Jay Harvey Upstage

A touch of modernism — self-consciousness about what a stage play is — helps redeem for today the topical tangle of Shakespeare's early comedy "Love's Labour's Lost." Indy Bard Fest negotiates the obscure aspects of a work that was probably intended for court performance, allowing for endless word play and larded with expressions that have disappeared from the mainstream. It's a style that would have baffled even the groundlings at Shakespeare's Globe. But reminders of the play's artificiality are relentless, and the implausible is no obstacle to making the action believable over the short term. Amateur archers:Rosaline and the Princess chat. Seen at the Cat Theatre Friday night near the end of its run, the production embraces the nonsensical premise on which the play is based — and everything that ensues from that: a royal whim to gather lusty, highly placed men around the monarch to abjure the company of women in favor of three years' worth of s...

Alex Norris plays the pandemic. Never being of the opinion that old ways of doing things need to remain set in the forms of their originators, I don't take what Alex Norris and his quintet do on "Fleet from the Heat" ( SteepleChase ) to be a retread of the Blue Note heydays of Art Blakey and Horace Silver. What use is genuine inspiration if the only result is to do something entirely different? The trumpeter-flugelhornist pays explicit tribute to those bandleaders and their styles in the booklet notes. Not that making his debt clear would excuse him if the music were lame. But "Fleet from the Heat" is fresh and avoids running merely in the well-worn tracks of his illustrious predecessors.  The main proof of this accomplishment is a suite straight out of the COVID crisis that won't seem to let go of us. "The Famous Original Pandemic Suite" in the middle of "Fleet from the Heat" comprises four pieces with distinct personalities. The entire ...

 Clown and sage, pixie and guru, loyal frontline Horatio to a thousand jazz Hamlets, the trombone has led a protean existence in the music's century-plus history. Those several personas — except the farfetched Shakespearean one — are suggested by veteran trombonist Ed Neumeister in his quizzically titled new CD, "What Have I Done?" ( MeisteroMusic ). The question resonates in common usage as an expression of regret and remorse, but also as a way of probing the mystery of our acts, particularly in creative fields. One answer to the question in this case is that Neumeister has given his quirks and splendid imaginings prismatic emphasis through his choice of sidemen. The disc displays pianist Gary Versace, bassist Drew Gress, and drummer Tom Rainey as vital participants in the leader's self-portrait as a composer; it also gives everyone brief cameos tucked in between the eight major statements in the form of six  showcases titled "Pickled Ginger." That's j...

Cleopatra in a moment of tender devotion to Antony Trimming Shakespeare, a customary practice, works toward producing a playable reduction of the original, sensitive to modern attention spans and the wish to privilege dramatic flow above all. Casting may force the combination of some minor roles, the elimination of others.  It's also a way of putting a director's vision  of the play in the foreground. Ryan T. Shelton, who directed the Improbable Fiction Theater Company's production of "Antony and Cleopatra" for the 2021 I ndy Bard Fest, says in a program note that "the idea of romance" took precedence. Several performances remain in the schedule at the Cat Theatre in Carmel. It's hard to imagine a version of this unique tragedy that didn't privilege the romance between the title characters, but what becomes of secondary interest in this show is the political matter of Roman imperial security after the assassination of Julius Caesar. The triumvir...

The Harlem Quartet, with an assertive mission of expanding string-quartet repertoire and audiences, gave a bright, energetic sample of its work Wednesday night in a program divided between a romantic masterpiece and a group of new works by a guest pianist, brother of its first violinist. Aldo Lopez-Gavilan writes music of florid surfaces and emotional depths. The five pieces that he and his string-quartet colleagues played after intermission at the Ensemble Music Society concert fill wide canvases with color and rhythm. Often they elaborate on repeated figures, resembling jazz improvisation over a hypnotic riff. The pulsating energy of dance music is never far from the surface. Harlem Quartet with pianist Aldo Lopez-Gavilan (second from left) Lopez-Gavilan's music often makes pictorial points, suggesting scoring for movies running only in the composer's mind. Such was the impression given by the first of the set that the ensemble offered a near-capacity audience at the Glick In...

