Jay Harvey Upstage

Next month will mark the year's second great-composer bicentennial:  Giuseppe Verdi is more widely performed than his near-contemporary, Richard Wagner. But despite the great acclaim he enjoyed in his native Italy from mid-career on, his operas struggled for the esteem that came early to Wagner, with the unprecedented boost of cultish devotion. Verdi's late-in-life Shakespeare-inspired masterpieces, "Otello" and "Falstaff,"  had to suffer the indignity of being simultaneously admired and tagged with "Wagnerism." This despite ample evidence the Italian composer had worked for many years to extend and revise the formal conventions he had inherited on his home ground. Moreover,  the "barrel-organ" epithet formed a leech-like attachment to his tunes and their accompaniments, drawing attention from the frequent ingenuity and freshness of both, even in the early works. But now, the cognoscenti's esteem and the public's love run tho...

The Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel announces student tickets at $15 each to "select Palladium seating areas" for Lang Lang's solo piano recital Sept. 19. Lang Lang, the Chinese-born pianist who has become a world citizen of classical music within the past decade, has been heard as soloist with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.  But the Palladium event marks his first solo recital in the area. On the 7:30 p.m. program: the four Ballades by Frederic Chopin and W.A. Mozart's Piano Sonatas No. 4 in E-flat, K. 282; No. 5 in G, K. 283, and No. 8 in C, K. 309. Students wishing to purchase tickets can go online or contact the box office, (317) 843-3800.

Part of the IndyFringe excitement is that no one has come between you and any show you're seeing.  That is to say, no jury made the selection. That's why you will encounter duds from time to time.  When you do,  you have no shadowy,  judgmental figure behind the scenes to be annoyed at. If you don't like a show, you have faced the source of your annoyance right there in front of you, within the allotted hour, as you took in the performance. I faced mine in the middle of Sunday afternoon. The University tWits, its self-deprecating name not quite disarming all criticism, is a six-person troupe from Bloomington specializing in sketch comedy on contemporary subjects. Its final show at the Phoenix Theatre' s Russell Stage was not well attended, with the audience just twice the size of the company. Word of mouth works both ways in guiding patrons' choices, apparently. An initial scene purporting to be full of disagreements about how to begin did not lead one to exp...

If you don't find something at IndyFringe to move you, then you have just scratched the surface. Sure, there's nothing wrong with staying on the fun side of the annual festival, but there's so much more. Susan's haul from successful bidding at "Going, Going, Gone(r)" To while away an hour watching the long-running "live auction comedy" contrived for the 2012 Fringe by Lou Harry and John Thomas always returns positive benefits.  Running out of play money to bid with is the closest thing to a worry you're likely to have at "Going... Going... Gone(r)." (Before she ran out of faux dough, my wife, Susan Raccoli, had acquired the treasures pictured here.) The show, a monthly staple on the IndyFringe Basile Theatre schedule since its premiere, takes donated castoffs and garage-sale rejects, then repurposes them as valuable forgotten items from the estate of a deceased auctioneer named Ed. His relatives and friends just want to move on...

Not having binged on Fringe this year like some hardy souls, by Friday night I'd still become a little unhinged by Fringe. My choice of three one-person shows in a row may have had something to do with it.  It's hard for one person, even for one hour, to hold the stage well.  An exception can be made for a good actor's thorough command of a wonderful script, such as what Paul Hansen offers in "The High-Impact Infidelity Diet" and Pat O'Brien in "Underneath the Lintel." But original material in the hands of a single performer challenges an audience member to lock in instantly and stay hooked.  I will concede that, for most of the audience, Kevin Burke had that knack  at his evening show at ComedySportz , but not for me. "Sin City Stories" purports to be "true tales of Sin City" (Las Vegas) from a Zionsville resident who had a remarkable run there for six years, chiefly in the hit show "Defending the Caveman." But th...

Even casually made choices at IndyFringe can yield an entertainment package of the festival's variety in microcosm. My Thursday evening sampling indicated some of the contrasts that even a brief visit can set before you. In "Tapman: Origin" at the Cook Theater, Chicagoan Tristan Bruns has the wit to take his virtuosity as a tap dancer and link it to a story line. Instead of a recital showcasing in separate numbers his pinpoint balance, endless verve and supple feet, he plays the superhero Tapman, whose goodness has to be judged mainly by the nastiness of his enemies, chiefly the Mad Tapper (played with sinuous elan by a Bruns colleague). The dance display focusing on Bruns is hung on this story line, which is a little thin and deliberately derivative, to be sure. It's a flexible enough device  to be anchored (through narration) to sites in and around the home of IndyFringe, the Mass Ave Cultural District .  Of course, one of them has to be  (drum roll and cymba...

Constant behind the wry, sad smile with which Kurt Vonnegut greeted the world — his face wreathed in smoke and wrinkles as he aged, crowned with tousled curly hair, an ageless look that made it seem he might be carrying a slingshot in his back pocket — was an abiding concern for resisting dehumanization. The spirit of mischief raised in his writing always pointed in the direction of something better for what his literary hero, Mark Twain, called "the damned human race." Humor might be the lingua franca of hope, but don't bet on it, Twain and Vonnegut would probably agree. "Welcome  to  the Monkey House," an adaptation of several Vonnegut stories by ShadowApe Theatre Company , is a performance as unswerving from this outlook as any you'll see at Fringe . It has the special virtue of turning some of Vonnegut's fable-like short fiction into vibrant action. That helps mute hints of whimsical sermonizing from such stories as "The Euphio Question,...