Leisure

Reviews and think pieces on music, movies, art, and theater.

Leisure

For Colored hits Walsh

Black Theater Ensemble’s performance of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf is at times both strong and passionate, but mostly fails to rise above clunky predictability. Many of the production’s failings can be traced to the weakness of the play’s structure.

By the February 7, 2002

Leisure

Women behind the lens

Every child has done it. Scanning through the tightly-packed shelves of yellow, bound magazines that your parents so religiously collected, hoping to pick out a volume of National Geographic filled with pictures of wild animals, exotic places and even bizarrely dressed, but usually undressed, people.

By the February 7, 2002

Leisure

Lounge lizards

For years, the Washington, D.C. music scene has been known primarily for its reputation dating back to the early-’80s hardcore boom. Today, that reputation is beginning to change. While hardcore has fallen off to a degree, local electronic/dance artists have recently been making a name for D.

By the February 7, 2002

Leisure

Nomadic tackles complex play

Named after the Schubert Quartet around which much of the plot circles, Death and the Maiden raises questions of trust, women’’s empowerment, the nature of true justice, the role of silence in healing, forgiving, forgetting and the existence if objective truth, but provides few answers.

By the January 31, 2002

Leisure

French import ruins it for everyone

“Oh, The Brotherhood of the Wolf?” said my friend, “That was out in France about a year ago.” Having spent the semester abroad, she had been in Paris to witness first-hand the sensation that surrounded this film. I had already formulated my opinion, and was desperate to draw out of my friend how the French?and if I am to believe the trailers that tout this film as the most momentous thing to hit the Old World since the Bubonic Plague, all of Europe, too?came to theirs.

By the January 31, 2002

Leisure

Good music gone bad

In a business as increasingly cynical as the record industry, the “tribute album” phenomenon might be the most cynical trend of all. After all, for what purpose other than to perhaps cover time-share fees for record-company executives might these records be released? However, such cynicism is not necessarily warranted?some recent tribute albums have been a pleasant artistic diversion.

By the January 31, 2002

Leisure

Jumping for love

A remarkable thing is happening right now at Arena Stage: They are performing a romantic comedy that somehow escapes the nauseating and hackneyed nature of the genre as a whole. On the contrary, Arena’s latest production, On the Jump, is both cleverly engaging and surprisingly refreshing.

By the January 31, 2002

Leisure

Cold cut fever

With any luck, you’ve already read this week’s cover story about the Voice staff’s favorite area restaurants. Now, while we at Voice Leisure are committed to getting students off campus to take advantage of Washington’s many cultural offerings, we understand that there are many times when leaving campus just isn’t an option.

By the January 31, 2002

Leisure

Playing with water

Even if Afghanistan is landlocked, we’ll settle for a Victory at Sea. If you are racked with paranoia from this week’s State of the Union speech, go to the Black Cat and relax to their sultry and desolate sounds of this quietly captivating Boston indie band.

By the January 31, 2002

Leisure

Keyes for TV success

Cable-news junkies have welcomed the latest addition to the pantheon of talking heads. Sometime Presidential candidate and full-time conservative pundit Alan Keyes is now hosting a program on MSNBC called Alan Keyes Is Making Sense. One portion of the program is devoted to a “conversation” between Keyes and several guests, supposedly “regular folks” plucked from the District’s streets.

By the January 31, 2002

Leisure

Storytelling another unsettling tale

Todd Solondz makes me cringe. He also makes me laugh, but it is the laughter of discomfort, the laughter that asks, “Did that just happen?” Those who have seen a Todd Solondz film are all too familiar with this feeling. Partly due to this, the three films since his popular debut further reinforce the stereotype of what “A Todd Solondz Film” will be, namely a movie that is controversial, mean-spirited and unsettling.

By the January 24, 2002

Leisure

Nas returns to form with anti-war statement

Much politically and socially conscious music once emanated from mainstream hip-hop. In recent memory, however, this has not been the case. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, a list of songs were sent to the major radio programmers in the country, strongly suggesting they not be played.

By the January 24, 2002

Leisure

Brown paper bag blues

We all know why it’s there, this den of secret passions and forbidden pleasures. Although temporarily situated behind and underneath a vast web of scaffolding, and permanently located in the less fashionable end of M Street, Key Bridge News appears to be chugging along today as the same model of utopian urban efficiency and inauspicious prosperity that it always has been.

By the January 24, 2002

Leisure

Wax in your ears

Two or three months ago, some elitist tool delivered a polemic in the Washington City Paper about the sad state of record stores in our fair city. Granted, this may be the case if you’re a vintage vinyl hound, who can’t live without a weekly dose of first-pressing mono-recorded wax.

By the January 24, 2002

Leisure

Local theater celebrates German cinema

The casual American moviegoer’s knowledge of German cinema most often begins and ends with films such as Das Boot (1981) and Run Lola Run (Lola rennt, 1998). While both films merit viewing, a thriving German film industry exists beyond Franka Potente’s shock of flame-red hair in Lola and Das Boot’s boatload of doomed submariners.

By the January 17, 2002

Leisure

Schreifels strikes a chord

Walter Schreifels of Rival Schools is a rock star. Not in that good-looking, sings-to-the-camera, ladies’-man kind of way—although this writer finds the first to be true. Instead, he is the kind of rock star that has vision in his blood and determination behind his eyes—undoubtedly the product of a 15-year music career.

By the January 17, 2002

Leisure

A twist of fate

When George Bush choked on a pretzel Sunday, media outlets across the world exploded in speculation. Was this a conspiracy? Is there a cover-up? Yet we at The Voice Leisure section choose to dig deeper?we mine the pits of sound bytes and news releases that have swallowed pundit and wonk alike.

By the January 17, 2002

Leisure

Where the ladies are

In the past year, Ladyfest, a female-run music festival that originated in Olympia, Wash., has become kind of a hippie-mom version of the riot-grrrl aesthetic, fashioning that “you ain’t it, la la la” feeling into a self-reliant community, complete with radical-feminist workshops, spoken-word slams and good old-fashioned boy bashing.

By the January 17, 2002

Leisure

Arcadia a literate trip into the past

There has been a link between landscaping and scholarship dating back to the Greeks. In the Golden Age, Socrates had his classes among the trees, giving rise to the phrase “The Groves of Academe.” In the present age, Tom Stoppard sets his satire/treatise of the academic world in a Devonshire manor house famous for its beautiful and literarily significant garden.

By the January 17, 2002

Leisure

Deep blues take Arena Stage

Do you think the blues are dead? Think again. The blues are alive and well, not only in their original forms, but also in the music they have inspired for the past 80 years. With their wholly original rhythmic and lyrical styles, the blues have influenced the formation of jazz, gospel, hip-hop and, of course, rock and roll.

By the January 10, 2002