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Archive: September, 2011
Music critic Brian Wilensky gives you the rundown on a week of live music.
Monday: Music follows lots of trends and lots of people like trendy music. Take Toro Y Moi as an example. His real name is Chaz Bundick and his recent success comes from the surge of sub-musical-genres known as electro-pop and chillwave. Said sub-genres can be defined with this question, “Will clothes sell if this music is paired with an Urban Outfitters commercial?” 8 p.m., $14-$15, w/ Unknown Mortal Orchestra & Coma Cinema, First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St., 215-563-3980.
Tuesday: Japandroids are just a couple dudes from Vancouver that like to play loud rock music about girls and that epic night over the weekend that was just too much fun. Lyrical spoiler alert: “I don’t wanna worry about dyin’/I just wanna worry about those sunshine girls,” “Young Hearts Spark Fire.” 8 p.m., $12, w/ Bass Drum of Death, Kung Fu Necktie, 1250 N. Front St., 215-291-4919.
Wednesday: While Glen Matlock may not rock quite like he did with the Sex Pistols before being replaced by Sid Vicious, he stayed partially in the scene with a whole laundry list of bands between 1977 and 2011 AD. Last year he put out Born Running with his band The Philistines and it rocks, but in a rockstar that’s been around since the 70s kind of way. 8 p.m., $15, w/ Traci Hunter, Jukebox Zeros & Mean Streets, North Star Bar, 2639 Poplar St., 215-787-0488.
Shantala Shivalingappa conveys more with her hands and arms than most do with their entire bodies. In all four works of her solo show, Namasya, she sculpted her upper limbs in wondrous ways to relay a world of emotions from subdued to strong. Same goes for the rest of her body, which is an elegant fine-tuned instrument. Shivalingappa’s stage presence is a beacon of concentrated energy, powerfully shedding light on interior thoughts (and perhaps remembrances) that are like poetic fragments of multifaceted stories. Sharpen your focus and you can become mesmerized by the depths of the movement.
Last show is tonight, Sept. 12, 8 p.m., Arts Bank at the University of the Arts, 601 South Broad St. MORE INFO HERE.
Philly Improv Theatre and its audience have fun with Friends of Alcatraz. This is not the famous prison. It’s a saucy cat with many intriguing friends. The friends all have complicated stories — even the rabbi. This is clever amusing theater presented by talented and whimsical performers. Good music, clever staging… this is a very pleasant — no, better than that — a whimsical, thoughtful Fringe offering. You’ll leave laughing and applauding. If you think puppets aren’t your thing, you might have a different view after seeing what the PHIT performers have put together to amuse themselves and you.
Through Sept. 17, Mainstage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St. MORE INFO HERE.
Malasian twee-pop princess Zee Avi does everything sweet. Those sugardrop strings, that high, honeyed voice — it's all just blissed and blessed, somewhere between Laura Marling's fragile melodies and the pristine catchiness of the Cardigans. It'll be interesting to see if she wilts in the open air at Popped thrives in the sunlight.
Also playing Popped: Shins, The Hold Steady, Pains of Being Pure of Hearts, Girl Talk Black Thought and more. Fri. and Sat., Sept. 23 and 24, Single-day tickets $59.50, both days $110, FDR Park, near Broad and Pattison, poppedphiladelphia.com.
Man Cave is a testosterone-laden Monday feature that highlights the weekend haps of a pop culture-loving Philly dude.
This weekend I checked out one of Philly Improv Theater's many contributions to the Fringe Festival. Produced by Alex J. Gross and Ian Vaflor, it's a pro-wrestling spoof called Pro-Mania!. Any wrestling fan will want to see this, because I know you have a good enough sense of humor to appreciate the peccadilloes of your favorite variety of sports entertainment. Pro-mania! is more silly than satire though, and the half-sketched half-improvised show (much like an actual pro-wrestling event, if I'm not mistaken) is an absurdist cavalcade of high-enegery, very crowd-interactive shenaniganry. Odd chanting ensued.
