Macy’s announced that Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Ne-Yo will headline this year’s Macy's Glamorama rock/fashion extravaganza, which benefits the Children’s Cancer Research Fund. Joining Ne-Yo will be local jazz combo The New Standards. Friday, Aug. 14, 8 p.m., The Orpheum Theatre. Tickets range from $75-$1,000

Read more.

There was a lot of guitar in my life last week. Between Shon Troth’s expert slide work at Rock the Garden, to Eric Clapton and Stevie Winwood trading licks at Xcel, and Johnny Swardson at the Stone Arch Festival, I’m all set. But the musical highlight of the week came from an old piano man: Allen Toussaint.

Read more.

Pardon the Yogi Berra-ism, but some classics really are classics. During the opening scene of the touring production of A Chorus Line, stopping at the Orpheum this week, I got the same jangly, overwhelmed-with-panic emotional feeling, in my stomach, in my throat, behind my eyes, that Spider Man must get when Dr. Octopus sneaks up on him.  In the opening scene, Zach, portrayed by Kevin McCready, is trying out a herd of dancers auditioning for his show. He singles a couple of performers out—“red headband, keep your head up!” But most of them go through in groups without any feedback at all. Maybe this is what was getting to me—I was having karate practice flashbacks or basketball practice flashbacks. Anybody who’s been at the back line of an aerobics or a ballroom dance class, or a soccer practice, or even a PowerPoint training seminar knows what it’s like to feel disoriented, flailing a little, a step behind the rest, struggling to tread water and remain unnoticed until you catch up, until you get it (hopefully).

Read more.

The theremin is an electronic instrument, patented in 1928, which consists of a couple of antennae that the performer does not actually need to touch to make sound. Instead, the performer simply waves his hands in the air around the antennae, calling forth sounds almost as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra. The theremin has a buzzy tone and no set tuning (it slides right across pitches as the performer’s hands move, rather than stepping neatly from one note to the next), and so, while theremin virtuosi exist (and can play, you know, “Ave Maria”), I think that Justin Jones and his partner in crime, Elliott Durko Lynch, have found the true use of the theremin—as a toy for avant-garde performance.

Read more.

Earlier this year, The Jungle Theater had planned to present a stage version of Around the World in 80 Days, but decided instead to present Pulitzer-winning playwright Donald Margulies’ Shipwrecked! An Entertainment: The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told by Himself), a play that could just as easily have been called Around the World in Thirty Years.

Read more.

By now, you’ve probably heard the news that a Guthrie-produced play—Tony Kushner’s The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures—is finally bound for Broadway (sometime in 2010, it appears)—and that the Guthrie “disinvited” theater critics from New York and Chicago from seeing the play in its current incarnation, presumably because it’s not yet the work of art Kushner wants it to be.

Read more.