Swagger, Not Style

Imperfection as Ideology: Kurt Vile at the Black Cat Backstage

Chris — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:55:44 +0000

It’s perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of a musician with as mighty a moniker as Kurt Vile. If that was a stage name (it’s not*) the intimation would be of the most confrontational, petulant punk, but the Philadelphia-based Vile’s defiantly primitive, accident-prone songs are lazier and hazier than that, rarely straying from the [...]

Cate Blanchett DuBois’s Streetcar

Chris — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:03:20 +0000

There’s a huge star at the center of the Sydney Theatre Company’s much-hyped, Liv Ullman-directed, wholly satisfying new staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, which sold out its Kennedy Center run before the curtain rose on the first preview. I speak, of course, of the dramatist Tennessee Williams. That’s no slight on Cate Blanchett, who [...]

Shut Up and Swing: (The Top Half of) Travis at Jammin’ Java

Chris — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:21:56 +0000

More than ever on the concert circuit, nostalgia is the move. With everyone from Liz Phair to Public Enemy to The Pixies (and those are just the P’s) devoting gigs and sometimes entire tours to reviving their seminal albums in sequence, lots of long-lived performers — particularly those strugging to get even their cult [...]

Woolly Mammoth’s “Full Circle,” review’d

Chris — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:28:07 +0000

When we say that Woolly Mammoth’s production of Charles L. Mee’s decade-old satirical farce Full Circle is a sprawling affair, we don’t mean merely that it’s forever threatening to collapse under its own allegorical girth. As directed by Michael Rohd, the show is performed promenade-style, appropriating almost every public area of the building as a [...]

Scena Theatre, Doubling Down on the Poe

Chris — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:05:15 +0000

Halloween is done and gone, but Scena Theatre’s aptly sepulchral Poe double-header — The Fall of the House of Usher followed after intermission by director Robert McNamara’s solo performance of The Tell-Tale Heart — is still neatly matched to the season. Not only is Usher set, in one of several Poe phrasings that playwright [...]

Sometimes the Movie Is as Good as the Book: Nick Hornby Interviewed, Part the Second

Chris — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:19:35 +0000

I spoke with the the great novelist and essayist Nick Hornby about a month ago, just prior to his swing through Our Nation’s Capitol to promote his swell new novel Juliet, Naked, which we discussed at some length. His other current release, the film An Education, for which he wrote the screenplay, opens here [...]

Three Guys Walk onto a Non-Metaphorical Dock: Quotidian Theatre’s “Port Authority”

Chris — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:31:36 +0000

Conor McPherson’s unshowily devastating three-hander Port Authority is stocked with premises that are, summarized in their most reductive forms, utterly familiar: I Love Her But She Loves Someone Else, I Loved Her But the Flame Has Cooled, I Loved Her But She Died. So it’s a credit to McPherson’s humane, observant pen — and to [...]

Live Last Night: The Gaslight Anthem at the 9:30 Club

Chris — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:10:01 +0000

Look, Bruce Springsteen and Joe Strummer didn’t invent this stuff, either. The greased hair and the leathers and the overdriven takes of Mad Men-era rock standards already had a blanket of dust on them a generation thick by the time The Boss and The Clash got around to them. Jersey pomade-punks The Gaslight Anthem are [...]

People (Don’t) Change: Nick Lowe at Wolf Trap

Chris — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:24:04 +0000

The great Nick Lowe was in reprise mode at the Barns of Wolf Trap last night. You can hear an NPR podcast of his September 2007 set at the Birchmere here, which is pretty much the same show he performed at the Barns, with the small exceptions I noted in my DCist review. [...]

Diamond Hard, Osmium Heavy: Them Crooked Vultures at the 9:30 Club

Chris — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:11:48 +0000

As long as John Bonham and Kurt Cobain stay dead, there’s probably no more intriguing a musical home* for their former bandmates John Paul Jones and Dave Grohl, respectively, than Them Crooked Vultures, newest and superest of the supergroups. At the 9:30 Club last night, rock’s own Justice League stuck to what’s been standard [...]