The story Patrick M. Garry tells is a story of how curiosity on the part of a group of young teens leads them to meddle in someone’s life with tragic results. This premise is well-rooted in life especially in political campaigns. The staging for the story has a small hometown appeal well-suited for the action.
A review of Inherited by Amanda Curtin
Memory is critical in each of the stories, recycled into new experiences, and reworked into new memories, twisting, in and out of view, but never lost—nothing is ever lost. The setting brings history into the present day as modern characters uncover clues about the past that lead to self-awareness.
A review of Theatre and Theatre Companies of New York by Anthony Rubino, Jr. and M. Stefan Strozier
The book is enjoyable to read, humorous, and informative, and contains a great deal of black and white images that comprise virtually a walking tour of theatres in NY and Brooklyn.
A review of The Kitchen Counter Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn
She interviewed volunteers and experts, and got to it. It pays to be a food writer, with chef friends in restaurants all over Seattle. Lessons opened with a taste test to demonstrate how the variety within one category of food. Every taste test was a revelation. The most expensive canned tomatoes were not the Best in Show. Salt substitute really is a subsitute, and a poor one. The real lesson: Trust your tastes.
A review of Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant
Life in a war zone is fine for the noble savages, but not for developers from Shaker heights with Harvard-bound sons. It’s easy to dismiss Mr. American Tourist as a hypocrite, but Leegant isn’t choosing sides. Aaron’s partners in crime are equally American (one is from Skokie), sentimental and easily manipulated. Mr. American Tourist may be a hypocrite, but he knows how he wants to live, and he doesn’t need anyone’s approval to do it.
The Use of Quiet Powers: The Very Best of Mariah Carey
So much for failure in love. Mariah Carey’s voice can sound hammer-strong or feather-light, and she uses different parts of her voice in “Breakdown,” which opens with a man’s chanting voice (the voice, appearing in different instances in the song, makes the song nearly a duet, which is odd since most of the lyrics focus on separation). It is a song with texture—layers of sound, and rhythms going in more than one direction.
A review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor…the life of Colin Kerby, OAM by Jan Mitchell
It’s an odd sort of progression from surgeon to sandwich maker and from confectioner to showman. It’s hard, at times, to believe that this is a book about one person, though there is a kind of entrepreneurial, inventor thread that links everything Kerby does.
We Are Better (Attitude in Urban Dance): Renegades by Mark de Clive-Lowe, with Omar, Sheila Escovedo, and Nia Andrews
The eastern-sounding “Alabi” begins Mark de Clive-Lowe’s Renegades, followed by an invocation to dance, to communal pleasure, “Get Started,” which has chanting, and features soul singer Omar and a lot of Shelia E.’s percussion. Is the pleasure only in being together and dancing? Is there any other connection or purpose?
That’s the Way Love Is: The Best of Marvin Gaye, The 60s
The music listener heard references to family, church, and school in Gaye’s work, those early educators and touchstones, the expected resources for affection and knowledge, and often what must be left behind if life is to be lived fully or honestly. Leaving them behind meant freedom—and risk, if not trouble. There is a female choral arrangement in “Pride and Joy,” and it is somewhere between male doo-wop and the call and response of a church choir.
Emotion and Style, Jazz and Soul: Until Tomorrow by Zara McFarlane
Zara McFarlane’s voice can be really pure or take on a husky quality, and her inflections are subtle, varied, as in “Captured (part 3), a song about the memory of a woman, with a swinging rhythm. Delivered with syncopation, the lyrics of “Mama Done” suggest something ominous: “she talked herself right into the ground.” McFarlane’s voice floats in the air in the song “Until Tomorrow,” which seems to be about an impasse in a relationship that time and distance might ease. Her voice could be a sound alive on the wind, without a body.