Don't Cut the Cheese

If you were lucky enough to find a job during this jobless recovery, your orientation probably consisted of a short tour of the copy room and a long trip through the employee handbook. But if you’re Jessi Peine, your new boss sent you on a six-week trek across Europe, where you toured several cheese-producing farms, … Read more

H-E-Double Hockey Sticks

We have a television in the office, a twelve-inch black and white job with rabbit-ears. This TV, recovered more than once from the garbage, is switched on precisely once a year: in March, during the state boys high school hockey tournament. We just can’t help it. If you were born and raised anywhere in this … Read more

Taj of India

Few things are worse than a British pub passing off grilled pita as naan. Uptown now offers yet another great refuge from this kind of fraud, and it’s a cheap date, too. Taj’s naan is exactly what it should be—barely leavened, slightly charred on top and a little glossy with a brush of ghee. At … Read more

The Ballroom

May we have this dance? Our favorite Franco-American experimental theater revives their 1992 production exploring American life in the 20th century through a series of vignettes set in a Midwestern dancehall. Given that this is a play that uses a physical space as its central metaphor, it ought to be interesting to see how the … Read more

The Drawer Boy

The Jungle kicks off their new season with a trip north of the border and quite literally down memory lane. Michael Healey’s acclaimed play takes inspiration from the real-life 1970s people’s-theater project The Farm Show to tell the story of two isolated Ontario farmers whose quietude is disrupted by a nosy city-boy actor who wants … Read more

Conjure: The Puppet Cycle: Paintings by Mary Kline-Misol

Kline-Misol’s puppet-populated still lifes use rich reds and blues to create an inviting air of mystery. There are elements reminiscent of Salvador Dali, of Hopi kachina dolls and New Orleans voodoo, of Pinocchio and gypsy fortunetellers. It is like wandering through the maze of twisty passages in some especially atmospheric antique shop, where beyond every … Read more

The Art of Dr. Seuss

It’s a good bet that for most of us, our first exposure to surrealism was through the loopy imagination of Ted Geisel, better known to five generations of kids as the good Dr. Seuss. This touring exhibit features thirty-three panels of lithographs, serigraphs, and sculpture covering Seuss’s wide-ranging career, which included not just familiar favorites … Read more

Dance Theatre of Harlem

It has been the better part of a decade since the nation’s premier African-American dance company pirouetted its way onto the local stage, so you’re duly warned not to miss this performance. DTH leader Arthur Mitchell is a living legend of the dance world, having broken through the color barrier some fifty years ago to … Read more

Richard Thompson

Despite a few lackluster albums during the nineties, we’re quite fond of Thompson’s studio releases—last year’s The Old Kit Bag stuck in our heads deeply enough that we wound up happily exploring further all the way back to his sixties work with Fairport Convention. But the deep-voiced king of British folk is really at his … Read more

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

You might know them best as Paul Simon’s backing band on Graceland, the smash 1986 album that was many Americans’ first serious dip into the wide ocean of world music. But South Africa’s top choral group has too much musical grace to need to stand behind anybody. They’ve been championing the complex, lilting harmonies of … Read more