Music
Blues, by design, has always been the musical genre of the people. In order to make blues music, one needn't own anything more than an acoustic guitar and a story to tell. Its bare bones form and personal lyrics enabled even the poorest of folk to take part, leading to
Stage
Peter Pan: the boy who never grew up, who learned to fly, who valued the power of imagination and a sense of wonder over trivial matters like responsibility and adulthood -- this is a character that's become so familiar to generations of audiences, hopping from literature to theater to film
Music
For many people, they engage with music the same way they do with smart phone games, mindless reality shows, and endless cycles of nostalgia: it's all about escapism. And it makes sense, with music having the potential to be one of the most transportive art forms out there. If you
Stage
Cabaret is the kind of musical that has shown itself capable of working its way into the pop culture landscape, functioning under a veneer of pure bravado and style, while also carrying with it a message that has only grown more resonant over the years. Beginning its life as a play
Arts
Having the kind of mid-sized venues that cities like Seattle and Portland enjoy has typically been something that's eluded Tacoma. Sure, we have a number of smaller places for your workaday touring bands to play, and we've got enormous institutions like the Broadway Center and the Tacoma Dome, where your
Music
In rock music, passion and verve have traditionally led the way for lead vocalists to express themselves. Nothing played so effectively as an open heart, inviting listeners to empathize with the music, enabling them to put themselves in the shoes of the people singing about love, loss, indignation, sorrow, and
Music
Somewhere along the way, humanity saddled itself with stifling, abundantly inconvenient, and calamitously damaging notions of gender, sexual orientation, and the respective roles of women and men in society. For a life so filled to the brim with nuance, it seems a bunch of people got together and drafted a
Stage
Return to the Forbidden Planet is a whirling dervish of energy, throwing so many ideas and inventive set pieces at the wall to see what sticks, and its wild, giddy enthusiasm is positively infectious. Centerstage Theatre has produced a musical that's deceptively light as a feather, mashing together classic sci-fi tropes,
Music
The careers of John, Paul, George and Ringo, post-Beatles, is a nearly ideal case study in the separate personalities that make up a band, and the effects of isolating them in solo projects. Harrison was free to explore his spiritual side, and released the triple-album masterpiece that he apparently had
Stage
Jesus Christ Superstar, in many ways, is more of an institution than a musical, at this point. Beginning its life as a concept album, before debuting on Broadway in 1971, it was almost immediately a smashing success, leading quite quickly to a 1973 film adaptation. With music by Andrew Lloyd
Music
I've thought a lot about that pivotal moment in my life -- around the age of 13 or 14 -- when I started emerging from my cocoon of detached emotions, spurred on by my increasingly frequent connections with other people, and became a person capable of possessing overwhelming feelings. There
Music
Three Easy Pieces is a monthly column where I guide you through a specific pocket of pop culture, showing you how it evolved from its inception to how it exists today. This month, I'm talking about supergroups. Yes, the notion of several famous musicians from other bands forming their own
Music
It's the natural state of being to be mystified by the universe -- not in a "the flap of a great bird's wings must be creating this thunder we're hearing!" sort of way, but in an innate curiosity that draws us to explore. Sure enough, the more we explore about
Stage
Thurgood Marshall was a great man, but make no mistake: he was human. This, along with highlighting the many accomplishments of his life, seems to be the central thesis of Thurgood, a one-man show that had a life on Broadway with Laurence Fishburne, and is now being staged at Theatre on
Music
When I first started attending local music shows, I was intimidated by how chummy and established everyone was. The bands were elevated entities, but also fluidly mingled with the audience in boozy after-parties. Venues would spring up in unexpected places, only to invariably shutter after a little bit -- usually
Stage
Without putting too fine a point on it, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie is about the past, present and future: regrets about the past, anxiety about the future, and being petrified in the present. Those are the themes explored in a play about a mother and her two children, but the metafictional
Online Newspapers
A well-functioning music scene consists of passionately interwoven people working their hardest to support one another in mutually beneficial ways. At the local level, there's an interplay between bands, venues, audiences, visual artists, bookers, promoters, radio stations, and journalists, all working toward the goal of a healthy, enriching environment in
Music
I've made no secret of the fact that, when looking for a band to write about, I frequently am attracted to the band with the most interesting name. This is the reason why Gene Simmons was idly doodling "KISS" in his high school notebook, testing out fonts, and daydreaming about
Music
The history of sample-driven music is an odd one, littered with plucky DJs and producers whose first and greatest strength was the ability to dig through crates of records in search of seconds-long snatches of fascination. Samples were the great equalizer, allowing amateur songsmiths the ability to create their own
South Sound Cinema
Beginning in fall, the quality of movies in theaters increases exponentially, and as pageants like the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards approach in the spring, ambitious and beautiful movies are suddenly on the tips of everyone's tongues. Here in Tacoma, the Destiny City Film Festival began its life as an