Jay Harvey Upstage

  Why not start at home with "Justifiably J.J." (Summit Records ), John Fedchock's tribute to a master Light and shadow of top trombone: John Fedchock trombonist? Here is my impression of the last of eight tracks, recorded when Fedchock came to town to celebrate the centenary of J.J. Johnson last March at the Jazz Kitchen . The new disc closes with "Ten 85," memorializing the house number of  Johnson's last residence in his hometown. It's one of those compositions as  confirming of Johnson's immortality as his trombone playing. It zips along as the theme unfolds, bright and life-affirming, before yielding to an exhibition of the fleet style Johnson developed as he showed that the nimbleness of bebop could be adapted to an instrument not by nature suited to it. He displayed the agility of the trumpet, without the need to extend the trombone's range ever upward. In heading a quartet of Indiana jazz masters — pianist Steve Allee, bassist Jeremy Al...

Patriarchy can have life-defining consequences at home, especially when its lofty representative in a boy's Travis Abels about to be devoured by sin monster life is a beloved father. "Things I Hide From Dad" is an autobiographical IndyFringe Festival show of compelling intensity and focus that has three more performances at the District Theatre .  This personal account from a Hoosier man long resident on the West Coast, where he went on a painful journey of self-liberation, is lively and exquisitely designed. Recorded sound and Travis Abels ' movements around the stage are coordinated to a fare-thee-well and always germane to his narrative.  His struggles to reconcile his admiration for his father with the pulls of his body toward forbidden pleasures are symbolized by a secret closet. Into it Travis keeps trying to confine temptations as they accumulate and become monstrous. The boy's acceptance of the cult-like variation of Christianity that his pastor father a...

  Paco Erhard knows his people well, and his "5-Step Guide to Being German" drives that knowledge Paco bends over backwards for Germany. home, with useful supplements on people he's gotten to know on his extensive travels. Americans' devotion to the flag, he supposes, is intended to reassure them they are still in their own country, and haven't been as footloose as he. Most of us know the word "Wanderlust" as well as we do "Gesundheit!" A native of Munich, the comedian turned his given name into his surname and put "Paco" in front at the suggestion of a neighbor in Spain, where he was studying many years ago. Like most Spaniards, apparently, she couldn't handle the letter "h," making "Erhard" come out as a kind of guttural stammer, a throat-clearing mess. "Paco," on the other hand, rolls off the tongue across the globe. Certainly fluency of thought and language is at the center of Erhard's comed...

Though it's not required, summer camps often boost their uniqueness with scary tales featuring local boogeymen, always effective around the campfire. In IndyFringe Festival' s "Camp Summer Camp," a mystery holds the plot together like a crafts project executed by an all-thumbs camper.  But that's all to the good for the sort of ensemble "laff riot" Defiance Comedy specializes in. The show is a successor to 2023's "Being Rob Johansen," a parody that also thrust forward the Defianceista named in the title. Even so, the energy was distributed well, with a small host of off-the-wall characterizations shaped to a focused result. Thus it continues in "Camp Summer Camp."  If you have summer camp experience, it may resemble this show only obliquely, but that will be enough to resonate amid the generalized madness. Adolescent as well as preteen self-consciousness will generate anxiety and curiosity, as it did in my memory of camp. One of ...

 If you have ever said to yourself, urging acceptance of a situation you don't understand and cannot Tim Mooney concentrates the identity action of "Twelfth Night." change, "It is what it is," you have lived in Shakespeare's Illyria, landlocked in reality, but with a seacoast to suit the playwright's purposes. Indianapolis has benefited from two striking full-staged productions of "Twelfth Night" in recent years: Southbank's vivid, musically rich one in 2022, and a party-hearty, expansive version at Indianapolis Shakespeare Company's old White River State Park home, when in 2015 the company carrried the acronym HART as identifier. How people identify is central to the plot and character twists of the Bard's comedy, making the show ripe in 2024 for the kind of freeze-dried treatment Tim Mooney specializes in. "Breakneck Twelfth Night" lives up to the squeezes Mooney has put on "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet...

 The august setting of Indiana Landmarks'   Grand Hall offered a nice upgrade for an advance look at August's main theatrical dazzle here: the IndyFringe Fest , whose history has had much to do with putting Mass Ave on many a local destination fun list. Previous previews I've attended have been under a tent outside Station No. 2 Firefighters Museum  on the Skipping, leaping, floating: Snowflake in action Avenue near one of downtown's busiest intersections. Without distractions, Wednesday night's performances unfolded onstage under the decorative organ pipes of the Grand Hall.  They were meticulously timed at two minutes each under the enthusiastic control of "Snowflake," a mime/dancer/timekeeper of grace, verve, and surefire comedy improv skills. Two others shared emcee duties, near the stage, from the back, and up and down the aisles. There was always something to look at, with quips and information thrown in during brief pauses between Fringe performers...

It's not surprising that family values are an enduring issue of political and cultural resonance.  Even at Ensemble: Bridget (from left), Emma, Alice, Lizzie their gory worst, they are in part responsible for the pop-culture fascination with Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted of the 1892 murders of her socially prominent father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. What went on there for a long time before the reputed double parricide of Aug. 4, 1892? Speculation and sleuthing have been rife for 132 years. The heroine of "Lizzie," a musical by Steven Cheslik-deMeyer and Alan Stevens Hewitt that's just opened at Phoenix Theatre , refers to herself as "the Yankee Clytemnestra" in one song. The link to ancient sources of violent death in the family amounts to a natural cultural archetype for this New England legend of enduring allure. The creators of the musical take what's known to be true and exploit it, weaving in legendary elements, through relia...