The Fringe Festival (July 30-Aug.9) released its complete schedule today, a 20-page program encompassing 160 shows at 22 different venues. No one knows anything about this year’s crop of shows yet, but here are the ones I’d pay $12 to see—and why:

Read more.

Macy’s announced that Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Ne-Yo will headline this year’s Macy's Glamorama rock/fashion extravaganza, which benefits the Children’s Cancer Research Fund. Joining Ne-Yo will be local jazz combo The New Standards. Friday, Aug. 14, 8 p.m., The Orpheum Theatre. Tickets range from $75-$1,000

Read more.

There was a lot of guitar in my life last week. Between Shon Troth’s expert slide work at Rock the Garden, to Eric Clapton and Stevie Winwood trading licks at Xcel, and Johnny Swardson at the Stone Arch Festival, I’m all set. But the musical highlight of the week came from an old piano man: Allen Toussaint.

Read more.

Pardon the Yogi Berra-ism, but some classics really are classics. During the opening scene of the touring production of A Chorus Line, stopping at the Orpheum this week, I got the same jangly, overwhelmed-with-panic emotional feeling, in my stomach, in my throat, behind my eyes, that Spider Man must get when Dr. Octopus sneaks up on him.  In the opening scene, Zach, portrayed by Kevin McCready, is trying out a herd of dancers auditioning for his show. He singles a couple of performers out—“red headband, keep your head up!” But most of them go through in groups without any feedback at all. Maybe this is what was getting to me—I was having karate practice flashbacks or basketball practice flashbacks. Anybody who’s been at the back line of an aerobics or a ballroom dance class, or a soccer practice, or even a PowerPoint training seminar knows what it’s like to feel disoriented, flailing a little, a step behind the rest, struggling to tread water and remain unnoticed until you catch up, until you get it (hopefully).

Read more.

The theremin is an electronic instrument, patented in 1928, which consists of a couple of antennae that the performer does not actually need to touch to make sound. Instead, the performer simply waves his hands in the air around the antennae, calling forth sounds almost as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra. The theremin has a buzzy tone and no set tuning (it slides right across pitches as the performer’s hands move, rather than stepping neatly from one note to the next), and so, while theremin virtuosi exist (and can play, you know, “Ave Maria”), I think that Justin Jones and his partner in crime, Elliott Durko Lynch, have found the true use of the theremin—as a toy for avant-garde performance.

Read more.

Earlier this year, The Jungle Theater had planned to present a stage version of Around the World in 80 Days, but decided instead to present Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies’ Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told by Himself), a play that could just as easily have been called Around the World in Thirty Years.

Read more.

By now, you’ve probably heard the news that a Guthrie-produced play—Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures—is finally bound for Broadway (sometime in 2010, it appears)—and that the Guthrie “disinvited” theater critics from New York and Chicago from seeing the play in its current incarnation, presumably because it’s not yet the work of art Kushner wants it to be.

Read more.

Word of mouth going into Friday night’s world premiere of the new play by Tony Kushner—The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures—was a bit unsettling. “It’s three-and-a-half hours long,” people were saying, as if plays have some sort of built-in pain/misery index that crosses the ethical bounds of torture somewhere around the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Reports of Kushner writing feverishly all day and delivering whole new scenes to the cast two hours before curtain made the greatest living playwright of our time sound more like a procrastinating teenager who can’t get his homework in on time. Then there was Kushner himself, in print and on the radio, humbly lowering everyone’s expectations, asking people—especially critics—to think of it as more of a workshop production than a finished play.

Read more.

Tony Kushner is not known for brevity, but the five short plays being presented at the Guthrie Theater under the banner Tiny Kushner demonstrate that the Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright of the epic Angels in America can go short—and, even at his shortest, he still goes on longer than is technically necessary to get his point across. 

Read more.

By now, a critical consensus has congealed around the Walker Art Center’s latest exhibit, The Quick and the Dead, a show that purports to “reach beyond itself and the limits of our knowledge and experience” to ask “what is alive and dead within the legacy of conceptual art?” Almost everyone who has written about it thus far is in agreement that the show, curated by Peter Eleey, the WAC’s new visual arts curator, is the best exhibit the Walker has pulled off in years—an “intelligent and elusive” show (as ArtForum’s David Velasco described it) that puts the Walker back on the cutting-edge of contemporary art after veering so dangerously close to populism with such pandering people-pleasers as Picasso and American Art, Frida Kahlo, and currently, Live Forever: Elizabeth Payton. Finally, it seems, the WAC has gotten back to what it does best—confounding people with that special brand of weird that can only be found in the world’s finest museums. 

Read more.