Caesar in Sneakers
“Mischief, thou art afoot,” Marcus Antonius says after inciting his fellowmen. “Take thou what course thou wilt.” The same goes for Main Street Theater’s intriguing, game production of Julius Caesar. It takes what course it wilt with Shakespeare’s popular text. Director Steve Garfinkel boldly removes the play from its historical…
Home Fires Burning
Jon Robin Baitz is among the hottest of young New York playwrights, and his talent is apparent in Stages’ current production, the Houston premiere of his 1991 Substance of Fire. The play is a precocious and intelligent study of a family in crisis, placed in a larger context of contemporary…
Love in the Time of Coloratura
Hold on to your hats and get out your lavender-colored lorgnettes! After a century of Marx, Freud and feminism, the 1990s might well be the decade of homocentric criticism. A case in point: Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (Vintage, 1993). Far from an…
Three-Ring Museum
Until his death in 1992 at age 79, John Cage carried out a revolution that aimed to break the hold of the cultural elite. More than a composer, Cage was a philosopher, poet, inventor, teacher and prophet who formulated a new attitude toward content, composition and the function of art…
Rotten Johnny
Naked arrives preceded by glowing reviews and perched on numerous critics’ year-end best-of lists. And it’s the latest product from the generally (but not uniformly) superb British filmmaker Mike Leigh. So, I was already in an advanced state of anticipation when the film began to roll. Recent movies have, with…
Into Africa
Rice University professor and acclaimed writer Max Apple (author of two novels, Zip and The Propheteers, and two collections of short stories, The Oranging of America and Free Agents) penned the screenplay of feel-good basketball movie The Air Up There. It’s about time that a Houstonian besides Larry McMurtry made…
Innocent on the Lam
After seeing Flight of the Innocent, you won’t be surprised to learn that Italian director Carlo Carlei has already signed a deal to make movies in Hollywood. Carlei, 31, has expressed admiration for the “earth-toned poetry” of such anti-studio films as The Tree of Wooden Clogs, and, given Flight’s shades-of-brown…
Wanna Buy a RoboDome?
On April 9, 1965, the Houston Astrodome staged its first public sporting event. In the Astros’ 2-1 victory over the New York Yankees, Joe Morgan stole the first base, Rusty Staub knocked in a run, Mickey Mantle clubbed the first home run. A field-box seat cost $3.50. The fans left…
HPD Blues
When Sam Nuchia returned to the Houston Police Department as chief shortly after Bob Lanier was sworn in as mayor in 1992, most HPD officers couldn’t have been happier. Much of the rank and file hated Nuchia’s two predecessors, Lee Brown and Elizabeth Watson. Nuchia’s appointment moved one homicide investigator…
New Times
Last Thursday, Press staffers formally welcomed Terry Coe as our new publisher. Food and beer were served, Coe stated his commitment to editorial independence, and reporters like him already. Coe grew up in Virginia, did his undergraduate work at William and Mary, and has an MBA from the University of…
Press Picks
thursday january 27 Sophia The New Music of the Houston Composers Alliance presents this one-hour, ten-movement liturgical meditation on wisdom of Hildegard of Bingen. Other women participating are Patty Spain, soprano; Priscilla Nathan-Murphy, dancer; Teresa Hrachovy-Grawunder, flutist; and Lovie Smith-Schenck, percussionist. Both tonight and Friday, 8 p.m., St. Martin’s Lutheran…
Been Caught Stealing
Window Crazykilledmingus (C.A.S. Productions) I’ve lived in my present digs almost a year and a half now, and the upstairs neighbors have played Jane’s Addiction’s Nothing’s Shocking at high volume at least four times a week, every week, to the exclusion of all other music, that entire time. If I…
Pretty Ugly
The present is an inopportune moment to start classifying popular music. For one thing, there’s simply so damn much product out there that any lines you draw are going to be straddled by someone somewhere. For another, the mere act of classification is going to piss off any artist worth…
Letters
Mad About Us Michael Fry’s clever use of exaggeration in “The Official Houston Home-Invasion Recognition Guide” [No Bull, January 13] may not be original or subtle, but it is funny. Santa in crosshairs is very funny. The depiction of the Scotsman is less so. Ridiculing a fear so intense that…
Hot Ticket
Every now and then, I find myself standing at the end of a bar, listening to some noise not really worth listening to grinding in from another room, and as the last bit of the evening’s coffee finishes its work on my lower back and my knees start to buckle…
The Queen of Tarts
People gravitate to certain restaurants for a host of complex reasons: a room that speaks to their souls, a waiter who makes them feel good, a chef whose notion of seasoning matches their own. Sometimes, however, there is a lure so fundamental it underpins everything else. In the case of…
Behold the Modern Kolache
It was bound to happen. Beset on every side by chic-er croissants and trendier tortillas, the poor old kolache is fighting back. These yeasty Czech rolls have earned Texas-classic status despite having a shelf life of approximately 20 minutes, but nowadays being a classic ain’t enough. Accordingly, to increase their…
The Color Purple — and Blue, and Red and…
Ntozake Shange was 27 in the summer of 1976 when her play hit Broadway, playing to “somewhat stunned audiences,” as The New Yorker put it. Under the indeed stunningly long title For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Shange’s unpunctuated free-verse “choreopoem” for seven black…