| The Rust Belt Theory of Low-Cost High Culture |
[02 Jan 2015|04:52am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/01/cheap_high_culture_in_baltimore_buffalo_detroit_and_other_midsize_cities.html One Friday evening this past summer, my friend and I arrived at Joseph Meyerhoff Hall, home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, for an all-Beethoven program. But we didn’t go straight in. First, we stopped at a stand outside for some Duckpin Ale, an excellent pale ale made by Baltimore’s Union Craft Brewing. We had trouble deciding which of the five food carts to sample, but finally settled on the Smoking Swine. We polished off our plate and drinks just in time for the performance, though the latter was not necessary: Signs outside the concert hall announced, “At this performance, drinks are allowed into the theater,” and indeed, many in the diverse, nearly full-house crowd carried their cups in with them.
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| The Rust Belt Theory of Low-Cost High Culture |
[02 Jan 2015|04:52am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/01/cheap_high_culture_in_baltimore_buffalo_detroit_and_other_midsize_cities.html One Friday evening this past summer, my friend and I arrived at Joseph Meyerhoff Hall, home of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, for an all-Beethoven program. But we didn’t go straight in. First, we stopped at a stand outside for some Duckpin Ale, an excellent pale ale made by Baltimore’s Union Craft Brewing. We had trouble deciding which of the five food carts to sample, but finally settled on the Smoking Swine. We polished off our plate and drinks just in time for the performance, though the latter was not necessary: Signs outside the concert hall announced, “At this performance, drinks are allowed into the theater,” and indeed, many in the diverse, nearly full-house crowd carried their cups in with them.
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| Jean Hamm, Weird Al, and Xanax the Magician |
[02 Jan 2015|02:03pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/01/galavant_review_abc_musical_comedy_is_more_spamalot_than_princess_bride.html If you are looking for something strange and new to watch, there is no better candidate than Galavant, the fairy tale musical comedy beginning this Sunday on ABC. This is, without question, the oddest show to arrive on television in quite some time. Set in a fantasy realm in the Middle Ages, it tells the story of Galavant, a swashbuckling hero who must get his mojo back after his true love abandons him. The music and lyrics come from Dan Fogelman and Disney experts Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, but there is not one moment of Disney-musical earnestness in the first six episodes. “He wowed in every way, a fairy tale cliché,” goes a line in the opening number about Galavant’s former prowess, and that is just the beginning of the series’ consistently cheeky, hammy, self-aware, Spamalot-inspired tone. Galavant may be unapologetically musical, but it is not an entirely unapologetic musical: It mocks its own tropes—those borrowed from musicals and those lifted from fairy tales—every chance it gets.
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| A Most Curious Movie |
[02 Jan 2015|02:45pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2015/01/a_most_violent_year_review_oscar_isaac_and_jessica_chastain_star_in_godfather.html J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year is a most curious movie, one with nearly all the elements of a classic crime-family saga and yet somehow lacking the moral complexity and emotional heft of the films to which it pays fastidious aesthetic homage: the New York–set urban thrillers of Sidney Lumet (Serpico, Prince of the City) and Coppola’s Godfather series. A Most Violent Year couldn’t look or sound cooler. Bradford Young’s chiaroscuro cinematography lends a bleak, sooty glamour to the malaise-drenched environs of New York City in 1981. Alex Ebert’s music—especially the mournful horn motif that follows would-be heating-oil magnate Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) as he drives around the once-mean waterfronts of the outer boroughs—lovingly evokes a lost era of film scoring when heroes came complete with their own pensive, melodic themes.
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