On a recent trip home, I spent a few hours rummaging through my parents’ basement. While wading through boxes of old Christmas ornaments, stacks of yellowed Life magazines and bags of old clothing, I came across a rare treasure: a box of Polaroid photos. The pictures captured my parents’ early married life, the honeyed eyes […]
Kathy Justice
Posted inNews
Lamine Soumano
It’s not impossible to track down West African musician Lamine Soumano, but it’s hard: He’s elusive electronically, at least according to Google. He has a record label and a MySpace profile. There, he has 39 views and three friends. And nowin America to promote his first album, Sacred Grovehe’s never in the same place for […]
Posted inNews
Talk to me
Directed by Kasi Lemmons (Eve’s Bayou), Talk to Me is the story of radio personality Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene (Don Cheadle), an ex-con and former drug addict-turned-political activist and comedy personality. An interesting story in himself, Greene is a loud-mouthed prophet, spitting out jive and derogating politicians and bigwig personalities with sharp-tongued wit. We also […]
Posted inArt
Wait Until Dark; King Lear; Briarpatch
Wait Until Dark Hot Summer Nights at the Kennedy, Raleigh Through Aug. 5 In a grand departure from the usual rom-com machinations that have dominated this summer’s Hot Summer Nights production schedule, Raleigh’s Kennedy Theatre offers a classic suspense-drama full of thrills, chills and spills in its latest production of Frederick Knott’s Wait Until Dark. […]
Posted inArt
Lonely Words; Briarpatch; 10 by 10 in the Triangle
Lonely Words University Theatre, NCCU Campus Through July 29 In Durham playwright Howard Craft’s latest production, the subject of HIV/AIDS in the African-American community serves as a springboard for a discourse about truth, lies and, ultimately, the power of words. Taking its title from a Billy Joel song about the loneliness of supreme honesty, Lonely […]
Posted inArt
New this week: Romance/Romance
Romance/Romance Hot Summer Nights at the Kennedy Through July 15 Will true love conquer all? That is the question posed by Barry Harman and Keith Herrmann’s comic musical Romance/Romance, in which two separate tales of male and female flirtations and relationsone set in the past and one in the presentilluminate the darker and decidedly more […]
Posted inArt
Blithe Spirit; The Full Monty
Blithe Spirit Hot Summer Nights at the Kennedy Through June 17 When art imitates life, the results can be astonishingly humorous and altogether well-conceived. This is especially true when considering Noel Coward’s dark romantic comedy Blithe Spirit in relation to the millennium’s escalating divorce rate and marital disharmony. In the late 1940s, when Coward penned […]
Posted inMusic
An unlikely pair, Tir Na Nog and WKNC bring local rock and beer downtown
It’s close to 10 p.m. on a Thursday night in downtown Raleigh, and the city streets are empty. Stragglers pass through Moore Square Park, and a few casual diners perch at outdoor tables, chatting beneath the warm glow of surrounding street lamps: All is quiet on Blount Street. The clock moves closer to the hour […]
Posted inArt
The Full Monty; At the Vanishing Point
The Full Monty Raleigh Little Theatre Through June 24 Transferring a hit film to the stage is never an easy feat, but writer Terrence McNally and musician David Yazbek have created a foolproof formula in their adaptation of 1997’s Academy Award-nominated hit The Full Monty. And just as the film came with an R rating, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Bad Pirates, good Waitress
It’s important to remember the aspect of context when looking at the third installment of Disney’s swashbuckling franchise Pirates of the Caribbean. The first two films (The Curse of the Black Pearl and Dead Man’s Chest) were little more than animations of the swarthy waxen characters in the semi-macabre Disney theme park ride. Pillaging, rum-guzzling […]
