OPENING: Little Shop of Horrors today at Ford’s Theatre; Nights at the Opera: Golden Age today at the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater; The Front Page today at Port City Playhouse; Clybourne Park Monday at Woolly Mammoth Theatre; Stomp Tuesday at Round House Theatre Bethesda; My Name Is Asher Lev Wednesday at Round House Theatre Bethesda.

CLOSING: Farfar Oasis and Lowtide Hotel today at Kogod Theatre; Chumbale tomorrow at Teatro de la Luna; High Fidelity Sunday at the District of Columbia Arts Center’s Black Box Theater; Mahalia Sunday at MetroStage; Puss ‘n Boots Sunday at Synetic Family Theater; That Face Sunday at Studio Theatre; Bus Stop Sunday at Olney Theatre; Carmen Sunday at the Jewish Community Center in Rockville; The Flass Menagerie at Rep Stage.

ONGOING: See our listings.

AFTER THE JUMP: Reviews of Amazons and Their Men and Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.

Read More “This Week’s Theater: Reviews of Amazons and Their Men, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” »

St. Louis soul singer Barbara Carr has never truly received the attention she deserves.  On Saturday night she’s headlining a fine Southern soul triple bill at the Solar Eclipse (aka the Eclipse) with Chick Willis and Roy Roberts. She was interviewed on WPFW briefly last week, which is where I first heard of the show. But I’m not sure how else it’s been advertised: I’ve seen no online mentions of the gig, other than on Robert’s Web site.

Read More “Live Saturday: Soul Triple Bill with Barbara Carr at the Solar Eclipse” »

Allah is drinking coffee. Jesus is switching lines at L’Enfant. Me and Buddha ride.

Throaty voice, Mohawked braids, her right hand conducting an invisible orchestra:  Diamante Dorsey has the stage.

The audience claps at every pause and shouts her lines right back. They like their gods on U Street, paired with sex, cozying up in the Langston Hughes room.

“I kind of use that shock thing to my advantage, but it’s also my downfall,� she said after performing at Busboys and Poets on Wednesday.

A high school senior at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Dorsey is a contender at Saturday’s D.C. Youth Poetry Slam, part of the Split This Rock Poetry Festival.

Read More “At Split This Rock, a Local High-Schooler Channels Buddha, Tupac, and Leonard Cohen” »

Friday

• Al Green. DAR Constitution Hall. $70.

• Balkan Beat Box, Bajah + the Dry Eye Crew. 9:30 Club. $20.

• Mambo Sauce. Strathmore. $10 in advance, $12 at door.

• Greg Brown, Justin Wilber. Wolf Trap. $30.

• The American Space Cadets, American Speedway, Sin 4 Sin. The Red & The Black. $8. 21+.

• Matthew Ryan, Garrison Starr. IOTA Club & Cafe. $15.

• RAMZY, The Method, Bad Rabbits. Rock & Roll Hotel. $10.

• The Big Cheese. Bangkok Blues. Call for price.

• Sing Swan Song, Kuan. Velvet Lounge. $8. 21+.

• Tyrone Wells, Tony Lucca, Roy Jay. Jammin Java. $15-$22.

• Suckers, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers, Laughing Man. Black Cat mainstage. $12.

• KC Jazz Club: An Evening with Delfeayo Marsalis. Kennedy Center Terrace Gallery. $25.

• Ghost Town, High Off Life. Jaxx. $10 in advance, $12 day of.

Read More “Weekend Music Roundup: Al Green, Suckers, the Very Best, and More” »

-The New York Times reviews the HBO miniseries The Pacific. They like it. Salon, on the other hand, liked Terrance Malick’s take better.

-Since he’s legally forbidden to perform comedy on television, Conan O’Brien is hitting the road this spring. He’ll be in D.C. at Constitution Hall on June 8th.

-The Washington Post’s Dave Malitz profiles four up-and-coming bands that will be visiting D.C. on tour. He shines some light on a few locals, too.

Baltimore City Paper profiles cosmic-voyager Dam Funk, who will be performing tomorrow at 411 New York Ave. NE.

-SPIN has made all of its back-issues available via google books. I particularly enjoyed this article, where critic Robert Christgau and Matador Records founder Gerard Cosloy argue over whether Royal Trux has the right to exist.

Just the idea of an Inuit throat singer performing at National Geographic should be enough to pique the interest of many adventurous music listeners. But if that weren’t enough, a mere list of Tanya Tagaq’s musical associations should lead to outright fascination. To wit: Tagaq’s latest record, Auk/Blood, was released on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label, also the home of groups like Isis and Hella. And while Tagaq won’t be performing with any metal or math-rock musicians at her National Geographic show tomorrow, she will be taking the stage with drummer Scott Amendola and guitarist G.E. Stinson, who have been active in recent years in the West Coast avant-jazz scene. (Amendola has played in the D.C. area a few times in recent years, supporting the likes of Nels Cline and Madeleine Peyroux.) The next day, Tagaq will be up in New York collaborating with the Kronos Quartet.

