Jay Harvey Upstage

Fond of sketching out meandering suites that miraculously hold together, Kenny Banks Jr. Kenny Banks leans into his lively imagination. has once again showed his intuitive range, with hand-in-glove assistance from bassist Nick Tucker and drummer Kenny Phelps. As I caught  the trio's first set at the Jazz Kitchen Saturday night, my amusement ran slightly ahead of my confusion at separating familiar music as structurally important versus taking it in as extensive quotation. He's made his mark here, having leapt to prominence as a finalist in the 2019 jazz awards of the American Pianists Association. After the expansive unaccompanied introduction to the first selection, Phelps and then Tucker helped the performance jell around "Blowin' in the Wind." But Banks must feel his substantial departures from the Bob Dylan tune entitle him to present it as his own "American Canvas." There was certainly a lot of Banks' imagination rolled out along lines that didn...

Monique tries to cope under Pillowman's watchful eyes.  Most of us have probably had to put extra effort into seeing how much of the old normal we can bring forward into our lives since March 2019.  J.E. Hibbard's "Sweet Dreams, Pillowman" takes one newly single woman's approach to that difficulty and goes deep into the problem. The problem in her case is definitive. In American Lives Theatre 's production at the Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival , it takes a while for the audience to know just how severe the psychic costs have been.  The suspense is delightfully laid out before we are let in on the desperation of the woman's coping mechanism. Monique (Audrey Stonerock) seems to have  populated her messy apartment with three rodent companions (Carrie Powell, Maria Meschi, Chelsea Mullen), richly embodied in this show, whose chorus-line outbursts and sensitivities are projections of her state of mind. But their companionship goes only so far. Through cap...

Victoria Montalbano as Princess Leia I come to a show such as "The Princess Strikes Back" with an appropriate sense of intergalactic travel, Me as Hopalong cultural division. Any personal resonance of a pop-culture phenomenon upon my life faded after my Hopalong Cassidy phase in the early 1950s.  What kind of immense imaginative journey awaited a man who had long since hung up his cap guns and holsters and in the 70 years since has found no other mass-marketed phenomenon to admire intensely or emulate? To have a theater professional as polished and self-revealing as Victoria Montalbano thread "Star Wars" through her life as a teen and young woman, pursuing a strong interest in theater into her professional life, was my adventure into understanding people who forge iconic connections with fictional people. (I saved the illustrated booklet from the 1977 first run of the first film, free in the lobby in that largely pre-merch era, and seem to have misplaced it; I'v...

Professional dancers get the chance to display their creative chops in an attractive once-a-year format — no reason it shouldn't be a recurrent hit. The Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival tradition for Dance Kaleidoscope is to present an hour-long showcase of its members' works. It's an anthology of carefully cultivated bounty. Separation by circumstance and anxiety ini "Unending Waves." The 2022 assignment from artistic director David Hochoy was to focus on a recorded song or two from a decade of the choreographer's choice. As has long been the case, it's a treat to see how dancers realize their choreographic visions through the hard collaborative work of their colleagues. Most  of the decades chosen represent the heyday of vinyl records. The term has attained almost a kind of sanctity in our digital, streaming age. And it's not just for alliteration's sake that the title fits a program comprising original works by seven DK dancers. Unless the...

Even the most mechanical side-splitters on the stage are uplifting somehow. That's not the best argument for the reality of the spiritual life, but there it is. And it could be the path to insights generally not afforded to us this side of the grave. John Gay, whose "Beggar's Opera" deflated the fad for opera in Georgian England and who knew a thing or two about tickling the public ribs, summed it up in this epitaph couplet: Life's a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once, and now I know it. My debut at the 2022 Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival consisted of two adjacent productions on Indy Fringe's two home stages on St. Clair Street: "Tortillo 3: Sombrero's Revenge" and "Breakneck Comedy of Errors." Each production tends to highlight Gay's declared belief, as well as his after-death supposition that the ultimate truth is a joke. Tim Mooney: A man of many words and hats Let's look first at Tim Mooney 's latest ...

With only a spotty knowledge of French and seeing the title of a brilliant new Cedille release, my mind BOE: David Cunliffe, Desirée Ruhstrat, Aurélian Fort Pederzoli. went immediately to the most  familiar musical use of the word "orage" (storm). The original second act of "Les Troyens" by Hector Berlioz depicts the royal hunt and storm at the center point of the drama, and exemplifies the rare but significant extremes French romanticism was sometimes capable of. The Black Oak Ensemble 's "Avant l'orage: French String Trios 1926-1939"  hints at the storm of the Second World War that was to sap French cultural and political confidence for the second time in the 20th century's first half. But unlike the flamboyance Berlioz and others brought to French music in the previous century, the composers represented here express a search for balance, a measured sense of small-scale expressiveness and upholding the traditional French virtue of clarté  — ...

 Arts for Lawrence has staged an unfortunately delayed world premiere with "Benjamin Harrison Stenographer Alice Sanger and President Harrison confer. Chased a Goat," a play commissioned from Hank Greene. It ends a short run over the weekend at its theater at 8920 Otis Avenue, at the former fort named for the title character. The 23rd president of the United States moved to prominence in a period of national adjustment following the Civil War, with the emergent Republican Party riven by success as well as challenged by the broad-based Democratic Party.  "Benjamin Harrison Chased a Goat" exemplifies Ralph Waldo Emerson's confident, controversial prediction that biography was destined to replace history as a way to understand America. It is directed  by Christine Kruze with a firm resolve to highlight vividly how distinctive individuals shape history. When the first scene focuses on the figure of Caroline Harrison, the president's strongly assertive wife, the ...