Arts

Illuminated Art Sprouts in Conservatory’s Gardens

This winter, as usual, you’ll be able to celebrate the holiday season by taking in the Wildlights display at the Columbus Zoo. But you’ll also have a gorgeous alternative just a mile east of Downtown. The major exhibition “Bruce Munro: Light” opened last weekend and will remain on view through Feb. 8 at the Franklin Park Conservatory. Lori Kingston, the conservatory’s marketing director, said it would be great if “Light” attracts some of the families who enjoy holiday spectacles such as Wildlights. But she also said illuminated exhibitions like this have appeal throughout the year, not just in December. “I think light draws people all the time, no matter what the season,” she said. Munro, a Brit who started out as an industrial lighting designer, specializes in massive works that combine transparent spheres and other objects with shifting colors and even sound effects or music.

So Many Books, So Little Time?

First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School by Alison Stewart During the 1880s through the 1950s–what the African American historian Rayford Logan called “the nadir of American race relations,” when the striving of blacks was met by the iron fist of white supremacy–America’s first black high school became the springboard to almost a century of black achievement. In 1870 with some public money, a small legacy from Myrtilla Miner, a white leader in educating poor black women, and the prodigious efforts of Washington’s black elite, the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth held its first classes. After bouncing around to various locations, Congress appropriated $112,000 for a permanent structure, and the M Street School was opened to black students in 1892. A number of its earliest teachers had been trained at Ivy League schools, studied abroad or held advanced degrees. Because of Jim Crow, they were often unable to find work in their chosen fields, and so migrated to Washington, D. C. and the M Street School, which was renamed Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School in 1916.

Wexner’s “Blues For Smoke” Exhibit Is Art You Can Feel

The current Wexner Center “Blues for Smoke” Exhibit comes to Columbus at a time when Contemporary Art Centers such as the MOMA and artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat are referenced by Rick Ross, Jay Z, Lil Wayne and Kanye West over rap radio outlets 100 x's a day. My wishful thinking is that more people can afford the admission at the Wexner vs. buying an expensive luxury car, so art is about to be embraced by the masses. I did not have a private jet to fly to “Blues For Smoke” prior showings at MOCA in L.A.

Playwright Delves Into Americans’ Greatest Fear

Though he now teaches humanities at Columbus State, Bill Cook has spent time behind bars. He called on that experience while writing his latest play, State of Control, the story of a man who blunders his way into a prison cell.
Speaking about the play last week, Cook explained that his own prison experience was as an employee, not an inmate.
“I worked at the Franklin County jail back in the ’70s,” said Cook, 62. “I sold candies and so on to prisoners from the commissary. I would take it up on the various floors and pass it through the bars.”
While he was not serving a sentence, Cook remembers the sensation of being trapped after passing through two locked doors in order to do his work. “I got this odd feeling I was locked into my job.”
Directed by Matt Hermes and presented by Cook’s own troupe, A&B Theatricals, State of Control begins a two-week run on Friday. At the center of the tale is Stan (played by Ben Gorman), an accountant who becomes the fall guy for an embezzlement scheme and pays for it with a prison sentence.
In the playwright’s eyes, being imprisoned is the average American’s greatest fear, surpassing even cancer.

Becoming Bob Gaudio Kappus transforms himself into one of the Four Seasons for JERSEY BOYS

Imagine you’re in your final audition for a role you’ve always wanted to play. Standing fewer than 40 feet away judging your performance is the character you’re supposed to be playing.
That was the challenge facing Jason Kappus, who plays Bob Gaudio in the musical Jersey Boys. Kappus and company present the two-and-a-half hour musical Sept. 17-29 at the Ohio Theatre (39 E. State St).
 
 
Gaudio, who wrote most of the lyrics for the show based on the lives and times of the Four Seasons, played an active role in the casting of the show.
 
 
“That was a little bit nerve wracking having him look on while I was trying to be him,” Kappus says. “The best advice I got was right before my final audition. The associate director told me the role Bob cares the least about in the show is Bob Gaudio. It’s his wife Judy that you have to impress. Apparently that went well.”

