Jay Harvey Upstage

The title strings out the names of four characters with the flat egalitarianism characteristic of the play's patron saint: "Vanya  and Sonia and Masha and Spike" is Christopher Durang's rambunctious tribute to Anton Chekhov and the 2013 Tony-winner that opens Phoenix Theatre 's new season. The idiosyncratic rambunctiousness, not something readily associated with Chekhov, is what Durang brings to the stage from a long series of coruscating successes. The underlying theme of weariness with life and the audacity of presenting characters who may bore or annoy us but are treated with wry affection are the Chekhovian bedrock.  On it Durang builds a family structure of sacrifice, missed opportunity and petty vanity played out in a solid old home in the upscale bucolic setting of Bucks County, Pa. The first three characters grew up in that household dominated by punishingly overcultured parents whose latter-day decline from Alzheimer's was borne physically and emo...

The dependable comfort level that comes with Garrick Ohlsson playing Chopin would not have been enough by itself to lift his performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor to the special plane it occupied  Friday night at Hilbert Circle Theatre. The towering pianist, in the front rank of American concert artists for more than 40 years, worked hand-in-glove with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and music director Krzysztof Urbanski, countryman of the composer. There was a certain suppleness and joyous give-and-take between podium and piano. Ohlsson and Urbanski exchanged smiles in mid-flight at the start of the third movement, which had a wealth of smooth tempo adjustments, nothing jerky about any one of them. Garrick Ohlsson was in his element Friday. From the stately orchestra introduction to the first movement, with its well-shaped, drooping phrases in the main theme, to the aristocratic dash of the finale, this was a cherishable performance. Such a spectrum of ...

In "The Crucible," farmer John Proctor's well-tended fields flourish under the same bright sky that spells doom for the unwary and the wavering, but eventually for God's watchful, unbending servants as well. In a fallen world, the Puritans' "city on the hill" rests on creed undermined by credulousness. The community gathers for worship and song in "The Crucible." The Indiana Repertory Theatre' s production of Arthur Miller's historical drama opens with the fervor of "Let All Mortal Fresh Keep Silent," sung by the cast in full-throated assertion of the faith that governed life in the Massachusetts village of Salem in 1692. The scene is a powerful reminder of the context of the play. It also pushes to one side the allegorical import of Miller's drama, famously spurred by the anti-Communist fervor of the early 1950s and the atmosphere of fear, suspicion and revenge that marred life briefly in American politics, academ...

Jack Everly, veteran pops maestro of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra , thought it was time to give his regards to Broadway once again. And he meant the Broadway far removed from the quaint, century-old, sunny-faced heartiness of George M. Cohan, the man who first flashed that salute in song. "We've done a tribute to the iconic music of Irving Berlin and several 'decade' concerts," Everly told me by phone recently after a 10-hour production meeting about "On Broadway with Kander & Ebb," which will open the Pops Series Oct. 4 and 5 at Hilbert Circle Theatre. Jack Everly is the mastermind of ISO Kander & Ebb tribute It was Broadway's turn once again, and what better a thematic emphasis than musical theater's successors to Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, and Bock and Harnick? "They have continued the evolution of musical theater," said Everly of John Kander and Fred Ebb, who burst onto the scene with the cha...

The charismatic pianist Lang Lang presented his first solo recital in the area Thursday night at the Palladium , and the adoring response seemed a genuine acknowledgment of the recitalist's ability to form an instant bond with listeners. The program was divided simply into Mozart before intermission, Chopin after. Lang Lang's arrangement of a Chinese folk song, in celebration of the Moon Festival in his homeland Sept. 19, provided one encore. The continuing roar of acclaim elicited a second, a predictably scintillating account of Chopin's "Minute" Waltz. Then it was a few more relaxed bows, gracious waves to various sections of the audience, some handshaking along the front row and, in a superstar gesture if ever there was one, the toss of a large white handkerchief to some lucky fan after the young maestro had wiped his brow before strolling offstage for good. Lang Lang's Mozart largely adhered to classical niceties without being particularly patrician....

Krzysztof Urbanski, the 30-year-old Polish conductor who continues to build a reputation for himself here and abroad, has agreed to link that growing acclaim to the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for three years beyond his current contract. Krzysztof Urbanski in action, photographed by his wife, Joanna. The ISO announced today that Urbanski has signed a new agreement that will keep him here as music director through the 2017-18 season. The announcement comes on the brink of the 2013-14 season's debut Friday night in a gala concert featuring violin soloist Hilary Hahn. No terms of the new contract were revealed in the announcement, but director of communications Jessica Di Santo said some details, like the number of weeks Urbanski will be in residence here, are still being worked out. In the final year of his current contract (2014-15), he is due to be in town 10 weeks. His other obligation to music in Indiana — an adjunct professorship at the Jacobs School of Music at Indi...

