When a drenched young woman, Brigid, steps out of the rain and into The Second Coming pub, her “chance” encounter with owner Niall O’Neill starts the pair on a long strange trip through a dark and stormy night. The torrent that is Key West, playing on Geva’s Nextstage, hits the audience with a barrage of […]
Arts & Entertainment
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NHL isn’t going anywhere
I recently bought Duran Duran’s new album, Astronaut, and I feel ripped off. It’s not very good. I should have known better. For the past 22 years, I’ve been buying Duran Duran albums, hoping the music will somehow live up to the band’s 1982 masterpiece, Rio. In 1986, when I was 14, I bought Notorious, […]
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Burying and resurrecting visual pleasure
Ever since the invention of photography, the “death” of painting (and by association, drawing) has been proclaimed. Every time new forms of representation are announced, the death of old technologies is reiterated. Painting should have been buried a long time ago. Of course, painting has survived, although not in the service of “objective” representation but […]
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East High rocks the house
It was two days before last Sunday’s Class AAA high-school football final between East and Penfield. East carried an 8-0 record into the game against the 4-4 Patriots of suburbia, but one Monroe County coach didn’t think much of the Orientals. “Who’d they play?” he asked, suggesting that the City-Catholic league’s competition is completely inferior […]
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Desiring the everyday
“The Ceramics Program is vital because at its center are dynamic faculty who embody the integrity and core values we associate with expertly handcrafted objects,” writes Michael Rogers, chair of the School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology. The faculty Rogers refers to are Rick Hirsch and Julia Galloway, whose work is the […]
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Irish, Jewish, or Texan, it’s all comedy
One reward from Geva’s artistic director Mark Cuddy’s sabbatical year in Ireland is a new season richly flavored with Irish plays. There will be exciting new ones, but the first, now playing, is 100 years old. And, in every sense of the phrase, it’s a tough choice. No masterpiece, John Bull’s Other Island is talky […]
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What in the world?
If the Boston Red Sox win the World Series, they will have solved the Curse of the Bambino. And they will be world champions for the first time since 1918. Think about that: The tiny little city of Boston, the 563rd largest city on Earth, champions of the world! It would be an even greater […]
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Visit the documentary buffet
With 22 television monitors relaying images at once, More than Moore, a video installation at Visual Studies Workshop, instills a feeling of sensory saturation, even though the TV sets are all silent. (Headphones are provided.) VSW Associate Gallery Director-Acting Gallery Manager Bleu Cease is trying to make independent political documentaries more accessible to the public. […]
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Convulsive anatomies
In 1992 Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, curated the infamous Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990’s. In his catalogue essay Schimmel equated the anxiety at the end of the 19th century and the work of the Symbolists — which was imbued with an obsessive fear that […]
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Through the eyes of a child
There’s a formula for single-actor plays that can get pretty tedious. “What’s that you say, Mr. President?” the actor playing some famous person says, then answers in an effort to imitate the president’s voice. Some are historically interesting and even showcase an actor’s versatility. But in The Syringa Tree Shipping Dock Theatre is offering a […]
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Music of the heirs
Conceived, designed, and directed by John Haldoupis, After Sondheim, a new musical revue, is a collection of songs from musical theater pieces by newer and younger composer-lyricists. Haldoupis considers them possible successors to Stephen Sondheim, the current king of American musicals. With three unlikely exceptions, they all write both words and music for their shows. […]
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Voting Yankee
I read The Week magazine the other day, and it featured a suave-looking Osama bin Laden caricature on the cover wearing a John Kerry T-shirt and a Kerry-Edwards pin. The cartoon had bin Laden passing out Kerry campaign literature with a tagline underneath, “Who would he prefer? A vote for Kerry, says the GOP, is […]
