Category: Theater Critic’s Choice

Khaela Maricich, aka the Blow, wrote a blog entry a couple weeks ago explaining why her next record needs to be different from her last. “Nobody,” she said, “needs to hear another song about how it felt to get overwhelmed with love and get dumped and get over it.” Try telling that to the heartsick […]

Though BORIS have been hosanna’d loud and long–and rightfully so–for the devastating heaviness of their rocking, I think they still deserve a little more praise for their flexibility. Last year this Japanese trio released Altar, a sprawling, entrancing collaboration with Sunn 0))), and in May the local Drag City label gave a stateside release to […]

Faure’s 13 nocturnes for piano span most of his life as a composer, straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. In an impressionistic current with eddies of romantic turbulence, they depart from Chopin and Schumann, heading toward Debussy and Ravel. Pianist Emile Naoumoff, here playing Nocturnes nos. 2, 6, 7, and 13, approaches them as a […]

There’s a portal inside a garbage can that leads to Shangri-la via hell, and No Age are hanging out there eating grapes. Or at least that’s the only scene I can imagine where this LA duo might make any sense. They get their jazzy swagger from a silly little hi-hat, their scary gutter-punk vibe from […]

Though they’ve been acquitting themselves admirably since 2001 as a crungy guitar-and-drums duo, I bet QUI wouldn’t have landed this gig if they hadn’t bitten the bullet last year and added a lead singer–specifically the Jesus Lizard’s lead singer, David Yow. These LA guys are doing Yow a favor too, of course, by taking him […]

The central figure in Tennessee Williams’s 1958 one-act–Sebastian Venable, poet, aesthete, sexual predator, and martyr–never appears onstage. Instead the audience hears about him from two women haunted by his mysterious death. His elderly mother, Violet, seeks to protect Sebastian’s chaste image by discrediting the ghastly account of his demise supplied by his cousin Catharine, now […]

Born in Jerusalem, multi–instrumentalist Raz Mesinai grew up there and in New York, absorbing the sounds of both cities. Dub has been an element in his work from the beginning (as in the wiggy 90s project Sub Dub), but the music of the Middle East has played an increasingly important role. Under his own name […]

On “Before the Money Came (The Battle of Bettye LaVette),” a track off the Detroit soul singer’s new Scene of the Crime (Anti-), LaVette looks back with a triumphant sneer on a career that took four decades to get off the ground. She bitterly recalls cutting a shoulda-been classic album in 1972 at Fame Studios […]

The haters–after all the hype about the singles, they were bound to come out of the woodwork for the first album–say Bonde do Role are irresponsible assholes who happen to be Brazilian, yelling dumb stuff over ripped-off party beats and disrespecting their own musical culture. But the band’s tossed-off hybrid of ghoulish swamp punk, dirty-butt […]

Grizzly Adams look-alike Sam Beam has come a long way from the naked austerity of his early stuff. With IRON & WINE’s 2005 EP, Woman King, he proved he could write hooks that’d give you goose bumps–as well as make eerie jug-band rock that’s actually danceable, at least in a muddy-hippie way. Now he’s leading […]

It’s been a solid decade since she’s released a new album, and her Web site has been hyping the same not-actually-out-yet LP for almost two years–but with any luck MC Lyte’s recent flurry of touring points to a bona fide comeback. She’s kept herself busy with UPN cameos, soundtrack work, and voice-overs, but her talents […]

It’s no mystery how this Cleveland avant-garage institution has survived for three decades, despite innumerable lineup changes, the occasional breakup, and a lack of commercial success so consistent it looks like a strategy: PERE UBU is undergirded by the iron will of front man and sole constant member Dave Thomas. Despite his rep as a […]

Voguing is the subject of Third Swan From the End: Battle Gracefully to Be Legendary. Choreographer Darrell Jones says he’s haunted the sidelines of the scene for 15 years, so he knows the moves and the culture. But after receiving a 2006 grant from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum he began looking into the form intensively, […]

Billy Crudup gives a commanding performance as a neurotic, misanthropic author of children’s books; Tom Wilkinson, pitch-perfect as always, is his father figure and only real friend, an illustrator whose own disdain for humanity has receded with the years. Their book Marty the Beaver becomes an improbable best seller, but for the follow-up Crudup is […]

Congo Square Theatre Company has mostly focused on African-American playwrights during its eight-year history, but it’s gone international with the midwest premiere of this piece by black British actor and writer Kwame Kwei-Armah. Elmina’s Kitchen doesn’t break new thematic ground, but Kwei-Armah’s gift for street poetry and feeling for intergenerational conflict is in sync with […]