The Kansas City Ballet’s Own Nutcracker
Like the growing Christmas tree, the grand Tchaikovsky score and the sparkle on the snow queens, there are certain things audiences expect from their annual viewing of "The Nutcracker," and…
Film Review: ‘The Take Out Move,’ Remade
If you want to do a quick offhand comedy about a couple of guys competing in a frantic, slapstick cartoon style, you’d make a TikTok. If it got a smile,…
Movie Review: ‘Murder, Anyone?’
Before he died in 2019 at 68, the television writer Gordon Bressack left behind seven unproduced film scripts. As a dutiful son, the director James Cullen Bressack has decided not…
Film: Martha Coolidge’s ‘I’ll Find You’
Music is often an important component of film, elevating the action and visual settings while usually taking a back seat. As effective as it can be, it’s rarely central to…
Stage: ‘Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci’
Leonardo Da Vinci predated William Shakespeare by half a century; their paths never crossed. Both were artists who changed the world with their vision; each had flinty intellects interested in…
Stage: Back to the ’50s in ‘Maple and Vine’
Even as patrons file in Spooky Action’s basement theater space at the Universalist National Memorial Church, the central couple of the new production “Maple and Vine” are already on stage…
Documentary Review: ‘Everybody Dance’
“Everybody Dance” is the motto of Bonnie Schlachte’s Center of Ballet for All Kids in Agoura Hills, Calif. where special-needs kids of a wide age and abilities can learn and…
Tav Falco’s Panther Burns On the Prowl
Rock ’n’ roll is a sound and it is a style and Tav Falco’s been straddling both since the late 1970s. The latest version of Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, on…
Music: The Decemberists at Wolf Trap
The Decemberists, the charming chamber folk-rock band from out of Portlandia, became famous for live performances as elaborate and detailed as their ornate songs, staging obscure battles or sea scenes…
Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe at Wolf Trap
It’s gratifying to have any Elvis Costello concert come around, after two years of pandemic postponements. But the one that finally took the stage at Wolf Trap in Virginia last…