ARTS Pick: A Very Electric Christmas

Combining puppetry and dance with dazzling visual effects, Lightwire Theater’s A Very Electric Christmas takes the audience through a neon tale of family, friendship and hope. The production’s creative team designed sculptures and costumes using electroluminescent wire arrangements to tell the story of a young bird named Max, who is on the annual journey south […]

Aaron Farrington finds new magic in a bygone photo process

Aaron Farrington fell for photography in high school after his grandfather died. “My mom inherited his camera, so I inherited her camera and started taking pictures,” he says. Farrington became interested in making movies, too, and enrolled in a New York film school. But thanks to the expense, he dropped out and wrote a novel […]

ARTS Pick: The Can-Do Attitude

Is there anything left to be said about life, death, food, money and love? Local folk-punk band The Can-Do Attitude thinks there’s always something new and delightfully weird to discover, making its case with tracks like “Popcorn” (“One day we’ll hit an asteroid and all of the corn will be popped / One day we’ll […]

ARTS Pick: The Miho Hazama Big Band

To put the big into The Miho Hazama Big Band, Tokyo-born, New York-based jazz innovator Hazama assembled an 18-piece tribute to her idol Thelonious Monk in celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth. The accomplished composer, arranger, conductor and pianist was selected as one of DownBeat magazine’s 25 for the Future in 2016, and […]

ARTS Pick: Yerma

Billie Piper has earned critical raves, an Olivier award for Best Actress, and she’s performed two sold-out runs at London’s Young Vic in the lead role of Yerma, written by Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca in 1934 and reimagined by director Simon Stone. The power of the biological clock looms large in this modernized version, […]

ARTS Pick: Hiroya Tsukamoto

In a small town in the heart of Japan, 13-year-old Hiroya Tsukamoto discovered the banjo and taught himself to play bluegrass tunes for his dad, who was a fan of traditional Appalachian music. He went on to master the guitar, and in 1999 Tsukamoto won a scholarship to the Berklee School of Music, which brought […]

Bully frontwoman talks audio engineering, screaming and Losing

There’s something Alicia Bognanno of the Nashville-based grunge-pop act Bully wants to get off her chest. Her latest album, Losing, released on October 20 via Sub Pop, is not a breakup record. “I want to scream that to the top of my lungs,” says Bognanno, who easily could. The 27-year-old singer/songwriter/audio engineer/producer frequently screams lamenting […]

Movie review: Murder on the Orient Express arrives in style

While attempting a brief vacation from being the world’s greatest detective, Inspector Hercule Poirot has been reading the hell out of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. With every page, he cackles in delight, a reaction likely based as much on the opportunity to let someone else tell the stories as on the book […]

Bolivar the dinosaur hides out in New York

Imagine you live in Manhattan on West 78th Street and your neighbor is a dinosaur. The problem is, no one believes you. This is the premise for Bolivar, Sean Rubin’s debut graphic novel in which a large gray dinosaur living in New York speaks English, reads the New Yorker, orders corned beef sandwiches and visits […]