Friday, March 31
Calendar Home | Metroactive | Back | Next

Beatitude Mass Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph; 80 S. Market St, San Jose; 408.995.3318; Fri-Sat - 8pm; $10 Metro cover star Henry Mollicone unveils his brand-new full-length work, Beatitude Mass, this weekend with help from the Mission Chamber Orchestra and singers Nancy Wait Kromm (soprano) and Paul Murray (bass). The piece takes Latin prayers as its starting point and then adds material that the composer and librettist William Luce gathered in interviews with homeless people. In that spirit, the concert is a benefit to help the homeless in Santa Clara County. (MSG) Dot You! West Valley College Theater; 1400 Fruitvale Ave, Saratoga; 510.226.8036; Thu-Sat - 8pm; Sun - 7pm; $20 Saratoga Drama Group presents a musical revue that eviscerates the dotbomb era of 1998-2000. Ted Kopulus wrote 22 songs and three sketches poking fun at life, work and traffic in Silicon Valley. (TI) Queen Silveen Coast Line Brewery; $3; 9:30pm. In my nightmares, Tori Amos chases Kate Bush around screaming, "I'll swallow your soul!" just like that creepy cellar lady in . Of course, this dream is almost entirely fact-based: After the failure of her album, Amos reinvented herself as Bush's mopecore doppelganger, relocated to England and put a spell on Bush that kept her off the market for 12 years. Yet few artists are talented enough to go where Bush goes, so Tori fell short. But local art-pop diva Queen Silveen (a.k.a. Sylvia Heins, who recently moved here from Washington) manages quite well, thanks to her impressive soprano, accompaniment from Dayan Kai and Anthony Crawley, and lyrics borrowed from Blake and Shelley. Plus she doesn't swallow souls. (Bill Forman) Craig Wedren The Attic; $10 adv/$12 door; 7pm. The former Shudder to Think frontman may have a distinct musical presence, but his career has been decidedly chameleonic. Starting off with suitable agit-punk fervor on Ian MacKaye's Dischord label, Shudder to Think moved to the majors with a more art-pop sensibility, as Wedren's vocals bridge the gap between the The's melancholy brooding and Queen's pop falsetto. Since Shudder called it a day, Wedren's racked up soundtracks (from to the unjustly overlooked ), side projects (the vaguely annoying New York disco-pop outfit Baby) and, late last year, an achingly melodic solo debut called . With Devendra Banhart cohorts Vetiver and New York art-folk Currituck & Co., this show has the makings of brilliance. (BF) Tommy Castro Moe's Alley; $15-$20; 9:30pm. As a leading architect of contemporary blues, Tommy's contributions shine with R&B and rock & roll influences. Like many blue-eyed bluesmen, Tommy found his path through the music of Eric Clapton and Mike Bloomfield. Combining blue collar blues, Memphis soul and rock & roll, Tommy delivers good-time party music, and for 14 years Randy McDonald (bass and songwriting) and Keith Crossan (sax) have performed and recorded with him. This dedicated and talented band spent three seasons as house band for NBC's and toured for two years opening for B.B. King. Tommy is nominated for Contemporary Blues Artist this year and, with 19 weeks on the blues charts, his 2005 is also up for an award. (MM) 'The Magician's Nephew' Thursday (March 23 at noon, March 30 at 7pm), Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 3 and 7pm and Sunday at 2pm through April 2 at the Historic Hoover Theatre, 1635 Park Ave., San Jose. Tickets are $10-$22. (408.979.0231) BEFORE YOU could easily slip into Narnia through a wardrobe, there was a silent wood between the worlds. And green pools of possibility (like sickly green spotlights on the floor) led you to a rather ominous shadow behind a white arched screen that came to life as the witchly Queen Jadis (looking like Heidi Kobara). Well, the green lights, the shadow screen and Heidi Kobara aren't exactly in C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, but they are part of Tabard Theatre's enchanting production of this creationist prequel to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. A cast of children play the talking animals, dressed in fun, thoughtful costumes by Marilyn and Brittany Watts—the joking Jackdaw with black