For the last 20 years, so has the road. Dylan tours endlessly, turning up at a half-full arena or a minor league ballpark near you again and again, as if to prove he’s no sage, just an itinerant song-and-dance-man. Though late-period albums like Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft have evinced a creative renewal, he’s often been erratic, even indifferent on stage. Still, there’s something noble in his doggedness, fighting those Workingman’s Blues. Paying the empty seats as little mind as the occupied ones. Singing on though thousands of shows have curdled his voice into a viscous, gutshot croak. On a good night, he can still remind you why people worshipped him in the first place. (more…)
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, for whom life imitated art imitating life when they fell in love playing lovers in the kinda-sorta-semi-autobiographical sleeper romance Once a few years back, are no longer an item. But on the evidence of “Strict Joy,” their first album together since they picked up an Oscar for Best Original Song last year, they remain creatively simpatico. (more…)
It’s perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of a musician with as mighty a moniker as Kurt Vile. If that was a stage name (it’s not*) the intimation would be of the most confrontational, petulant punk, but the Philadelphia-based Vile’s defiantly primitive, accident-prone songs are lazier and hazier than that, rarely straying from the long and droning road but hinting at melodic paths untaken. Imperfection is his ideology.
At the Black Cat Backstage last night, Vile ambled through the final date of a month of shows with his three-piece band, The Violators, for what he said was the largest crowd he’d played. Double digits, still — right-sized. He opened the 70-minute set with a solo take of “Peeping Tomboy,” which, like so much of the spectral folk side of his songbook, seemed to waft in from some phantom radio. Even when the combo joined him for the stouter stuff — like “Freak Train,” the self-explanatory centerpiece of his just-released Childish Prodigy album — the cacophony was more ethereal than kinetic. (more…)
There’s a huge star at the center of the Sydney Theatre Company’s much-hyped, Liv Ullman-directed, wholly satisfying new staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, which sold out its Kennedy Center run before the curtain rose on the first preview. I speak, of course, of the dramatist Tennessee Williams.
That’s no slight on Cate Blanchett, who fronts, fights, twirls and finally, crawls her way through a towering, plaintive gut-punch of a performance as Blanche DuBois, the cracked Southern belle at the center of Williams’s oft-revived 1947 Pulitzer-winning war of wills. (She’s also Sydney Theatre’s co-artistic director, with her husband.) Though famous for film roles from Queen Elizabeth to Katherine Hepburn to Bob Dylan, the 40-year-old Blanchett’s almost-as-eclectic stage resume reaches back to the early 90s. Here she proves again that the authority and vulnerability she intimates onscreen is no camera trick. (more…)
More than ever on the concert circuit, nostalgia is the move. With everyone from Liz Phair to Public Enemy to The Pixies (and those are just the P’s) devoting gigs and sometimes entire tours to reviving their seminal albums in sequence, lots of long-lived performers — particularly those strugging to get even their cult to embrace their new music — have glommed to the trend.
Travis are in a reflective mood, too, but they’re taking a different route. Founded in Glasgow in the early 1990s, they were one of the better U.K. trad-rock outfits to arise in Oasis’s mid-90s wake. They’re hardly commercial rivals (or contemporaries) of classic-album-revivalists Bruce Springsteen or The Pixies, but they’ve more hummable, singalong-enabled tunes to their credit than you probably remember, if you remember them at all. (more…)
Michael Russotto, Sarah Marshall, Daniel Escobar, and Jessica Frances Dukes
When we say that Woolly Mammoth’s production of Charles L. Mee’s decade-old satirical farce Full Circle is a sprawling affair, we don’t mean merely that it’s forever threatening to collapse under its own allegorical girth.
As directed by Michael Rohd, the show is performed promenade-style, appropriating almost every public area of the building as a stage wherein a dance party might erupt or a trial be called to order. A fresh-faced chorus of student demonstrators double as traffic cops, shuffling us through the theater’s rehearsal rooms, lobby, and auditorium as the narrative — a chase, more or less, through Berlin in the chaotic days after the Wall came down, 20 years ago this month — progresses. (more…)
Halloween is done and gone, but Scena Theatre’s aptly sepulchral Poe double-header — The Fall of the House of Usher followed after intermission by director Robert McNamara’s solo performance of The Tell-Tale Heart — is still neatly matched to the season.
Not only is Usher set, in one of several Poe phrasings that playwright Steven Berkoff’s adaptation uses as a kind of mantra, “in the autumn of the year,” but by the time the show closes on Nov. 29, the holidays will be hard upon us. ‘Tis the season of joyless and compulsory engagements, and surely no social call was ever more dismal than the three days’ journey the dapper narrator of Usher (David Bryan Jackson) undertakes when summoned by his withered and demented old chum, Roderick (Eric M. Messner). (more…)
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. 46 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. 56 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.
