Tag: Vol. 35 No. 12

Few female country singers from the 60s were as good or as consistent as CONNIE SMITH, who was a steady presence on the top-ten charts through the end of the decade. She scored her first (and biggest) hit in 1964 with Bill Anderson’s “Once a Day,” and the run that followed was nothing less than […]

The potential for moral confusion in a liberal-minded family–unpacked so ruthlessly in Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale–is scrutinized with more ambiguity in this good-natured comic subversion of the holiday get-together. Diane Keaton, in a performance full of unexpected accents and grace notes, presides over a large New England tribe; their open-mindedness is tested […]

Something weird must happen after you’ve written and recorded a few thousand songs with somebody. Milwaukee brothers Dennis and Jimmy Flemion, better known as the FROGS, have been playing together since grade school, and their breakout album, 1989’s It’s Only Right and Natural, was a bizarre collection of semi-improvised “gay supremacist” psych-folk-pop culled from the […]

It clocks in at over three hours, but Peter Jackson’s remake of the 1933 classic is gripping. For starters it’s visually compelling, with its lush sets depicting Skull Island and period Manhattan. Jackson rethinks the characters, turning the original’s stark Jungian fantasy into a soulless but skillful set of kinetic and emotional effects. Carl Denham […]

“Sex with you is like . . . damn, I don’t really know what it’s like,” goes the spoken intro to “Sex Wit You,” the third single off MARQUES HOUSTON’s Naked (Universal). He’s not at a loss for words for long, though. “Sex with you is really the best with you / It makes life […]

The Lyric’s current production of The Magic Flute is truly magical–the singing, the playing, the sets, the costumes, the dancing wild animals. This often confusing mix of fairy tale, vaudeville, and Freemasonry lesson is probably Mozart’s most famous work, written at the same time as the Requiem and finished just two months before he died. […]

Gleefully juvenile and flippant, Hairspray seems perfect for high school kids, who also make up most of its characters. But despite all the attention paid to appearance–especially the towering bouffants that require so much of the title product–it’s far from superficial. Set in 1962 Baltimore, Mark O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan’s musical adaptation of John Waters’s […]