Devoted poet/avid concert-goer/nerd-grrrl extraordinaire Jane Cassady's weekly horoscopes run in this space every Friday morning (except when we forget and run them on Monday!).
Virgo (Aug. 24-Sept. 23): “You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees/ For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body/ love what it loves.” (Mary Oliver, Wild Geese) Nor do you have to keep trying to prove to everyone how easygoing you are, how little you need.
Libra (Sept. 24-Oct. 21): “You may be my lucky star, ‘cause you make the darkness seem so far.” (Madonna) To the Libra who recently decided to re-take-up poetry: we’re shining on your every stanza.
Scorpio (Oct. 22-Nov. 22): “Want you to make me feel, like I’m the only girl in the world, like I’m the only one you’ll ever love, like I’m the only one who knows your heart.” (Rihanna) Yes, Rihanna, this is possible, even if you are just one star in a vast constellation.
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As puppet theater, Nick Allin and Lindsey Burkland’s clever, playful production of Ionesco’s play is kinda sloppy: The walls of the dollhouse-size apartment set are continually toppling over, the puppetry is of the “little kids shaking dolls to simulate conversation” variety, and the performers occasionally forget the
setting altogether, standing up from the tabletop stage to address each other directly. But this isn’t a puppet show, exactly. The performers’ testy interactions add an extra layer of discontent to the original; where the 15-year-old, stubbornly growing corpse in the bedroom represents all manner of encroaching miseries on the couple’s marriage, the puppeteer’s rolled eyes and agitated snatching of props suggests the entire production is a bit of passive-aggressive role-play.
Jay Nachman’s one-man show about his father’s death from lung cancer is a sweet and funny portrait of a grown man’s childlike adoration of his perfect father. Nachman’s soft, raspy voice is endearing, and his gentle humor carries the show, a mixture of storytelling and observational humor. The delivery is a little stiff, highlighted by Nachman’s relaxed appearance in a post-show Q&A, but still appealing enough to keep the audience chuckling and contemplating the fates of their own loved ones. I wouldn’t like to be Nachman’s father’s girlfriend, but I wouldn’t mind being in the family.
Through Sept. 17, $15, Grasso’s Magic Theater, 103 Callowhill St., MORE INFO HERE.
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Pure magic for adults and children alike, The Green Fairy Cabaret at the School of Circus Arts had children wide-eyed, and adults taking deep breaths, from a juggler with an unusual skill to a clown who joined the audience to a woman who climbed to the ceiling, hand over hand, on a long silken cloth, sliding slowly down to the floor. Performers fearlessly tackled dangerous feats without nets, and managed to survive while the audience held its collective breath. They've made their case -- you leave thinking this is much more than circus stunts, it's an art form.
There's something about seeing a disheveled, hunched-over, makeup-aged Brian Sanders being hoisted up in the air by a company of undead friends while "Bridge Over Troubled Water" plays in the background that makes me weepy. And for good reason: Sanders' Dancing Dead is a tribute, of sorts, to those in the choreographer's life who've recently passed. (More on that here.)
But all the heavy stuff of death is leavened delightfully by this JUNK cast, zombified but as acrobatic and limber as ever, throwing themselves onto the graveyard floor and swinging with the greatest of ease from suspended ropes in the appropriately dingy sub-basement of 444 Lofts.
The fact that Sanders here plays a groundskeeper who's only partly in on the Thriller-y action means we don't get to see him dance as much as we'd like (read: all the time), and pretty much every seat in the venue could be argued as obstructed-view, but JUNK's funky blend of quirk and elegance more than makes up for any minor quibbles. As far as I'm concerned, it's his best work yet.
Through Sept. 17, $25, Sub-Basement at 444 Lofts, 444 N. Fourth St., MORE INFO HERE.
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