Notes of triumph without the kind of exaltation that came more easily to Beethoven than it does now still prevailed in Michael Schelle' s "Resilience," a three-movement concerto for the unusual duo combination of viola and cello in the solo roles. A Schelle-Beethoven polarity was bracingly established in the first half of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra 's return to the concert stage Saturday night at Butler University's Schrott Center. Butler's longtime composer-in-residence has engaged with Beethoven directly in his prolific career, most memorably in the 1995 solo piano piece "Hammerstein," both a send-up of and a salute to the creator of 32 immortal piano sonatas. There is a wealth of parody, pop-culture commentary of edginess and charm, and unbuttoned cleverness throughout Schelle's music. "Resilience" puts aside mere cleverness (which Schelle will probably never abandon, and would never consider "mere") to wax autobiog...

The second installment of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra 's thematic programming in its 2021-22 Classical Series takes audiences to Hungary this weekend. Kristof Barati played two pieces inspired by Gypsy music associated with Hungary. Of course the travel theme has to be interpreted liberally to take in music merely  inspired by that of the destination, as is the case with two violin showpieces featured on the program. And composers have always moved around from time to time: you have many instances like the masterwork that concludes "Greetings from Hungary." It's music which comes as much from wartime New York City, especially given how touching a story there is behind the creation of Bela Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. The Hungarian master, one of a broad spectrum of European artists and intellectuals displaced by World War II and fleeing to the United States, was slowly dying and in need of artistic and personal validation in the country to which he had...

  Jon Gordon's sax rides upon arrangements. Full-canvas coverage by small bands seems to bring Jon Gordon 's musical ideas to fruition, if "Stranger Than Fiction" ( ArtistShare ) is any indication. A set of 10 pieces, a few of them terse, fill a recording in which downward-trending melodies are perked up by animated treatment, keyed to the airy vigor of Gordon's alto saxophone. The arrangements never wander, and the constituent voices are always clear. Endings are neither overstated nor collapsed into fade-outs, which almost always strike me as the result of indecision. The opening track is especially arresting, in that it shows how much Gordon's arrangements enjoy laying out instrumental voices: "Pointillism" indicates its link to Georges Seurat 's innovation in painting by building a crescendo across the ensemble in which every strand gets prominence before the tempo becomes regular and fast. As in the French master's art, precisely applied...

The Book Club suddenly becomes aware they're on camera. It would be kind of la-di-da to open a blog post with a couple of epigraphs, so I'll get my thoughts on Indiana Repertory Theatre 's "The Book Club Play" started with two quotations that might serve the same purpose. The first is also the title of a volume, published more than 40 years ago,  of essays by Marvin Mudrick, a fiercely independent literary critic. It poses a perennial, but seldom asked, question: "Books Are Not Life But Then What Is?"   The other is from a letter Franz Kafka wrote in 1904, containing an even more arresting thought: "Good Lord, we could be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to." After a few more startling insights into the kind of books the budding genius thought people need, Kafka's letter hits a climax which Borders, now defunct, isolated on those complimentary bookma...

 The striking way "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opens establishes the play's atmosphere of A successful marriage may be two people looking in the same direction, but not in the case of George and Martha. foreboding about as effectively as the first scene of "Hamlet," with its edgy nightwatch tension on a castle platform at Elsinore. Stumbling into their home from a late-night party at the university president's house, George and Martha  also stumble into a pop-culture dispute about movies. Many couples have had such conversations at a trivial level. With George and Martha, they strike deep. The failures of memory and a feisty lack of interest in each other's focus, whether it be momentary or permanent, offer a dark foreshadowing of the more tangled, confused narratives of a troubled marriage. The ghost of Hamlet's father has nothing on the unmet need of this academic couple for a private seminar on their relationship. New faculty wife Honey ...

