Those halls ain’t gonna deck themselves, yuletide thrillseekers! May I recommend for your tree-trimming merriment this humble playlist; a mere suggestion for filling two sides of a Maxell XL II high-bias 90-minute cassette, you understand.
Side A
Ain’t No Chimneys / Sharon Jones & The Dap-kings
Presents for Christmas / Solomon Burke (1940-2010)
WGBH Station Identification Continue reading
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Tagged Christmas, compilations, holiday obscura, music, yule
Right, so clearly I left the store unattended while I was working on my little Xmas-musiq project over the last little while. But just because I haven’t posting things here doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing at my usual, punishing clip. Some reviews I forgot to post: Continue reading
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I am pleased to present Santa’s Magickal Ho-Ho Bag, the fifth (!) in my annual (so far) series of radio Christmas cards featuring yule-tunes eclectic and inexplicable (TM), for your hall-decking enjoyment.
If they’re loading slowly and that’s cramping your style, you can also listen here.
Posted in music, shameless self-promotion
Tagged bonus audio, Bruce Springsteen, Christmas, compilations, holiday obscura, music, radio
Also, I went to a Michael Buble concert this week. I thought it was good, even if a few people who read my review thought I was raining on the guy just because I don’t think much of most of his original songs. But I like him just fine when he’s singing standards, and as a live performer — a guy who is fully present when he’s on stage; whose mildly blue (turquoise?) quips and dance steps don’t seem rehearsed to death, and who’ll draw out a tween-song interlude to five minutes as long as the jokes don’t dry up — I really do think he’s aces. “The American media thinks that because I wear a suit and sing romantic songs that this is some Sex and the City 3 shit,” he told us. “I’m here to change that perception.” The first time I saw him play, three years ago, he did exactly that. Ring a ding ding!
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Tagged Click Track, concerts, Michael Buble, pop music, The Washington Post, Verizon Center
Photo: Graeme Shaw / courtesy Synetic
Great Scott! Book critic, comics blogger, and friend-for-life Glen Weldon — the Green Lantern to my Green Arrow — invited me to participate in an exegesis of SUPERMAN VS. MUHAMMAD ALI, an essential cultural artifact of the 1970s. I’ve had a framed copy of the cover hanging in my apartment for years, in my bathroom in point of fact. But as with so many of the classics, I never actually read it until assigned to do so.
Anyway: Read all about it on your National Public Radio!
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Tagged boxing, comics, Monkey See, Muhammad Ali, Neal Adams, Superman, The 1970s
Photo: Marina Chavez
So Saturday, me and my pal @HeatherMG went to see the guy who wrote “Me and Bobby McGee.” This short review is kinda buried in today’s Paper of Record, and split over two pages web-wise, so I’m posting it here to make things easier. For all of us.
Kris Kristofferson is no hurry, but he doesn’t like to waste time. At the Music Center at Strathmore last night, he marched onstage in his customary black-shirt-black-jeans-black-boots regalia at exactly the announced go-time of 8 p.m., launching with little fanfare into a generous 30-song solo acoustic revue of his bone-deep body of work. A hardy 74, the Rhodes Scholar and former Army helicopter pilot moved lightly from one coiled, economical story-song to the next, punctuating each tune with an abrupt “Thank you!” or better still, “True story!” rather than allow the last note to hang in the air — as they can, within the Music Center’s sound-abetting walls. His tectonic growl would be frightening if it didn’t let it break so freely into laughter, or if you couldn’t see that beatific smile. Continue reading
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Tagged country, Kris Kristofferson, pop music, Strathmore, The Washington Post
Nicholas Rodriguez as Curly & Eleasha Gamble as Laurey in Oklahoma!
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Tagged Arena Stage, Bob Mondello, critical mass, Oklahoma!, theater
Orson Welles’s hour-long radio play The War of the Worlds was the greatest Halloween prank of the 20th century. Twelve million people tuned in for the original broadcast on Oct. 30, 1938 — about the same number as watch Glee now, but the population of the U.S. was only 40 percent of its current size back then. In a 1947 Princeton University survey, roughly one in 12 respondents said that upon first hearing Welles’s radio verite report of hostile Martians landing at Grover’s Mill, NJ, they had indeed believed it to be real news coverage of a frightening calamity. Continue reading
I teach a boxing class on Wednesday evenings. It’s at a general-interest gym, not a boxing gym, so we’re not equipped or insured for sparring, and we don’t have a speed bag or a double-ended bag, though I’m working on that. We drill with heavy bags and focus mitts with lots of calisthenics stirred in, and people looking for an intense and unique workout really seem to like it. Most folks who try the class once come back.