Read More “Your Weekend in Experimental Music: Tanya Tagaq, Bored of Trade 5″ »

In 1998 the screenwriter Lyn Vaus and director Brad Anderson sold their low-budget romantic comedy Next Stop Wonderland, starring Hope Davis, Alan Gelfant, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, to Miramax for $6 million after generating significant buzz at the Sundance Film Festival.

This month Vaus is releasing a psych-rock record, The Floating Celebration.

So it’s no stretch to say that Vaus has led one of those blessed hipster existences: He made post-punk in Boston as part of the band Carnal Garage; worked in film development in Los Angeles; starred, in a fit of Cassavetean inspiration, in Anderson’s 1996 film The Darien Gap; penned and acted in several indies (and soundtracked one); and moved to D.C. several years ago, where he’s been working on a long-simmering project he won’t talk about for fear of jinxing it.

Not long after he made The Floating Celebration, Vaus and Anderson (who is best known for The Machinist) took a camera behind the Cabin John, Md. house of producer Philip Stevenson where Vaus recorded the album, and shot a trippy, patchwork music video—one teeming with bizarro stock footage and featuring the great niece of the Bond girl Ursula Andress. (The actress, who had responded to a Craigslist ad, even made her own bikini, just as her great aunt did for her iconic beach scene in Dr. No.)

The Floating Celebration has little to do with the music Vaus, 50, made in his post-punk days. “Carnal Garage sort of sounded like Jesus Lizard being mugged by Pere Ubu or something,” he says. “This is completely different…It hearkens back to what I listened to when I was a kid, like Sunset Strip from ‘65 to ‘68.”

Read More “The Incisive Psychedelia of Lyn Vaus” »

That’s me there on the left, obviously pretty chipper about being in the company of Glen Weldon—short story writer, critic, and sequential-art blogger nonpareil; unchallenged 36th-chamber master of the Koyaanisqatsi joke and occasional collaborator; Aquaman biographer and autobiographer; boob-window watcher; faithful drinking buddy, sounding board, pal-for-life.

This snapshot is not quite a year old. I have altered it slightly in deference to Glen’s belief, shared by many of his fellow Micronesian tribesmen, that photos steal the soul. And also that this picture makes him look more like Rod Steiger than he’s prepared to deal with. I have more hair now; Glen has exactly the same amount. Still, you can see how it’d be easy to mistake one of us for the other, especially with our habit of traveling via tandem bicycle and finishing each other’s sentences all the time. (Finishing this guy’s sentences has required me to purchase a new, pocket-sized copy of S.I. Hayakawa’s Choose the Right Word, overwrite the few crumbs of French and Spanish I used to claim to know, and triple-down on my intake of nootropics courtesy of my local milkbar. I’m pretty sure the only prep Glen had to do was to watch Die Hard again.)

So that’s why I can’t get too mad about the City Paper having briefly slapped Glen’s byline on the Web for my review of Forum’s Amazons and Their Men. Honest mistake, already fixed, no hard feelings. Anyway, G-Weld’s written plenty of stuff of which I’d be only too happy to claim authorship.

March 11
It says something that in 2003, Regina Carter became the first jazz musician ever allowed to play “Il Cannone,” the zealously guarded violin owned by the legendary Niccolò Paganini. Namely, it says that the MacArthur Genius Grant winner stands toe to toe with any of the great classical violinists in terms of accomplishment. But she surely tops them all in her imagination as an improviser, and perhaps more so with her quest for new ideas. Or old ideas: Carter’s new project, Reverse Thread, is actually a contemporary jazz take on African folk songs, with an accordion and kora added to her usual guitar-bass-drums accompaniment. Even here, though, Carter defies easy definition; the music she performs includes the music of the Ugandan Jewish community, as well as a tune that fuses West African music with that of India and Puerto Rico. The album drops May 18, but Carter offers a preview performance at Black Rock Center for the Arts, 12901 Town Commons Drive in Germantown. $44-$54.
Read More “Jazz Setlist, March 11-17: Regina Carter, Robert Glasper, and More” »

“El Dormitorio” by Eric Scibor-Rylski from “Mexico 2010″ at the IDB Cultural Center.

OPENING: “Peep and Strip Show” opens today at the Art League; work by Freya Grand opens tomorrow at Gallery Neptune; “The Fantastical” opens Saturday at Project 4 Gallery.

CLOSING: Work by Margo Humphrey closes tomorrow at the Driskell Center at University of Maryland; work by William Christenberry, Robin Rose, and Donald Baechler closes Saturday at Hemphill Fine Arts; “Personal Interiors” closes Sunday at American University’s Katzen Arts Center.

ONGOING: See our listings.

THIS WEEK’S REVIEWS AFTER THE JUMP:

Read More “Gallery Roundup: Openings, Closings, Reviews of Hamiltonian Gallery and the IDB Cultural Center” »