Playing with a young heart underlined by the inevitability of being known as The Son, Ravi Coltrane made his probable local debut Wednesday night at a couple of Indy Jazz Fest sets at the Jazz Kitchen . Ravi Coltrane (photo by Mark Sheldon) To my mind, he has long since established his independence as a musician from the gigantic eminence of his father, John Coltrane , and the smaller aura that surrounds his pianist mother, Alice Coltrane . He sure doesn't sound like an orphan. And people are ready to receive the 48-year-old as a mature musician, even in places that are new to him, allowing for the fact that some of the patronage is attracted by his famous names (his given name being, of course, a tribute to Ravi Shankar ). He has some of his father's stamina as a performer, displaying it torrentially in the first number of the second set, Ralph Alessi's "Klepto." That was among several offerings on tenor sax, his main instrument; turning to soprano for a...

It's more than academic when Gary Walters and Shawn Goodman get together to make music, though an academic setting seemed a comfortable place for the two Butler University faculty members to present a concert Tuesday night. Partly a CD release party for the clarinet-piano duo's  "Not Benny's Goodman," the performance took place under  the Indy Jazz Fest umbrella, besides being the third presentation in Butler's 2013-14 Faculty Artist Series. Walters and Goodman sounded well-attuned to each other in the eight-piece program, but not consistently to the hall. There were signs that Eidson-Duckwall Recital Hall may have been too live a room to be hospitable to everything they played. Goodman has an ease and expressiveness in the clarinet's low register, evident especially in "Infant Eyes" (Wayne Shorter) and "A Child Is Born" (Thad Jones). Her frisky sweeps into the highest range were exciting, if sometimes in danger of being overblow...

There was a wealth of honor paid to the modern jazz heritage Monday night in a re-creation of most of the "Birth of the Cool" repertoire, with which Miles Davis made the first of several influential changes in jazz. But besides the Buselli Wallarab Jazz Orchestra 's painstaking but gratifyingly fresh presentation of that music at the Indiana Landmarks Center , there was a stupendous opening act that indicated the ongoing vitality of American jazz: the Zach Lapidus Trio. Several years of familarity with Lapidus' performances around town have led me to expect music that is both stimulating and unfussily polished. He is a pianist with an oddly appropriate harmonic sense. Though moment to moment his choices may seem far-fetched, he always brings each oddity back into natural relationship with its context. Zach Lapidus (Mark Sheldon photo) In his current, astonishingly well-seasoned band, he enjoys the support of two spot-on, intuitive sidemen: bassist Nick Tuck...

Riding several waves of huge popularity in a career well past the half-century mark, pianist Ramsey Lewis can afford to show a number of different aspects of his personality in a 90-minute show without seeming to go far afield. There's a wide range to display, much of it in the jazz-rock fusion and smooth-jazz territory where the Chicago veteran is a major stakeholder. That's what his Indy Jazz Fest appearance amounted to Friday night at the Madame Walker Theatre Center. At 78, he naturally brings a lot of mellowness to bear on the music, as a number of solo showcases at the Steinway grand indicated in the course of his quintet's show.  Ramsey Lewis (photo by Mark Sheldon) He improvised a long introduction to one tune that showed his delicacy of touch linked to an active melodic imagination. I recognized a couple of Cole Porter songs, "In the Still of the Night"  and "I Love You," and eventually the other musicians came in with something from the...

Putting the Indy Jazz Fest on a firm footing year after year requires shrewd judgment about the potential draw of big names while keeping artistic variety uppermost. For 2013, according to festival director David Allee, that also meant sacrificing the traditional culmination of the festival in one or two days of outdoor performances. "An outdoor setting is expensive, and we couldn't come up with a viable option," he told me at the Jazz Kitchen, where several Indy Jazz Fest events will take place. "We thought the 2009 lineup was one of our strongest," Allee recalled, "but we couldn't get more than 2,000 to 3,000 people at each of those." The roster included Joshua Redman, Nicholas Payton, Marcus Miller, Claudia Acuna, Poncho Sanchez, Kurt Elling and Branford Marsalis. Eddie Palmieri is one of the stars of Latin jazz (Photo by Mark Sheldon). Allee said that signing big names in jazz, such as 2012's George Benson, did not tend to drive ...