Anyway, I interviewed Frederick Wiseman, director of the new documentary Boxing Gym and more than three dozen others, for the Washington City Paper. You can read that here.
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Tagged boxing, Frederick Wiseman, interviews, movies, Washington City Paper
Ecstasy, Lou Reed, 2000.
Continue reading
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Tagged Album Covers I Never Need to See Again, Lou Reed, Robert Christgau
Yikes. Just look at this place. I’ve let it all go to seed. Again.
I’ve been writing. I’m writing all the time. I’m just not so good sometimes about keeping my scrapbook in order. And so:
Here’s my Washington Post review of Mavis Staples’s concert at George Washington University Lisner Auditorium two weeks ago and my review of the Gorillaz show at the Patriot Center two nights later, both with some heartening reader comments that speak perfectly to my frustration about being given an arbitary ceiling of 300 words for most of these reviews. Anyway, a week after Gorillaz, I saw Nick Lowe at the Birchmere and took a ridiculous amount of time to collect my thoughts about it. What I ultimately decided is that Nick Lowe is a guy who takes his sweet time doing stuff.
For the theater crowd, here’s my Washington City Paper review of Constellation’s Burtoned-down Women Beware Women. And my debut piece for TBD, a report on last weekend’s Helen Hayes Star Gala. I was delighted my recognition of host Tyne Daly for surviving her 1976 tour of duty with maverick San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan made the cut.
And now for something completely different: Happy birthday today to my beloved friends Christina Sharkey and Rebecca Haithcoat. Many happy returns, Ladies.
Mission Improbable: Ryan Welsh and Medleine Carr get close
Gentle reader, if you’re anything like me, you’ve often lamented the manifold ways in which the theater consistently fails to evoke the experience of watching a great, droll black-and-white thriller, like The Third Man, let us say, or else an episode of the most delightful TV spy show in the history of televised espionage, The Avengers. Happily, the operatives responsible for Improbable Frequency– a surefooted, fast-talking WWII trenchcoat-and-dagger musical comedy from the reliable Irish-import company Solas Nua — have given bold remedy to this problem. The five-year-old outfit, best known for gritty (if heightened) naturalism, has now made a limber, sexy, generally spectacular first entry into the song-and-dance game, and while the result could only benefit from a two-to-four-song song shearing, the delight it brings to those tuned into its bizarro, ah, wavelength is irreducible.
And who is that? Well, the pun-averse are advised to stay well away. And the fun-averse, obviously! Also, anyone whose ears are easily fatigued by uncommonly dextrous feats of verbal derring-do. Everybody else? Game on, for Queen and Country. Continue reading
MEMORY of a FREE FESTIVAL
Being a drama in one act.
SETTING: The press tent of a large outdoor pop music festival in the suburbs. Not far from here. Not long from now.
CAST IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:
RICHARDS, a music critic for a newspaper, about thirty
A WOMAN, perhaps thirty-five
A BALD MAN, maybe forty
MALITZ, Richards’s malnourished colleague, also about thirty
KLIMEK, a writer for a website, slightly older than thirty Continue reading
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Tagged journalism, pop music, reality theater, Virgin Mobile Festival
Actually, don’t despair. Just go read if you’re so inclined. Like many of the journo-types I know in DC, I spent Saturday at Merriweather Post Pavilion for Virgin Festival V, or Virgin Mobile Festival III, or Virgin Mobile Free Festival II. My breathless Twitter feed is here; I also penned a hasty roundup for DCist, which offers you another angle on things in addition to those written by friends and professional acquaintances of mine.
Over at former DCist music editor Amanda Mattos’s newish music site Pinna Storm, I introduce Exquisite Chord, a fun and educational new spin on an old smarty-pants game that you, too, can play.