face and thick epaulettes of black feathers (Carolyn DiLoreto), the sniffing bulldog (Nick Iles), the long-horned gazelle (Gabrielle Crandall), the furry black bear (Sarah Vivoli), not to mention strong leads as the magician's nephew Digory (Justin Isaacson) and his friend Polly (Sarah Crandall). When especially fast things happen, like talking/flying horses named Fledge (Ana-Catrina Buchser) soaring beyond the mountains, shadow puppetry gallops across the white screen. Before you can be lost in Narnia, much traveling occurs between worlds. Director Susannah Greenwood has taken full advantage of the space at Historic Hoover Theatre. The apron in front of the curtain is used for exploring old houses through dark tunnels. Behind the curtain the silent wood awaits. In a catwalk area to the right we can look over at Uncle Andrew's (John Musgrave) dusty, book-filled study (dust actually falls from books as he picks them up) and the sick room of Digory's Mom (Cheryl Vicary). In the floor space that divides the audience (four rows are seated in the pit), characters walk from Uncle Andrew's 1910 Edwardian world, narrating as they go, to arrive in the nascent Narnia. Or they can go the quick way, disappearing from Narnia through the wings and reappearing in 1910 through the stage door. This crafty stage usage makes a clear delineation between worlds, gives a sense of time passing and offers a holistic picture of Narnia, which is spun from the past and from dreams and shadows and then sung to life by Aslan the kingly Lion (Ogidi Obi). Though the Shakespearean soliloquies in this Aurand Harris adaptation demand Shakespearean chops (and probably props) to keep narration from sounding like proclamation, it's best to let your senses, not your mind, carry you to Narnia. In keeping with Aslan's "the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air," the child creatures mount an especially beautiful silk dance to end Act 1. Set to cosmic sounding music, the black silk of darkness is held and billowed aloft by animals about to "awake, love, think, speak." A blue silk carried by Jackdaw and the iridescent blue-green fairy (Madison Schmidt) creates the undulating sea. This magical show brings Narnia from the inchoate shadows as truly a "land of youth." (Marianne Messina) Storytelling Festival Friday, March 31, through Sunday, April 2. Sonoma Community Center, 276 E. Napa St., Sonoma. $10-$13; Sonoma Valley elementary students, free. Call for complete schedule. 707.938.4626, ext. 1. As part of a three-day storytelling festival, the sought-after Chitresh Das Dance Company performs the classical Indian dance form kathak (translation: "the art of storytelling"). Dancers wear eight-pound anklets made of bells, while moving as gracefully as ever. Music and puppetry comprise the other chapters of the festival, which runs from Friday, March 31, through Sunday, April 2. Highlights include Chitresh Das Dance Company on March 31 at 7:30pm; the Russian Chamber Orchestra performing Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale on Saturday, April 1, at 8pm; and the Bear Flag puppet show by Magical Moonshine Theater on Sunday, April 2, at 3pm. (Brett Ascarelli) Battle of the Brews Friday, March 31, at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, Grace Pavilion, 1350 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa. 5:30pm to 10pm. $40 advance purchase. Twenty NorCal microbreweries duke it out in the Battle of the Brews, while Wonderbread 5—a Jackson 5 cover band made up entirely of white guys sporting white-boy afros—get down. Admissions includes a souvenir cup, beer, vittles and dancin', and all of the proceeds benefit Sonoma County Children at Risk. Hop into the ring on Friday, March 31, at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. (Brett Ascarelli) Fairfax Documentary Film Festival Friday, March 31, and Saturday, April 1, at the Fairfax Theater, 9 Broadway, Fairfax. From 7:30pm. $10. www.cinemawest.com. Way back in the day, before Hollywood and before movies, the Bay Area actually hosted one of the first successful attempts to make a moving picture. The 1878 experiment, which took place at Leland Stanford's Palo Alto ranch, involved photographs of a horse that