Given Chris Mars’ greater fame as the former drummer for the Replacements, you might well think that his career as a fine artist is mere rock-star dilettantism. It’s not. He’s the real thing, a skillful visual artist whose work echoes the semi-apocalyptic grotesque tradition of Hieronymous Bosch and World War I artist George Grosz. To … Read more
Okay, so they sound just like Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. But at some point, we all grow old enough to realize that pop music is one big lazy susan that keeps spinning in place. (In any case, all roads lead back to the Rolling Stones, right?) And why should we begrudge the kids … Read more
Bob Mould is no stranger to shocking his audience with a radical new direction—after his years in Hüsker Dü, the loudest punk band in all creation, the quiet and folkie Workbook seemed dumbfounding, though now seen as a career high point. But that’s nothing compared to his recent jump into dancefloor techno and electronica, on … Read more
You could be forgiven for falling asleep during the last few years of Elvis Costello’s career. Don’t get us wrong, his collaborations with the classical Brodsky Quartet and pop-standards king Burt Bacharach were tasteful and sophisticated proof of his facility in more musical modes than mere rock. But for many of us who discovered him … Read more
We were skeptical of Coldplay’s massively huge debut album Parachutes. It seemed like a blatant ripoff of a much better thing—to wit, fellow Scottish navelgazers Travis—and a kind of superbuffed commercial repackaging of Britain’s wave of earnest young acoustic groups. But as the saying goes, you have your whole life to record your first album … Read more
For a musician who’s changed directions as many times as Beck has, Sea Change is an apt album title. If our Mr. Hansen has a single style, it’s eclecticism, tossing blues, hip-hop, rock, folk, and whatever else happens to be in the room at the time, into the mix. The irony here is that the … Read more
For all its imposing reputation as the play where nothing happens for two hours, Waiting For Godot is Samuel Beckett’s most accessible play, as you might have seen if you caught the recent PBS production of his collected stage works. There’s a famous story about its enthusiastic reception from an audience of hardened lifers at … Read more
Last year’s production of Hamlet worked out so well for Jeune Lune that they’re taking it on the road. But before the company heads out for an East Coast and Midwest tour, they’re restaging the play at their home base for a couple of weeks, where they’ll also return in late November. As in the … Read more
Ironically enough, while guests from France take over the Jeune Lune stage for their production of Hamlet , longtime Jeune Lune director Dominique Serrand is in residence at the Guthrie for another Shakespearean offering, one that’s never been performed at the Guthrie before. Comedy of Errors is one of the Bard’s zany coincidence-ridden farces, and … Read more
In anticipation of December’s arrival of the Bolshoi Ballet, also at the Northrop, this much-decorated Swedish troupe presents Mats Eks’ modern reworking of Swan Lake . It makes a certain amount of sense to put the cart before the horse like this; as much as we might like to, we cannot escape the constraints of … Read more