I was just saying to TBD’s Ally Schweitzer aboard the FreeFest ferris wheel how most of the “ideas” I think I have are really just puns. Case in point!
Oh, I also wrote this nerdy thing for the City Paper’s Arts Desk blog about Washington Shakespeare Company’s Shakespeare-in-Klington night, which I did not attend on account of if being scheduled directly opposite LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, y’all. I like this band this much.
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Tagged DCist, music, name-dropping, shameless self-promotion, Virgin Mobile Festival
Betsy Rosen & Allyson Harkey
Last weekend was theaterrific in my life. My esteemed Washington City Paper colleague Trey Graham was not wrong when he set the stage for our discussion of Tricycle Theare’s Afghanistan: The Great Game with the observation that a completely different show, Factory 449′s The Saint Plays “broke [my] brain a little.” But it was fun trying to puzzle it all out. And by “fun,” I mean it was work. I also wrote about GALA’s El caballero de Olmedo, despite my very limited understanding of Spanish. Here’s the review.
Posted in shameless self-promotion
Tagged Factory 449, GALA Theatre, theater, Washington City Paper
Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation is the first show to open at The Studio Theatre since Joy Zinoman, the force of nature who founded the institution in the 1970s and served as its artistic director until just weeks ago, passed the torch to David Muse. Intentional or not, the selection of this generous, sharply observed comedy to begin the Muse era feels like a tribute to Zinoman, who along with charting the theatre’s creative course was also chief instructor in its conservatory. (She plans to continue teaching.)
Circle Mirror Transformation, which Muse directed, takes place in an acting class similar to the entry-level one Studio offers. I doubt Studio would allow a teacher to have his or her spouse as a student, as in Baker’s fictional class. But given the play’s small-town rec-center setting, the scenario seems plausible even though it’s a glaring violation of the Hippocratic — I mean, the attorney-client — well, it just seems like the kind of thing that could cause problems, is all. And guess what?
Continue reading
So that Bergmanesque shot of Sara Barker and Heather Haney is a publicity image from Washington Shakespeare Company‘s upcoming, youth-enizied, modernized take on Mary Stuart – Friedrich Schiller’s 200-year-old play about a 500-year-old power struggle between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. How could this possibly retain any latter-day relevance? Hey, read my piece about it in the City Paper’s Fall Arts Guide, available now in Washington’s better gyms, record stores, coffee shops and on your iPhones. ALSO IN THAT EXCITING ISSUE: I preview Lean & Hungry‘s Halloween-night radio production of MacBeth, and get the name of their composer and sound designer wrong exactly the same number of times I get it right: once. My apologies to Mr. Gregg Martin.
In last week’s CP, I reviewed Theatre J‘s production of Willy Holtzman‘s good-play-with-terrible-title, Something You Did. (What’s in a name? Nothing, in this case.) Some of the dialogue therein is also pretty terrible. But I stand by the “good play” part.
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The membership of Toronto indie-rock impressionists Broken Social Scene fluctuates between as few as a half-dozen and as many as three times that, which maybe has something to do with how this band has always — well, since 1999 — made music that feels intimate and epic at the same time.
Their generous 130-minute show at the Warner Theater last night boasted a lineup of eight (with Lisa Lobsinger performing the parts sung on record by BSS alums Leslie Feist, Emily Haines, and Amy Millan) performing crystalline lullabies, triumphant fist pumpers, and a few of the discursive, hazy instrumentals that used to get a lot more time on the collective’s albums than they do now. The one that came out at the beginning of summer (after leaking weeks earlier) Forgiveness Rock Record, is more focused and song-oriented than its forebears. It contributed the bulk of last night’s set, but the show still felt thrillingly rife with possibility, even if it was, as frontman and co-founder Kevin Drew repeatedly observed, a Monday night. (That still matters when you’re a full time rock semi-star? Depressing. A more likely potential inhibitor was that Of Montreal and Janelle Monae were kicking off a tour a couple miles north at the 9:30 Club.) Continue reading
Posted in music, The Washington Post
Tagged Broken Social Scene, Click Track, pop music, The Washington Post, Warner Theatre
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