Jay Harvey Upstage

Intense and topically urgent, "TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever" hints at its satirical thrust in the style of the title, resembling as it does middle-school graffiti. Serious issues lie beneath its sketchy presentation, but the show's atmosphere is overall comical.  The one-act play opens this weekend in a production at Fonseca Theatre Company. As seen Friday night, the show is vibrant under Josiah McCruiston's direction. It doesn't paint with as broad a brush as the director's notes suggest, but he clearly wants it to be open to an interpretation that advocates tearing down all barriers to equality that have stood firm historically. TJ makes his exra-academic intentions clear to Sally. The figures identified in the title are in one sense Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, and his enslaved mistress, Sally Hemings. Her contemporary namesake is played by Chandra Lynch as an ambitious graduate student focused on entering the academic world with her dig...

The stability of a 75-year-old downtown business lies behind the continuing viability of the Serenade Jazz Orchestra , a big band with a wide repertoire under the direction of Rick Oldham, who's part of a Diane Tsao with the Serenade Jazz Orchestra powerhouse saxophone section and emcee of its appearance Tuesday night at the Jazz Kitchen .  Oldham's business stature came up just once as he concisely guided a first-set full house through 15 selections. He told the story of how he got enthusiastic permission from Freddie Hubbard's family to include an image of the trumpeter (who died in 2008) in the 2012 mural that adorns the south wall of Musicians' Repair and Sales on North Capitol Street. The anecdote was by way of introducing a zesty reading of Hubbard's "Sky Dive." The 16-piece band got off to a conventional start with a piece guaranteed to get a Pavlovian response from big-band aficionados: Glenn Miller's "In the Mood" with its familiar ...

A favorite recorder virtuoso and subtle showman here in the century's teens , Matthias Maute  returned Matthias Maute, eminent festival guest Sunday to front an all-star band of regionally active early-music instrumentalists for the finale of the 2023 Indianapolis Early Music Festival . The concert invitingly promised "The Four Nations of Vivaldi" as a title designed to have the public think of Antonio Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," his set of wildly popular, much-recorded violin concertos linked to descriptive sonnets. But instead of increasingly unpredictable seasonal contrasts, the nations referred to spotlighted England, France, Spain, and India (also unpredictable then and now in the political sphere) in a manner that required the reconstructive ingenuity of Maute himself to amount to a highly selective musical gazetteer.  Each one of the concertos carried a prelude of national tone-painting, not by Vivaldi, designed to help call to mind the respective coun...

 "Musical agent of depravity"? That's how a late-16th-century writer characterized the madrigal, and that's where Les Canards Chantants planted its flag in Friday's concert, presented by the Indianapolis Early Music Festival. The phrase appears in a program note to the concert, provocatively titled "Sex, Drugs and Madrigals." The suggestion of an unholy trinity is deliberate. The ensemble of six singers and one theorbo player imaginatively staged the program to bring out the expressive heft of each piece. The range of emotions that came to full musical flower in the Italian Renaissance allowed the ensemble to fill their accuracy of intonation, their unanimous phrasing, and unshakable balance with gestures and movement appropriate to the repertoire.  The point of entry  into the program was a piece by Adriano Willaert, with the "o" added to his Christian name to indicate his stature in his adopted homeland of Italy. The Flemish master can stand...

Ferdinand, King of Navarre, and his lordly attendant Berowne practice avoiding women while a couple of visiting French huntresses regard them mockingly in the background. (Company publicity photo) The artificiality of the King of Navarre's decision to create and maintain a small group of male attendants abjuring the company of women gets a broader cultural grounding through the images and practices of yoga in Indianapolis Shakespeare Company 's production of "Love's Labor's Lost." This orientation poses both opportunities and problems for the show, which opened Thursday night at the troupe's wonderful home of Taggart Memorial Amphitheatre at Riverside Park . Some of the satirical thrust of Shakespeare's comedy gets redirected toward yoga and its cross-cultural vogue from the late 20th century into our own time.  The focus on overgrown and elaborate language is thus somewhat reduced, yet, on the plus side, the King's peculiar decision seems less ab...

Beef & Boards' "Sophisticated Ladies" cast dazzles in "Cotton Tail." Duke Ellington never let the benefits of being a middle-class black man in the early 20th century overwhelm him. He knew there were limits, but he had the wit to surmount them. He also had the canniness to turn his developing genius to advantage in a world not set up to reward black creativity.  When not long after his death in 1974, Broadway mounted the tribute show called "Sophisticated Ladies," Ellington's aura still glowed through the well-nourished stability and sturdy artistic aptitude of his band, in addition to his suave manner and unique style at the keyboard.  In Beef & Boards ' new production, the band is prominently displayed. For the overture, it's fitting that music director Teneh Karimu stands before the ensemble, white-jacketed with a gold-glitter back, wielding a baton, even though it's not representative of Ellington's onstage style. It pu...

Troilus and Cressida dance their romantic bond. Patches of great writing close to the Bard's highest level can't smooth the way in the late "problem play" he drew from the fabled Trojan War recounted in Homer's "Iliad." As adapted to focus more on the plight of women in ancient Troy as Greek invaders laid siege, "Troilus and Cressida: The Musical" brings Marcia Eppich-Harris' ambitious grasp of the classics to the fore of Southbank Theatre Company 's offerings in its short history.  The Shakespeare play's tangles of plot and character remain, though the abundance of songs lends plenty of melodic lilt to a dramatic structure rife with hyperactive masculinity and the cynicism and hypocrisy that often accompany it. There may be too many songs: Some are sketches, yet apt to their dramatic moment. But the abundance occasionally leads to their coming across sketchily in performance.  Military values are sturdily upheld in the classics, a ...

Somewhere in reported Miles Davis lore, there's an anecdote about his visit to a New York City club to Michael Davis sets full-bore recovery mode in his sights. check out Buddy Rich's big band. Apart from his hermit period on West 77th Street, the revered trumpeter was known for wanting to hear what everyone was up to and to be a big-eared man about town. His opinions were typically crisp and assertive, whether positive or not. Anyway, Miles observed to his companion in the midst of a fiery Rich performance something like this: "See what he did there with that little bit? He swung the whole band." That's what I would like to think of what Jared Schonig applies to the scintillating performance of bandleader Michael Davis' composition "State of the Art," as arranged for his first-class Hip-Bone Band on "Open City" ( Hip-Bone Music ). Driving the band's post-Covid cavorting, Schonig's drumming is joined at the hip to everything the en...

Tymisha Harris as Josephine The search for personal identity in a weltering world can sometimes seem like a core 21st-century problem. Among the many ways that search has been carried out earlier in the history of prominent people that of  Josephine Baker , an expatriate entertainer known and loved by the French public from the 1920s until her death in 1975. Hers is an extraordinary example of what it means to invent, and re-invent, oneself. As the District Theatre show "Josephine" indicates, as a black girl in St. Louis during the racially explosive 'teens, she entered show business in the most vulnerable condition imaginable. She was a prime target for exploitation and a rough education in the school of hard knocks. In two scintillating acts, Tymisha Harris outlines a portrait that draws on Josephine's nascent charisma and her somewhat slower-to-develop skills.  Harris designed the costumes and choreographed the show. An earlier version played Indianapolis at the 20...