Jay Harvey Upstage

Many years ago, reviewing theater for the Flint Journal, for several summers I got to zip over to Stratford, Ontario, during opening week of its Shakespeare Festival. By the early '70s, the event had spread its wings to glide through more non-Shakespeare productions. It eventually dropped "Shakespeare" from its name, while continuing to specialize in the Bard of Avon's plays, most of them presented on its  sturdy thrust stage. No artfully framed proscenium-arch peep-show presentations for the Stratford Festival ! Speedy aisle entrances and exits and an emphasis on main-action three-dimensionality were embedded in the style. Memorable in this repertoire among the guest stars was the appearance of Peter Ustinov in the title role of "King Lear." An actor of considerable range and subtlety, Ustinov had a genius for comedy. So his casting in the leading role of Shakespeare's most searing tragedy stirred both eagerness and anxiety. The role is  regarded as ...

 Variety in performance styles, purposes, and a wide range of content is a given in the annual Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival, which returns to Mass Ave and its immediate neighborhood after a year in hiatus. Two more weekends are left. Any summary of individual selections necessarily covers a wide ground without any obvious way to make the account cohesive. My first 2021 festival weekend comprised just five performances. Three of them were one-man shows (a format massively represented in the schedule, including one-woman shows, of course). So why not start with those? Danny Russel's "Abraham Lincoln: Hoosier Hero," "Dadbod," standup comedy from Brad Hinshaw, and Timothy Mooney's "Shakespeare's Histories: Ten Epic Plays at a Breakneck Pace." Mooney's show, well described by the word "breakneck," is a virtuoso tour of the Bard's versions of English royal history, with a slant in favor of the Tudor dynasty, represented in ...

  It goes way back: building "safe spaces" for people with fragile links to each other but an overriding sense of belonging to something larger than themselves. What the world writ large may have denied to them they can access through discipline and the paradox of self-denial pointing the way toward self-discovery. It's the cultural foundation of the monastic communities that helped Christianity flourish in spite of its worldly entanglements from the start. In "The Convent," it's the annual retreat a middle-aged woman who styles herself the Mother Abbess has established in a medieval setting in France and nurtured upon the unfulfilled desires that bubble up out of the flotsam and jetsam of needy participants' lives. In three staged readings (just two remain) with seven actors under the direction of Kelsey Leigh Miller,  Summit Performance Indianapolis  revels in the sometimes raucous comedy and links it smoothly to the work's probing of spiritual de...

Frank Glover reconnected with his wonted magic. One of the matters John Coltrane had to contend with as he moved into his final phase in the 1960s was the perception that his music sounded angry. This put off many of his earlier fans, especially in Britain. In significant contrast, as readers of Lewis Porter's excellent book on Coltrane know, the pathbreaking saxophonist was anything but angry. But his pushing back the boundaries of tonality and conventional tone production, especially with robustness and intensity on the tenor saxophone, wore out and annoyed many listeners. Frank Glover also plays the tenor, but his primary instrument of choice is the clarinet. And that's what he brought to the stage in his long-awaited return to the Jazz Kitchen Wednesday night. He headed an all-star quartet, all of whose members are well-known hereabouts: pianist Steve Allee, bassist Nick Tucker, and drummer Kenny Phelps. It is hard for the clarinet to sound angry, as I hear it. When a playe...

  Kevin Sun calls his all-absorbing take on the music of Charlie Parker "<3 Bird," which I guess has to be said, with pun fully intended, "Love Bird" ( Endectomorph Music ). Kevin Sun digs deep into Bird. The love is certainly in place. Bandleader Sun has come up with new compositions based on Parker originals as well as on aspects of recorded Bird solos, sometimes blended. His study of the pioneering alto saxophonist dives deep. In putting a band together with slight shifts of personnel, he is clearly well beyond simply updating the sound and performance styles of early bebop masterpieces. Parker's centennial was last year, but the pandemic has somewhat delayed many big-round-number observances. Sun has not made a survey of Bird compositions explicit, though he tells which parts of the legacy he draws upon in liner notes. Fortunately  a tenor saxophonist (thus muting copycat pushback), Sun draws compatible performances throughout from bassist Walter Stinson ...

In her intense, lengthy drama "Smart People"— relieved though it is by drollery, some of it satirical — Lydia Diamond seems to have gotten overwhelmed by "representation," as if her four characters had run away with her in detailing the core and outgrowths of American racism. Academic understanding: Ginny and Brian get acquainted. Seen on opening night Thursday, Monument Theatre Company has put on the Fonseca Theatre stage a challenging work. It  keeps being thought-provoking and emotionally engaging, perhaps too bulkily, all the way through the final scene. That epilogue reminds us of the play's historical context: the successful presidential campaign leading to the inauguration of Barack Obama as the nation's 44th president. The inflated promise of that event as heralding post-racism serves as a kind of shrewd commentary on the main action — the tortured relationships and identity struggles of four smart young people, two black, one white, and one Asian...

Satoko Fujii incorporates varied legacy into new works.  Long ago, in an interview by the tireless jazz advocate and scholar Dan Morgenstern, the venerated pianist Bill Evans pushed back against a prominent critic's pronouncement that "no musician relies less on intuition than Bill Evans." Evans objected in thoughtful terms, saying that his reliance on intuition is about the same as any other jazzman, then explaining cogently that "when you play, the intellectual process no longer has anything to do with it." In light of that, it was interesting to become acquainted with a contemporary jazz pianist from Japan, Satoko Fujii, who has said she models her concept of the jazz piano trio on Evans' path-breaking work. As far out as "Moon on the Lake" (Libra Records) goes, there are signs that by explicitly pushing the intuitive side of trio playing, Fujii indeed channels Evans' example.  But the listener must understand the solid basis on which Evan...