Jay Harvey Upstage

Original costume designs for "The Rite of Spring"  Lots of risers in the orchestra, lots of youth in the audience.  Clearly something outsize and extra-inviting was on hand Friday night when the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra opened the 2026-27 season at Hilbert Circle Theatre. With the program having been already finely honed in performance the night before at Indiana University, the ISO under music director Jun Märkl was especially primed to respond to the historic, perpetually challenging demands of Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." The 1913 ballet has been  known since almost exclusively as an orchestral showpiece, without any choreography except that conjured up in listeners' heads.  The scenario of the ballet lent the young composer a form, culminating in a virgin's fatal sacrifice to propitiate the gods. The prehistoric Russia evoked suggested that the Ballets Russes creators' enduring innovation would be primarily musical and convulsively...

Over my mostly adolescent years as an Episcopalian, I never had the opportunity of hearing the graveside liturgy that reminds us, according to the Book of Common Prayer: "In the midst of life we are in death."  Somehow I picked up that precise reminder long ago and usefully thought of those ancient words of devotion, both obvious and paradoxical as they are, while attending a performance of "Fun Home" Thursday night. The season-opening production by the Southbank Theatre Company carries the magic of charm and searing revelations as it casts an authentic aura of bitter and illuminating truth at Butler University's Shelton Auditorium . Bruce uncovers Small Alison's forbidden casket fun.   The show's title turns out to be family slang, also with a whiff of paradox, for "funeral home," the Bechdel family business in a small Pennsylvania town. In the graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, which forms the basis of this lilting yet  profound musical by Je...

Rob Dixon holds forth in Coltrane celebration. There can be little question that the most appropriate musician to lead an Indy Jazz Fest tribute performance on the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth was Rob Dixon . Jazz fans have had a few decades to appreciate the protean capabilities of the Atlanta-bred tenor   saxophonist. Dixon has been an indefatigable presence on the local music scene, earning him the description "the jazz mayor of Indianapolis." His occasional programming of Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" has cemented his connection to the master. In corporate terms, the quartet that offered two Coltrane sets Wednesday at the Jazz Kitchen   did business as the I ndianapolis Jazz Collective. The band took in as special guest Lasana D. Kazembe , a spoken-word artist who proved apt for evoking the Coltrane idealism and displaying an original, intense  manner of representing Coltrane's musical breadth through verbal spectacle. Kembe's contri...

Leah Amory was distinctive in appearance and repertoir e As the 12th Quadrennial International Violin Competition of Indianapolis advances, its launch with performances this week by all the participants may fade as the public and violinists who fall by the wayside direct attention to the survivors in the semifinals and finals. Still, music lovers who don't necessarily favor Bach over Mozart or vice versa may be stunned by the disappearance  of unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas  by the baroque master whose output is considered foundational. In their place in the prelims is one of five sonatas for violin and piano by the late 18th-century Austrian master Mozart (or Franz Schubert's Sonatina in  D major). This decision will lend more prominence to the  focus on Mozart in the Classical Finals (Sept. 30 and Oct. 1),  where his five concertos, marvels for a 19-year-old, are in the competition repertoire. What gives? some may ask. "It's fairer to these kids to ...

Mother of them all: Jeanne Manford joins the parade. The shadow version of "coming out" turns out to have a brilliance all its own. "Everybody's  Favorite Mothers" proclaims the process in an enthralling way that  doesn't skirt the difficulties of owning sexual identity through open self-assertion and garnering the support of loved ones. In a premiere performance seen Thursday night at the Phoenix Theatre,   the audience of James Still's new play is brought into a close-up observer/participant's role centered on the emergence of gay-rights momentum and support in the 1970s. Without throwing himself into the briar patch of documentary-genre devotion, the playwright immerses us in a family story complicated by the movement's internal divisions and the unpredictable benefits of a loving ally's imaginative breakthroughs. The watchword evoked a few times in the play — "Vision without action is hallucination" — could be revised, somewhat ...

Choosing from the summit of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's operetta achievement to start Buck Creek Players ' 53rd season also confirmed the company president's personal history with "The Pirates of Penzance." Georgeanna Teipen's curtain speech Friday night set the tone for what she said was her aim in placing the work first in 2026-27 at the troupe's home on the far-southeastern side of Indianapolis. Mabel and Frederic sing of their bond, achieved with difficulty. The ensemble riches set forth in Gilbert's book and lyrics, complemented in permanent fashion by Sullivan's music, work hand-in-glove with  the broadly outlined individual vividness presented in such characters as the lovers Frederic and Mabel, the Pirate King, Major-General Stanley, the nurse Ruth, and such memorable minor characters as the Police Sergeant, who in due course reminds us that "a policeman's lot is not a happy one." The forces of law and order, and of ou...

  Blending genres to express her musical identity, Grace Kelly opened her quartet's first set Saturday night Grace Kelly holds forth at the Kitchen. with a tightly fused mini-medley of a James Bond movie tune and Billie Eilish's "No Time to Die." It was a much-anticipated return visit to the Jazz Kitchen, a club about which she expressed enthusiasm repeatedly while noting the two-night stand was the last stop on her current Midwestern-East Coast tour. Kelly, red mane waving as she acrobatically played her shiny alto sax, has increased the proportion of singing to her free-flowing instrumental prowess since I last heard her here. Remaining intact is her outspoken embrace of the audience and a knack for cultivating its heartiest responsiveness. By her encore, Huey Lewis and the News' "Power of Love," she was circulating through the dining-room audience in extended soloing on the groove-heavy tune. But she has  based her appeal increasingly on vocals, bei...

