Jay Harvey Upstage

Daniel J. Levitin I wonder if I've heard any one piece of music a thousand times, yet somehow I believed cognitive neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin when he said in a Butler University lecture Tuesday evening: "You can listen to a song a thousand times and still like it." The surprise in that statement is that our brains also favor being surprised by as well as familiar with input. So why would it be the case that a great number of repetitions (presumably not in succession!) of the same composition — an experience particularly available today when everything is recorded and widely accessible — doesn't turn us off? Levitin, author of the best-selling "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" (2006), offered a plausible answer to that question, though it is admittedly somewhat speculative. He said that it is likely that all music we've ever heard is stored somewhere in our brains. This would mean that the thousandth time he...

The pointillistic precision of yMusic  made a good impression in Sunday's concert. It's a pleasure to note that  Indianapolis was part of a musical coincidence Sunday: On the same night that Roomful of Teeth, an ensemble in which Caroline Shaw sings, was picking up a Grammy Award, Shaw's composition "From Rivers" received its second performance ever at Hilbert Circle Theatre. "From Rivers"  received its first performance at the opening of the Eskenazi Hospital in Indianapolis in December. On Sunday, Indianapolis-born vocal soloist Kristin "KO" Newborn joined the Indianapolis Children's Choir, accompanied by Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra associate principal cellist Perry Scott, in a performance keynoting a concert produced by New Amsterdam Records and presented by the ISO (but not featuring the orchestra). Caroline Shaw, winner of 2013 Pulitzer Prize Shaw's "From Rivers" contrasts the intensity of the solo voi...

Aping the ritualistic spear hoist of our ancestors, Kevin Burke is "Defending the Caveman." "Defending the Caveman" is a rare kind of marquee theater event to have splashed down at Theatre on the Square over the weekend for an indefinite run. Kevin Burke has been associated with Rob Becker's one-man, two-act show since 2003, principally at Harrah's Las Vegas, where he concluded a record-setting engagement last May. To see the Zionsville resident revive his interpretation amounted to an expert showcase of comic professionalism and timing, honed to a fare-thee-well but presented with just enough audience interaction to seem fresh. On a set representing a timeless cross between a modern home and prehistoric dwellings, with representations of cave paintings on large stone-like slabs in the background, the Caveman reviews the inevitable distance between male and female worldviews. Specifically, the way these differences keep bobbing to the surface in marr...

Typos are the gnats and horseflies of blogging.  Once detected they can easily be swatted away or squashed. Fresh swarms always hover nearby, but vigilance can forestall them, and those that get through the defenses can quickly be removed.  More indelible are typos in printed books. Everyone has found them, but as an inveterate reader of poetry books, I rarely see such smudges on their pages. This one is the most glaring I've ever come across: In The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini, the most famous poem of Richard Eberhart, "The Fury of Aerial Bombardment," is included. The original ends with this  poignant stanza: "Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill / Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall / But they are gone to early death, who late in school / Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl." As printed in this handsome book, however, the last word has become "paw." The anthology is nearly 20 years ...

(Written after wading through the hagiographic, overheated prose of SI's feature on Peyton Manning and somebody else's profile of Roger Federer after he won his quarterfinal match in Australia, but before he lost to Rafael Nadal in the semifinal. I've tried to represent the flavor of this perfervid sports journalism, though not the excessive length. But it is still too long, and thus a tribute to the underrated sport covered herein.) Peyton Manning Roger Federer The whispers had started, the knowing, dismissive nods, the shrinking sales of memorabilia. Rueful head-shakings, too, but only from the more compassionate fans. And those are not the dominant voices in the unforgiving universe of contemporary sports fanaticism. The old champ had got wind of the negative chatter, of course: Jay Harvey had to add to his struggle to get back into sleeping trim a ferocious battle to shake off and neutralize the naysayers. They'd heard all the unflattering stories, o...

