Jay Harvey Upstage

Among theater people, there might be reasonable suspicion of  English majors, particularly when it comes to evaluating productions of classic plays. With Shakespeare, literary study of the texts threatens to treat theatricality as secondary. I have fought against this tendency in me because understanding the Shakespeare canon as literature is the overwhelming focus in the classroom. I never had a teacher who concentrated on Shakespeare as theater. It's  always helpful to remember that the Bard was a man of the theater who never took the trouble to have definitive texts published, necessitating the First Folio and keeping centuries of scholars occupied ever since. That's enough throat-clearing to get into this account of how I took in "King Lear" on opening night in an IndyShakes production at Taggart Memorial Amphitheater in White River State Park .   It's clearly the job of anyone seeing a new production who has read the play to interpret production decisions. T...

A treasured album's cover, not much worse for wear You don't have to be a trombone player except in fantasy to enjoy a trombone-heavy jazz band, especially if your record collection includes "Jay & Kai + 6."  That's a Columbia LP from the 1950s with a marvelous cartoon by the great Arnold Roth on the cover and co-leader Kai Winding's name spelled two different ways, because "Kai" is not really pronounced "Kay," but publicists must have liked the rhyme cementing  the Danish trombonist's hit partnership with J.J. Johnson. It was Johnson who of course was the greater innovator on the brass instrument in jazz, and it doesn't require being from his hometown of Indianapolis to proclaim this. But whether as a duo or in this record's assemblage, Winding was a simpatico partner in tandem with J.J., and an excellent arranger as well.  At the Jazz Kitchen Sunday evening,   Naptown Trombone Collective paid tribute to the trailblazing ...

As with many  who exile themselves with distinction from a provincial upbringing, the curiosity that fed Janet Flanner's writing career was nurtured in the world she left behind. Before she was dubbed "Gen ê t" by New Yorker magazine founder-editor Harold Ross, she carried the prestige of a well-established Indianapolis family, a talented daughter who got a brief start in journalism here as movie critic for the News. She came out as a lesbian after a likewise brief marriage, then settled in the French capital, where her "Letter from Paris" was a regular feature in the well-written and -edited, and eventually well-heeled, magazine. "They Call Me  Gen ê t ," D. Paul Thomas' lively, variegated interpretation of the New Yorker' s European correspondent for a half-century,  takes Janet Flanner off the glossy page as so much more than a prestigious byline. As an extended "au revoir" to Paris set in 1975, it brings the thorough, exacting rep...