Going back to the city's concert halls and theaters these days feels like entering a medical facility. As necessary as the protocols are for arts presenters getting back up to speed, I've felt both apprehensive and excited on the way in: mask in place, vaccination evidence at the ready. The healing implications of art have rarely been so clearly outlined. June makes Alice's job a little harder as Weezy looks on. This was particularly brought home to me attending "Alabaster" at Phoenix Theatre Saturday night. The National New Play Network 's rolling world premiere of Audrey Cefaly's searing drama places us in an atmosphere of suffering and deep privation. The difficult work of healing is held out, but withdrawn or compromised or mystified along the way. Of the four female characters, the focus of the process is June, the only survivor of her family's and its farm's devastation by an Alabama tornado. Recovery from severe physical injuries has left be...

Satirist appeared live to an almost full Palladium.  At the top of full-canvas political song parodies sits Randy Rainbow, who came to the Palladium Thursday night with a four-piece band behind him to accompany his singing. There were intervening monologues displaying  his pinpoint comic timing, and of course costume changes involving glittering suits and extravagant feather boas.There were also plenty of excerpts of his immense video archive, a YouTube sensation since 2016. The date is significant, of course, because that was the year the apparently unlikely candidacy of Donald Trump took off, swaggered through the Republican primaries, and was crowned with his stunning election to the U.S. presidency. Rainbow had already acquired a niche in celebrity-linked video sketch comedy, which he recapped in the autobiographical part of his show here. But Trump unleashed from him a flood of inspired original parody versions of tunes mostly from the Broadway stage. Rainbow's time h...

American Pianists Association, poised on the brink of a new era with a new CEO and recent evidence that it can run one of its competitions under pandemic constraints, opened its 2021-22 season Sunday afternoon presenting a spectrum of young pianists it has honored over the years. "Welcome Back!" shouted the program title. Frederic Chiu's link with APA goes back decades.  Earliest honoree in the group that took the Indiana Landmarks Center stage one by one was Frederic Chiu, who won his award in 1985, when APA was known as the Beethoven Foundation. Chiu grew up in Indianapolis and studied with the fondly remembered Dorothy Munger. He provides a kind of role model of building a career as a concert pianist imaginatively and interactively. Among his distinctions Sunday, he used a chair rather than an artist's bench, a touch of individuality that also made him stand out at the 1993 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, where a number of observers (including me) th...

Wary of weighing in on a theater production in its next-to-last performance, I nonetheless accepted director Ronan Marra's invitation to see "1980: Or, Why I'm Voting for John Anderson" Saturday night at Storefront Theatre of Indianapolis . Will, Robin, and Kathleen look over an itinerary. I've been curious about the Broad Ripple company, which has occupied space along a partly unoccupied southern stretch of Broad Ripple Avenue since 2019. The spacious underground home of the company has a performance space that suited this play's  bare-bones campaign-office setting. I look forward to seeing how it might suit much different presentations; technically, the place seems up to speed as far as lighting is concerned. The audience sits on opposite sides of the playing area. I chose the north, and wish I'd thought to move to the south for the second act to check how well the cast was playing to each. Patricia Cotter's script takes in a wide range of cultural a...

If we remain conflicted about immigration, our nation can at least greet people who are already American citizens with a hearty "Welcome to the United States of America." At any rate, that's the inarguable welcome the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra extends to its audience as it opens its 2021-22 Classical Series this weekend at Hilbert Circle Theatre. ISO guest conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya Maybe it takes thematic programming to make such a declaration sound less jingoistic than it might otherwise. The season rolls out from here with a strong international emphasis; concerts in the series  focus on a range of nations elsewhere. In two weeks, Hungary occupies the spotlight, followed by England in November. Miguel Harth-Bedoya, a Juilliard-trained native of Peru and conductor laureate of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, is the guest conductor of a program energetically introduced in a sparsely attended concert Friday night. Here's hoping a followup at 5:30 this after...