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Tonya Beckman, Dan Crane, Ian Armstrong, and Esther Williams in Bloody Poetry. (Teresa Castracane/Taffety Punk)
My review of Taffety Punk Theatre Company's "Rulebreaker Rep" -- Kathleen Cahill's Charm, about pioneering feminist Margaret Fuller, and Howard Brenton's Bloody Poetry, about free-loving romantics of the early 19th century -- is in today's Washington City Paper.
Bradley Foster Smith in Richard Byrne's Nero/Pseudo. (C. Stanley Photography)
Richard Byrne's original glam musical Nero / Pseudo, featuring songs by Jon Langford and Jim Elkington, needs a little more Caligula, I conclude in my Washington City Paper review. Still, it's a project worth following -- and I've been following it for a couple of years.
Langford was one of my first opportunities to interview an artist I'd long admired. I talked to him for DCist in 2007 in advance of a mekons show and again the following year before his other great band, the Waco Brothers, came to town.
Robert Duvall, living legend.
Wherein I review the late period Robert Duvall vehicle A Night in Old Mexico for The Dissolve.
H.R. Giger, 1940-2014
A brief remembrance, written this morning not quite as quickly as I can type, of the great Swiss artist H.R. Giger and his most iconic creation, for NPR Monkey See.
Saxon Sharbino and Clark Gregg in Trust Me, which Gregg wrote and directed.
Trust Me, the second feature film written and directed by Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. star Clark Gregg, confounds pretty much any expectation you're likely to bring to it. I reviewed it for The Dissolve.
Not like this. Not like this. But somehow. Han Solo-as-conversation-piece, from 1983's Return of the Jedi.
It was actually my pal Village Voice Film Editor Alan Scherstuhl who pitched me on this piece. When Disney announced the other week that Harrison Ford would be returning for at least one more Star Wars movie, Alan figured -- and I immediately concurred -- that it's high time for Han Solo to receive the heroic demise that Ford wanted to give him in Return of the Jedi, 31 years ago. With apologies to Mike Ryan, whose work I admire, here's why Solo gotta go-lo.
Matthew Schleigh, Megan Dominy, and Rena Cherry Brown in The Love of the Nightingale. (Stan Barouh)
“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” is how James Brown and Betty Jean Newsome said it in 1966. (And Brown denied Newsome’s contributions to the song in court decades later, as if to prove the title correct.)
“Woman Is the Nigger of the World,” is how John Lennon and Yoko Ono said it in 1972.
“Every man has a choice to make: Commitment, or new pussy?” is how Chris Rock said it in 1996.
And The Love of the Nightingale is how Sophocles said it two-and-a-half millennia earlier, give or take, which got filtered through Ovid’s brain four centuries later, and then British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker’s just eight years ago. In her astute update of the sad story of Philomele and Procne, Wertenbaker dares to have one of her characters, an innocent, ask what a myth is.
“The oblique image of an unwanted truth, reverberating through time,” comes the answer.
And the unwanted truth reverberating, hard, through The Love of the Nightingale is this: Men. Are. Dogs.
Woof.
My review of Constellation Theatre Company's The Love of the Nightingale -- the best thing I've seen from that group in its seven-year existence -- continues in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.
Llyn Foulkes' painting The Awakening (1994-2012).
It's been a few years since I was way out of my depth trying to write about "visual art" -- by which I mean stuff that hangs on walls, that is, not cinema -- but reviewing the documentary Llyn Foulkes: One Man Band for The Dissolve brought me right back. I enjoyed the visit.