  The '"musical mayor" of Indianapolis, Rob Dixon , reached out to his constituents Friday night Rob Dixon holds forth at the Kitchen. at the Jazz Kitchen , and his position was sustained by acclamation  over a long set that climaxed with his stroll around the venue playing a long solo that, by virtue of a microphone attached to his tenor sax, got heard by everyone and was reinforced in sync with the band. Like a deft politician, he managed to reach out to shake hands as he passed by one table after another.  The non-peripatetic personnel of Dixon's enlarged Triology included Reggie Bishop and Gary Mielke, keys; Brandon Meeks, bass, and Richard "Sleepy" Floyd, drums,with a special guest appearance by Vick Luna , trombone. They all stayed on the bandstand, but lifted the mood all along the way wherever Dixon wandered. The band opened with a  unified, powerful  pair of statements that included Dixon's "Ten Thousand Ships," the title alluding the...

Among theater people, there might be reasonable suspicion of  English majors, particularly when it comes to evaluating productions of classic plays. With Shakespeare, literary study of the texts threatens to treat theatricality as secondary. I have fought against this tendency in me because understanding the Shakespeare canon as literature is the overwhelming focus in the classroom. I never had a teacher who concentrated on Shakespeare as theater. It's  always helpful to remember that the Bard was a man of the theater who never took the trouble to have definitive texts published, necessitating the First Folio and keeping centuries of scholars occupied ever since. That's enough throat-clearing to get into this account of how I took in "King Lear" on opening night in an IndyShakes production at Taggart Memorial Amphitheater in White River State Park .   It's clearly the job of anyone seeing a new production who has read the play to interpret production decisions. T...

A treasured album's cover, not much worse for wear You don't have to be a trombone player except in fantasy to enjoy a trombone-heavy jazz band, especially if your record collection includes "Jay & Kai + 6."  That's a Columbia LP from the 1950s with a marvelous cartoon by the great Arnold Roth on the cover and co-leader Kai Winding's name spelled two different ways, because "Kai" is not really pronounced "Kay," but publicists must have liked the rhyme cementing  the Danish trombonist's hit partnership with J.J. Johnson. It was Johnson who of course was the greater innovator on the brass instrument in jazz, and it doesn't require being from his hometown of Indianapolis to proclaim this. But whether as a duo or in this record's assemblage, Winding was a simpatico partner in tandem with J.J., and an excellent arranger as well.  At the Jazz Kitchen Sunday evening,   Naptown Trombone Collective paid tribute to the trailblazing ...

As with many  who exile themselves with distinction from a provincial upbringing, the curiosity that fed Janet Flanner's writing career was nurtured in the world she left behind. Before she was dubbed "Gen ê t" by New Yorker magazine founder-editor Harold Ross, she carried the prestige of a well-established Indianapolis family, a talented daughter who got a brief start in journalism here as movie critic for the News. She came out as a lesbian after a likewise brief marriage, then settled in the French capital, where her "Letter from Paris" was a regular feature in the well-written and -edited, and eventually well-heeled, magazine. "They Call Me  Gen ê t ," D. Paul Thomas' lively, variegated interpretation of the New Yorker' s European correspondent for a half-century,  takes Janet Flanner off the glossy page as so much more than a prestigious byline. As an extended "au revoir" to Paris set in 1975, it brings the thorough, exacting rep...

 "We Walk Beneath a Patient Sky," the substantial new work opening Dance Kaleidoscope' s final program of the current season, shows the result of a rare collaboration between a choreographer and a composer both active here. Jordan Munson blends his affinities for electronic music and the Appalachian musical tradition in the new work, against which Joshua Blake Carter has set his arresting choreography. He's tamed his characteristic abruptness of movement to focus on how a community establishes ritual and secures a common acknowledgment of meaning and values. Seen Saturday night at the Toby, the four-part work embraces a fresh vision of the hero's journey theme, but applied collectively more than individually. Robed, hooded, backs to the audience and unindividualized at first, the company of a dozen dancers comes to grips with the forces they must contend with, reaching up, arms sometimes hooping the air above them, also thrusting downward at an angle with motion...

Trumpet Mafia in full cry, with leader Ashlin Parker second from left. An open weekend date on the Jazz Kitchen schedule is not easy to find, especially on short notice, so John Raymond was grateful to have nailed one Friday night while Trumpet Mafia, an ensemble from New Orleans, was nearby and open to a further opportunity for its high-powered blare. Raymond, professor of jazz trumpet  on the faculty of Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, spoke proudly of his impresario role in securing the gig, in which the mafiosi included some of his students plus young Indianapolis trumpeters of professional stature Sam Butler and Kent Hickey, plus a well-established jazz educator and trumpet guru, Scott Belck of Cincinnati.  Anchoring the front line were New Orleans trumpeters Ashlin Parker and Bijon Watson. All told, there were 11 trumpeters ranked along the front of the Jazz Kitchen bandstand. It became a decent dozen at the end, when Indianapolis native Pharez Whitted was in...

As soon as the five men of Profeti della Quinta raised their voices, something extraordinary filled the air at the Indiana History Center  Sunday afernoon as the Indianapolis Early Music Festival presented its last June concert in its 60th anniversary season.  The singers of Profeti, with theorbo player Ori Harmelin (holding instrument) The immediate blend of  two countertenors, two tenors, and one bass as "From the Synagogue  to the Palace" began, made clear the point of bringing to wider recognition the achievement of Salomone Rossi (1570-1630?) as a Jewish musician enjoying special privileges while affirming his identity in a diaspora minority group constrained by law and custom.  Formed in Israel and now resident in Switzerland, Profeti della Quinta (Prophets of the Perfect Fifth) presented a program that made a rare point: despite the  reduced status of Jews in Italy 400 years ago, Rossi was honored in both Mantuan communities, repeatedly crossing th...