“Homeland is a word used for power, really,” James McMurtry says. For over a decade now McMurtry’s been writing American stories and putting them to music. In a sense it’s the family business: His father, novelist Larry McMurtry, built a career taking on and breaking open the myths of the American West, looking for anything […]
Byron Woods
Bio: Byron Woods is the INDY's theater and dance critic.Email: [email protected]: http://twitter.com/byronwoods
Posted inArt
Labours, Lost and Found
When Jordan Smith, Rick Lonon and Tom Marriott step out from behind the curtain in tux, tie and tails, one can almost hear Dennis Hopper’s lines from Blue Velvet: How’d they get so damned suave? The last time a group this swanky got together, one of them was headlining at the Sands in Vegas. They […]
Posted inArt
Welcome Travesties
Tom Stoppard’s Travesties certainly qualifies as the chewiest play of the season, an intellectual four-course banquet that makes much of the fact that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lived in Zurich, Switzerland during the same year as James Joyce and Dadaist Tristan Tzara. In Stoppard’s work, they all cross paths–where else?–but in the library. While Lenin researches […]
Posted inGuides
Soulful Stew
Since it’s the end of September, Barbara Farrell is getting out the postcards and the stamps. Within the week, she’ll be sending out a brief announcement to a list that’s been steadily growing over the last 30 years. A lot of people in the Triangle are on it, of course–along with folks from Burlington, Greensboro […]
Posted inArt
Stripped Tease
In a sense, Peep! is a show which doesn’t need a critic. Up front, it concedes the point: it’s bad. From the start, master of ceremonies Bucky Sidewinder, a guy who looks like a grown-up corpulent Eddie Munster in a tux, rags on the show (“It’s an all new Peep. Whoop-de-damn-do.”), the audience (“suckers”), and […]
Posted inArt
Too Many Cooks, Just Enough Choreographers
“Comedy is hard,” David Parsons confessed last week. He was recounting the work he’s done on Too Many Cooks, his new multi-movement tribute to Mexican 1960s space-lounge composer Juan Garcia Esquivel, since its initial showings in Cincinnati, Allentown and Washington, D.C., earlier this year. Parsons heard Esquivel on public radio last year just as he […]
Posted inNews
Stephanie Reinhart 1944-2002
You could tell that they’d aged well together, that the two made a good team. They sat together, nearly at right angles to each other. They were comfortable with the topic and with each other, open to inquiry and speculation–both clearly interested in the larger conversation about the art. Stephanie Reinhart’s knowledge of international dance […]
Posted inArt
The Second Coming of Pigmeat Markham
It was Torrey B. Lawrence as I’d never seen him before. He staggered out from the wings, and paused by an upstage dumpster to mimic urinating against its side with his back turned to us. He then careened none too steadily toward center stage, his zipper still at half-mast. At that point, his character, Linwood, […]
Posted inGuides
High Noon at the Rialto
High Noon at the Rialto, Burning Coal Theatre Company, Rialto Theatre, Oct. 12 One of the best-kept secrets in regional theater until it was discontinued in 2001, this Saturday series of edgy, staged readings served a number of purposes. It gave regional audiences their first glimpse at a number of important modern playwrights–and it encouraged […]
Posted inArt
The Working Stage
We actually saw theater do some heavy lifting, for a change, last week. Since the show was inadequately publicized, you might have missed it–which would have been a pity, since it’s a rare enough sight, even in this area. Carolina Arts Festival’s production of The Guys, Anne Nelson’s spare and undeniably moving tribute to the […]