As if to mark the end of toddlerhood, Indianapolis City Ballet's annual "Evening With the Stars" celebrated its fifth birthday Saturday night at the Murat Centre. In the slow march to maturity, the organization has projected a "world dance competition" and choreographic institute for 2014, plus hosting unannounced major companies to visit Indianapolis. These steps should put the ICB in the position to form the resident troupe that has been the founders' dream from the beginning (2009), just about the time when the Great Recession put a crimp in its progress toward that goal. Of course, there was lots of brilliance to spare in the 2013 "Evening With the Stars," and concerns about the ICB's long-range viability as a professional company based here could be put aside — especially given the size and enthusiasm of the audience. One piece raised for me questions about the appropriation of musical sources outside their context, however. It'...

The first set Ira Sullivan was supposed to play at the Jazz Kitchen Friday night was delayed by about a half-hour because two members of the band had to fight weekend traffic on the way down from Chicago. But the cliche "well worth waiting for" applied to the multi-instrumentalist, steeped as he is in bebop stylings of standard fare, dating from his days as a fixture at Chicago's Bee Hive Club in the early 1950s, playing with a host of luminaries who blew through the Windy City.. Ira Sullivan playing flugelhorn, one of his many instruments. Now 82, he still considers himself a Chicagoan despite long residence in Miami, where every summer he is involved in jazz education. His comments from the stage indicated faith in the likelihood that the music will be handed down to the younger generation in good shape. Certainly elder statesmen of Sullivan's stature and commitment are needed, and when they can take care of business on the bandstand as well, they confirm ...

Curtain up! Light the lights! It was fun participating Thursday night in the open house that Indiana Repertory Theatre staged to cast a wide net for patronage as it gets set to launch its 2013-14 season next week. The centerpiece of the event was the opportunity to tour backstage. Little did my wife and I suspect that this insider's view would be so extensive and so enthusiastically shared by IRT staff: At nearly every stop along the way, someone instrumental in making productions happen was on hand to talk about such components as lights, costumes, sound, props and painting. The theatrical art rests on a bewildering variety of highly evolved technical skills; the illusion that envelops you during a performance works both from the actors out and from the total environment in. Our affable, well-informed guide, Eric Olson, handles individual gifts to the IRT, and I would not be surprised if business is booming for him in this difficult assignment. He was a superb salesman fo...

The pretensions of a past will some day Make it over into progress, a growing up, As beautiful as a new history book With uncut pages, unseen illustrations.              -- "Song" from The Double Dream of Spring John Ashbery is today's most-laureled U.S. poet. Clearly pegged as an American immortal as his baffling verse takes on a more autumnal cast in volume after volume, John Ashbery , now 86, has long attracted and frustrated me as a reader. Ashbery's poetry rests upon a unique voice on the printed page, with innovations in the sentence as a unit of meaning, influenced by rapidly changing, disorienting figurative language. This thickly applied characteristic manner oddly obscures the person behind it and the experiences that may have generated what readers encounter in the poetry. You might think that fatal for a lyric poet, but the very disconnect has helped increase Ashbery's mystique for readers seeking an escape from contemporary p...

The watchword for any stagestruck youngster hoping for a Broadway career is to craft a sturdy three-legged stool —  dancing, acting, singing — get up on it,  and hope for a favorable wind to take off. So conventional is that advice that Sutton Foster , who's mastered all three essential skills, says the most frequent question she gets when she works with students is: Which is the most important? Foster spoke with me by phone in anticipation of her solo concert (presented by Actors Theatre of Indiana ) at Carmel's Palladium Oct. 5, and she has a forthright answer:  Acting. Sutton Foster will bring her solo show to Carmel. "Dance is a bunch of movement, singing is a bunch of noise," she said, smoothly turning autobiographical: "That was my problem at first. I had a lot of energy and a lot of volume and lot of chutzpah. But without anything behind the sound, it's meaningless," she explained. "I had to learn to go for the interpretation....

One enduring aspect of Verdi's music particularly feeds into what opera-lovers have long enjoyed: fruitful comparison of performances in major roles. What drives that interest in the case of Verdi is the high quality of the tunes themselves and their rhythmic profiles, which help singers establish emotion and character and leave a lot of interpretive latitude. Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) Take one of the most famous tenor entrances — the Duke of Mantua's "Quest o quella" in "Rigoletto." Of the many fine Placido Domingo performances in the new "Verdi: The Complete Works" set of 75 CDs, the durable Spaniard's portrayal of the Duke is among the best. But from the start, no one performance can cover everything germane to the role. If I compare Luciano Pavarotti's characterization in this "ballata" (Verdi's term) with Domingo's, two views of the Duke are apparent, both of them indicated by the music, in my view. Pavarotti...