The final scene of James Still's "And Then They Came for Me" at IRT. Some events that will always be worth careful study also need to be examined through other kinds of presentation. That's what "And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank" accomplishes in focusing dramatically on a few young persons' experience of the Nazi regime's systematic slaughter of European Jews in World War II. Indiana Repertory Theatre opened its third presentation (the other two were the 1996 premiere and 2005) of James Still 's multimedia play this weekend on the Upperstage. Still, the IRT's playwright in residence, effectively incorporates videotaped personal testimony from two Holocaust survivors in a dramatic presentation of their stories. Both of them briefly knew Anne Frank in Amsterdam after German armies had occupied the Netherlands. Thus, "And Then They Came for Me" is grounded in its links to the most famous Holocau...

Jennifer Christen performed Mozart's oboe concerto with ISO. No Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra first-chair player within memory have I so looked forward to hearing in a concerto as Jennifer Christen, the oboist hired as principal in 2012.  Acquaintance with her abilities was delayed somewhat by the lockout in the fall of that year, but there's been ample opportunity since to enjoy her floating, pristine sound in the many oboe solos that dot the symphonic repertoire. In this weekend's shortened shortened schedule (just the Coffee Concert Thursday and Friday evening's performance, reviewed here), Australian conductor Daniel Smith made his ISO debut as well. To savor the skills and artistry of two excellent musicians under 30 in the same concert was most heartening. But first, a consideration of Christen's performance of Mozart's Oboe Concerto in C major. With excellent support from Smith and her ISO colleagues, she gave a winning performance of a work a...

Prince Siegfried and sorcerer Von Rothbart vie for control of Odette. It got off to a rough start in 19th-century Russia, but has since become iconic, with its white tutus and graceful wing beats. "Swan Lake," a classic ballet with memorable music, has been treated to a wide range of adaptation and interpretation over the past century and a quarter. Through Saturday, the touring Moscow Festival Ballet is presenting the Petipa-Ivanov-Tchaikovsky work at the Tarkington at Carmel's Center for the Performing Arts. Thursday's opening-night performance made clear that this production would do more than emphasize the happy ending in which the Prince's love for Odette ends the spell that has trapped young women in the form of swans. It would also soft-pedal the disappointment at court that the Prince rejects the foreign brides who are presented to him, while making the most of the comic possibilities offered by the Jester and the Tutor. Prince Siegfried w...

The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the London ensemble founded by the legendary Thomas Beecham, played the Palladium Wednesday night. Under the guidance of principal guest conductor Pinchas Zukerman, the concert traced the traditional concert boundaries of Austro-German music — from J.S. Bach to Arnold Schoenberg  (before Schoenberg took that music over the tonality border into a new language). "Verklaerte Nacht" (Transfigured Night) exists in both sextet and string-orchestra versions. The sacrifice of intimacy when the latter version is performed is slight.  There's no doubt that the score's luxuriant half-hour length and the richness of its interior voices permit a large ensemble to make more of an effect. Of the three works on the program, this was the one that presented Zukerman as a conductor only, and his rapport with players and score was evident. The 1899 piece is program music with an unusual descriptive basis, partly because of the poem that inspired it...

Many years ago on "All Things Considered,"   host Susan Stamberg interviewed Philip Roth, long before his "retirement" from writing fiction.  At the time, he was among a handful of the most celebrated American authors. They were discussing the trouble Roth had got into during his first brush with fame because of how he wrote about Jewish-American life — critically and even corrosively. The pushback was fierce. You can get some idea of what the crisis felt like by reading Judge Wapter's scathing letter to the Roth stand-in (Nathan Zuckerman) in "The Ghost Writer." Philip Roth had a firm answer for Susan Stamberg Stamberg wanted to know if Roth had considered going in another direction with his work to avoid more hurtful controversy. "So did you ever think that you should just give up all this stuff?" I remember her asking. "But this is MY STUFF!"  Roth thundered. As far as I can recall, the rest of the interview went OK, but...