looked like it was running as the frames sped by. As the silent movie biz developed, and even as Hollywood's first movie studio opened in 1911, the North Bay continued to make filmmaking history, with the work of "Bronco Billy" Anderson, whose short, fictional film Bronco Billy and the Schoolmistress opens the seventh annual Fairfax Documentary Film Festival this week. Shot in Fairfax and released in 1912, the Western is just one example of the cowboy archetype that the nickelodeon star created and passed down to us in the form of George W. Bush. The documentary festival is co-directed by David Weinsoff, a lawyer who "sues polluters," and former rock 'n' roll record producer Wally Buck. Weinsoff, speaking by phone from his Fairfax office, says, "We like different types of documentary films, so there's a pleasant schizophrenia to the festival." Agreeing to disagree, Weinsoff, the traditionalist, chose all the films for the first night, including Bronco Billy as well as Lost and Found, a local documentary about a filmmaker's decision to reunite with a son she put up for adoption in the 1960s. Weinsoff tops off his selection with a sneak peak at new work by Super Size Me filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. On Saturday, April 1, Wally Buck, the "edgy" half, chose the lineup, including POPAGANDA: The Art and Crimes of Ron English, directed by Pedro Carvajal, who will also be in attendance at the screening; Citizen Art, about the Cicada Corps, a group that creates political messages from advertising (as with the image above); and Yanomami: Searching for Answers in the Amazon Rainforest, which shows glimpses from a new doc about the last stone-age tribe in the Amazon. The seventh annual Fairfax Documentary Film Festival illuminates the silver screen on Friday, March 31, and Saturday, April 1, at the Fairfax Theater. (Brett Ascarelli) Robert Brady Sculpture: 1989-2005 Palo Alto Art Center; 1313 Newell Road, Palo Alto; 650.329.2366; The show runs through April 23 After a long and successful career working in ceramics, Bay Area sculptor Robert Brady switched his primary material in 1989. Entranced by wood in its natural state—striving trunks, columnar branches—Brady creates attenuated figures that evoke Giacometti's skeletal studies. Brady's figures are often caught in aspects of worship or submission—kneeling, praying, bending to higher forces. The wooden surfaces are either stripped down, skinned of bark or painted in glossy colors. Angel (1991) is a penitential form, resting on one jointed knee. The streamlined torso is armless; the head marked only by two black dots for eyes. Our attention is drawn to the spectacular paddle-shaped red wings, scored with white lines as if they were made of brick. Another Angel, from 1993, boasts a stretched-oval head from a Modigliani painting and green-tinted wings for arms. Fledgling (1992) is a female figure balancing on her knees like a diver. Her arms are made from swooping curved pieces of wood arching backward. The arms are whiplike, as if about to propel the woman forward with a rush of potential energy. Nash (1995) is a spiderish man-chair resting on the point of his legs and arms, his ribcage lightly delineated with surface carvings. More explicitly metaphoric, Yolo (1989) consists of a large two-piece headless figure twisting at the waist. The arms are clutched behind, forced to drag a stone weight; the feet are buried in the base. This female Sisyphus is eternally poised between pulling and being pulled. Brady also favors pod shapes—giant cocoons with blank eyeholes and Celtic tracery carved on their surfaces. Fid (1993) is hermetically sealed, hiding secrets we can't penetrate. The King's Journey (1993) opens with a hinge to reveal a scooped-out yellow gourd filled with a stamen of sorts and three green seeds. The Brady retrospective is nicely complemented by Deborah Barrett's "Wildlife" show, which runs concurrently. Barrett is a pack-rat artist, happily collaging away with assorted snippets of material and creating pieces that combine the look of great age with disturbing currents of modern madness. For Man in Profile (2000), Barrett has drawn in gouache and pencil an exquisite portrait bathed in white