Shadowbox Halloween show could be more of a treat

It’s September, which means it’s time for Nightmare on Front Street, the latest version of Shadowbox Live’s annual Halloween show.

What’s that you say? You’re not ready for Halloween yet? Well, don’t feel bad, as it seems to have crept up on Shadowbox, too. The show has funny moments here and there, along with some smokin’ rock tunes, but this is not one of the troupe’s better efforts overall.

For starters—or rather, finishers—Shadowbox ends the show by interrupting a typical Dr. Mystery episode with an attempt at political commentary. As longtime patrons know, Dr. Mystery is a silly combination of narration, puppets and live action that is usually good for a laugh, a chuckle or at least an eye roll. It’s probably possible to add politics to the mix if it’s done on the sly, but the current skit does it in a heavy-handed way that only succeeds in bringing the whole thing to an awkward halt.

Actually, most of the show’s second half is much better.

After ‘Shame,’ ‘Sharing’ seems like sloppy seconds

Watching a movie about sex, like engaging in the act itself, is more fun if you can avoid distractions. Unfortunately, it’s hard to watch a new movie about sexual addiction without being distracted by memories of two earlier films.

The newcomer is Thanks for Sharing, directed and co-written by Stuart Blumberg. The first earlier film was The Kids Are All Right (2010), an unconventional family drama that also was co-scripted by Blumberg. The other was Shame (2011), a dark work about a man whose sexual addiction controlled his life.

Though Thanks for Sharing isn’t bad, it pales in comparison to these earlier films. It lacks the naturalness and unpredictability of the first, and it lacks the sheer power of the second.

Think of it as Shame Lite.

Set in Manhattan, the comedy-drama centers on three men who attend 12-step meetings in an attempt to control their dictatorial desires.

Book Review of Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans And the End of Slavery By Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer

Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans And the End of Slavery By Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer This year is an anniversary year for a number of events significant to the struggle for racial equality in America, including the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. While the document technically did not free any slaves–if you are interested in that, I will see you in my class on African American History Before Emancipation, Spring semester 2014!–it has always been interpreted, especially by enslaved African Americans, as though it did. Despite President Abraham Lincoln’s assertion that the Civil War was not about slavery, the enslaved thought otherwise. From the time the first shots were fired, they assumed and acted as though the war was about their freedom. For years Deborah Willis, Professor and Chair of Photography and Imaging at the New York University, and Barbara Krauthamer, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, had been discussing what the freedom of African Americans looked like.

Funny, he doesn’t look like he’s in pain

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New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Outer Critics Circle Award. Pulitzer Prize finalist. All this, plus a rave review in The New York Times.

Stephen Karam’s Sons of the Prophet picked up lots of praise after opening off-Broadway in 2011. In subsequent regional productions, however, its reviews have been more mixed. After seeing Evolution Theatre Company’s production last weekend, I suspect the tragi-comedy is a tricky piece that benefited from a brilliant premiere production but has been less fortunate ever since.

Here in Columbus, ETC’s production definitely leaves one wondering what all the fuss was about. Though director Mark Phillips Schwamberger elicits good performances here and there, they aren’t enough to distract viewers’ attention from the overall lack of coherence and energy.

The Fukushima Nightmare Gets Even Worse


Just when it seemed things might be under control at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, we find they are worse than ever.

Immeasurably worse.

Massive quantities of radioactive liquids are now flowing through the shattered reactor site into the Pacific Ocean. And their make-up is far more lethal than the "mere" tritium that has dominated the headlines to date.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), the owner/operator, and one of the world's biggest and most technologically advanced electric utilities, has all but admitted it cannot control the situation. Their shoddy performance has prompted former US Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner Dale Klein to charge: "You don't know what you are doing."

The Japanese government is stepping in. But there is no guarantee, or even likelihood, it will do any better.

In fact, there is no certainty as to what's causing this out-of-control flow of death and destruction. Some 29 months after three of the six reactors exploded at the Fukushima Daichi site, nobody can offer a definitive explanation of what is happening there or how to deal with it.

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