What if someone decided Garden State—that cinematic Bible for disaffected hipsters everywhere—was neither hip nor disaffected enough to convey the true plight of discontented hipsters? Well, then we’d have something like Lonesome Jim—a film that’s essentially a Garden State remake, but one that cranks up the dial on “mopey,” and damn near blows the speakers […]
Alison Hallett
Alison Hallett served nobly as the Mercury's arts editor from 2008-2014. Her proud legacy lives on.
Posted inTheater & Performance
The Mark
It’s not that playwright Gretchen Icenogle crosses boundary lines, exactly—it’s more like she insistently yanks on them, challenging the parameters that people so often take for granted. With The Mark, another Stark Raving Theatre world premiere, Icenogle explores life’s little gray areas, and she’s not afraid to delve into some pretty murky territory. In the […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
The War Project
Sojourn Theatre’s The War Project: 9 Acts of Determination was my first exposure to one of the most beloved companies in town—though I was acquainted with their reputation for skillfully pairing challenging scripts with an unconventional use of space. Moments after the curtain rose it became obvious just how well deserved this reputation is. The […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
City of Gold
With City of Gold, Hand2Mouth joins Fever Theatre and Liminal at downtown’s Goldsmith Building. The huge, largely empty space is full of exposed beams and unfinished floors, as though everything but the building’s essential structure has been stripped away. City of Gold is right at home in this setting: Hand2Mouth director/wunderkind Jonathan Walters has constructed […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Sex Symbol No More
Johnny Depp Has Syphilis in The Libertine!
THE LIBERTINE marks another successful step in Johnny Depp’s seemingly deliberate attempt to destroy his status as a sex symbol. This ongoing trend—foreshadowed by Depp’s too-dirty-to-be-hot river rat in Chocolat, solidified with his turn as the swishy J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland, and creepily intensified with his pedophiliac Willy Wonka—finds its fulfillment in The Libertine, […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
Rapture
Lucrezia Vizzana was a 17th-century Italian nun who wrote music in secret because composition was forbidden under the Inquisition. Discovered at an early age to have a gift for writing music, but prevented from fully developing that gift by the restrictions of the convent, Rapture depicts a Lucrezia (Joy Fischer) who will be driven insane […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
Men on the Verge 2
Miracle Theatre’s current production of Men on the Verge 2 is first and foremost a showcase for the prodigious talents of Andres Alcalá. The play is comprised of 13 short scenes about gay Hispanic men, and Alcalá plays every role: from a repressed Catholic atoning for a night of three-way sex to a Chilean restaurant […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
Far Away
Far Away Liminal at the Goldsmith Building, 20 NW 5th, 313-8200, Thurs-Sat 8 pm, $10-15 Liminal’s production of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Far Away is their first with neither artistic director Bryan Markovitz nor choreographer Amanda Boekelheide at the helm—and it shows. The first scene is the best, in the sense that it has a […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Somebody’s Watching
The Creepy Dramatic Thriller Caché
The Laurent family is being terrorized in their own home. Not with bombs, or prank phone calls, or even flaming bags of dogshit on their doorstep—but with a fiendish brand of terror so insidious that, at first glance, it doesn’t seem scary at all. Someone is sending them videotapes of their own house—hours and hours […]
Posted inBooks
The Ruins Of California
When I read Martha Sherrill’s The Ruins of California, which follows the life of fictional Inez Ruin in 1970s California, I was also rereading Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. That I kept confusing the two protagonists suggests two things: Despite the book’s boomer-skewed presentation, Ruins is a glorified young adult novel; […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
“Manos” The Hands of Fate
In the 1966 horror film “Manos” The Hands of Fate, a family in El Paso gets lost looking for their hotel. They stumble across a mysterious shack, where they’re greeted by Torgo, the creepy groundskeeper. The family falls into the clutches of the cult of Manos, which consists of Torgo, “The Master,” high priest of […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
The Love of the Nightingale
The attempt to make ancient mythology resonate with a modern audience comes with a unique set of challenges. But Theater Vertigo brings a deft, post-modern sensibility to the issue with The Love of the Nightingale, a retelling of the myth of Philomele. The myth goes as follows: After the Thracian army saves Athens, the Thracian […]