light. The torso is a simple outline from which a piece of cloth in the shape of a sleeve hangs. Monkey on a Horse (1999-2000) reproduces styles from several eras—a Dürer stag beetle, a Japanese monkey, a Persian horse. Rendered on heavily soiled and creased linen, this drawing looks like a lost volume from a Babylonian library. (MSG) Heavenly Bodies San Jose Museum of Art; 110 S. Market St, San Jose; 408.294.2787; Tue - Sun, 11-5pm; show runs through April 9 In an affront to the static quality of oil painting, the video works in "Heavenly Bodies," in the historic wing upstairs at the San Jose Museum of Art, all embrace notions of time and change. In essence, the pieces in the show are experimental video shorts turned into installations pieces. In You Called Me Jacky, a four-minute-long video, artist Pipilotti Rist lip-syncs with exaggerated gestures the title song while indistinct images flow and mutate behind her. The work may be a comment on bad music videos or it just may be a bad music video. In similar fashion, Drew Brandt's Dance, Video, Dance (2002) subverts a battling-warriors video game called Soul Caliber into a disco video. Instead of attacking each other, two armor-plated Voldos with knife-blade hands engage in an intricate dance routine in the halls of some Lara Croft underworld full of columns, vaults and dragons. Two large installations resonate to much greater effect. In one darkened corner, Ajna Joy Lichau's San Shi (Dispersion) consists of a large, faint wall-mounted photo of Angel Island on the wall; on the floor, a color image of a nude woman floats face down in the water. Subtly, the shifting reflections of light create a rippling surface. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that the video is being projected on a bed of sand, which gives it a 3-D quality. Is this a murder waiting to be solved or the beginning of a transformation? The shimmer in the dark remains a mystery. Ruth Eckland's Star Fields (2005) casts a six-minute montage of star bursts and silhouettes of persons and landscapes unknown. In time to a an electronica score, the video turns red, blue and yellow. The video is projected on a series of hanging translucent scrims before falling on a wall. The result--fragmented and layered--is like a hologram journey through deep space with flickering memories of Earth. Local computer artist wiz Jim Campbell offers a Self-Portrait With Disturbances. A small black-and-white TV with its innards exposed broadcasts a grainy shot of the artist's head. As the viewer walks past the screen, a video camera records the movements and adds them to the feed, creating a ghostly trail of pixels, like an animated Etch-a-Sketch. New media offers lots of possibilities, including the chance to flop. Bjorn Melhus' No Sunshine (1998) is a short video about two yellow-wigged proto-humans conversing in baby-talk gibberish until interupted by a pair of more (supposedly) evolved hairless beings in body suits. It is exactly this kind of avant-garde art-school indulgence that gave rise to the SNL parody Sprockets. As Dieter used to chide, "Your story has become tiresome." (MSG) 'Oh, Seuss! Off to Great Places' Oct. 15-May 2006 at the Children's Discovery Museum, 180 Woz Way, San Jose. (408.298.5437) Horton, the Cat in the Hat and a plethora of other Dr. Seuss characters will be the main attraction as the Children's Discovery Museum's newest exhibit, "Oh, Seuss! Off to Great Places.' This hands-on fun zone, borrowed from the Children's Museum of Manhattan, honors the great kids' book author on his Seussentennial. A Wealth Of Ideas Hoover Memorial Exhibit Pavilion; Stanford University Campus; 650.723.3563; Runs Jan. 31-May 6; open Tue-Sat, 11am-4pm; free Liberal it ain't. Stanford's Hoover Institution is the gold standard of conservative think tanks. The well-endowed (with money—despite the phallic symbolism of the Hoover Tower) institution possesses a deep collection of unusual historical documents on the topics of revolution, politics and world leaders. As a prelude to a book about the institution's archives by fellow Bertrand M. Patenaude, the Hoover library is mounting an exhibit of some of its rarest holdings. (MSG) Calendar Home | Metroactive | Back | Next