People in families that talk a lot but don't really listen to each other are a staple of drama. There must be something basically dramatic in the premise that intimacy doesn't necessarily breed understanding. How much more extreme such a situation is in the English family that Nina Raine scrutinizes in "Tribes," in which a scrappy, proudly artsy/intellectual "tribe" includes a deaf young man brought up to lip-read his connection to the hearing world. His escape from the family's practice of tearing each other down is a mixed blessing, tipping over thunderously into his marginalization. The play opened this weekend on the Phoenix Theatre 's Basile Stage in a production that forces upon the audience renewed attention to how we communicate and how intensely loyal we can become to our particular communicative style, especially when that style congeals into tribal thinking. The profane, polemical Christopher, a retired professor now focusing on his ...

"An American in Paris": Brandon Comer and Caitlin Negron "American Rhapsody" is the blended title of Dance Kaleidoscope 's first program of 2014, reflecting David Hochoy's interpretation of two of George Gershwin's evergreen long-form compositions: "Rhapsody in Blue" and "An American in Paris." Mariel Greenlee in Hochoy's "Farewell" Thursday night's preview performance showed the three works (the other being Hochoy's 1988 "Farewell," set to "Aria: Cantilena" from Heitor Villa-Lobos' "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5") to be in good shape, considering that the troupe's Indiana Repertory Theatre performance home was closed Monday and Tuesday this week, thanks to the snow and cold. "An American in Paris"  is a tone poem often praised for its insouciant combination of an aural picture postcard of life in the French capital between the world wars and one nameless,...

Yesterday I was ineffectually trying to knock down snow and ice from my roof gutters, following advice intended to help me avoid flooding and leakage when the otherwise welcome thaw comes at the end of the week. My ladder was almost useless: Planting it solidly on the ground was difficult, and the steps were soon slippery, making any slight degree of leaning while poking a broom and shovel at roof ice most unwise. In the subzero cold and under a blazing sun, it was up and down, leaning over or looking up. I paused now and then to clear away snow underfoot.  When I rested, I wondered about the tracks in the snow I saw nearby, the only footprints in the pristine landscape. What animal had made them? Wild or domestic? Wandering about or in pursuit, maybe being pursued? No outdoorsman and not about to start being one, I've occasionally regretted my ignorance of the signs and messages nature generously strews about us outside our manmade confines. The Lone Ranger and Tonto, of ...

[Scene: From total darkness, a blinding flash of light (with thunderclap) reveals upstage center a man. He's dressed casually but conservatively in today's garb, standing astonished in the middle of a cozy living room in 1950s American style, blandly and comfortably appointed. Downstage on either side, angled, are a couch on which a middle-aged woman sits, knitting or reading a magazine, and on the other side, an easy chair, in which her husband reclines, smoking a pipe and casually reading a newspaper. They are dressed in the ordinary at-home fashion of the era. The bright light quickly subsides to normal illumination, as they look up at him with milder astonishment than his.] Heaven, he's in heaven, and his heart beats so that he can hardly speak. It's humble, but in our hero's view, Mr. and Mrs. God call it home. Man:  God? The Couple (together):  Yes? Man (awkwardly):  I know this sounds presumptuous, but I was really hoping to see God.  That'...

ElecticPond Theatre Company, whose meat and drink is Shakespeare, is taking advantage of the long, cold slog into the New Year to serve up Bard-flavored truffles in "10x10: Shakespeare's Top Ten Plays, Ten Minutes Each." Witches in 'The Scottish Play" get down with spookiness. The company will run through this slap-happy revival just once more (Jan. 5 finale has been canceled because of the approaching snowstorm), using  an olio of contemporary speech (including asides and brief commentary) and original lines from the plays.  Nose-thumbing tributes are offered to "Othello," "Twelfth Night," "Julius Caesar," "Much Ado About Nothing, "Macbeth," "Henry V,"  "Richard III," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet." Artistic director Thomas Cardwell has devised spoofs that either skim the plays or burrow within them only far enough to pick out...