by Larry & Arlene Dunn
special to ClevelandClassical.com
American pianist Lara Downes, a frequent visitor to Northeast Ohio, just completed a four-day stint in Cleveland, Oberlin, and Akron. On Saturday, February 4, she performed and discussed works from her recent CD America Again for an enthusiastic audience in Heiser Auditorium at the Kendal at Oberlin retirement community. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hautzinger
Opera in a dance club? Why not? Opera can be intimidating and ridiculous, with its gilded houses, extravagant length, fantastic plots, and the bewildering phantasmagoria that generally appears onstage. There’s a reason why it’s parodied so frequently. So it was refreshing to see digestible, one-act operas about everyday people presented by Oberlin Opera Theater in the basement Dionysus Disco, better known to the sweaty college revelers who are its normal customers as the ‘Sco. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
There’s a famous one-liner popularized by Groucho Marx: “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” On August 27 in Kendal at Oberlin’s Heiser Auditorium, The Fourth Wall hybrid arts ensemble brilliantly brought the absurdity of the joke to life during a thrilling, high-energy performance of their one-hour variety show, “Fruit Flies Like a Banana.”
All jokes aside, The Fourth Wall (Hilary Abigana, flute, Neil Parsons, bass trombone and Greg Jukes, percussion) are excellent musicians who have a uncanny ability for intelligently combining a variety of musical styles with the spoken word and just enough off-the-wall (no pun intended) choreography to keep things interesting and thoroughly entertaining.
Inspired by “Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind,” a show by the Chicago theater company The Neo-Futurists, in which thirty plays are performed in an hour, “Fruit Flies Like a Banana” features twenty pieces performed in sixty minutes. [Read more…]
By Daniel Hautzinger
There’s an old vaudeville one-liner popularly attributed to Groucho Marx that goes, “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.” The mental gymnastics, upended expectation, and absurdity of the joke make it a fitting source for “Fruit Flies Like a Banana,” the title of hybrid arts ensemble The Fourth Wall’s “sprint-triathlon variety show.” They will present the show on Wednesday, August 27 at 7:15 pm in Kendal at Oberlin’s Heiser Auditorium. [Read more…]