XL REVIEWS

Sheryl Crow, 'The Music Man,' 'A Brief History of Helen of Troy,' Sonic Youth, Festival-Institute at Round Top, 'Summer Fling,' Scott H. Biram

Monday, June 26, 2006

Rock

CROW'S MIDDLE-OF-THE-ROAD SOUND IS STRONG ENOUGH

For Sheryl Crow, if every day is a winding road, then she must find herself in the middle of one pretty much constantly. Few artists have courted the mainstream so effectively, and few have been so precise in their approach to allegedly casual song craft. Thursday night, at a full but hardly sold-out Bass Concert Hall, she found that double yellow line and stayed there the entire time.

Jack Ingram opened the show with a strong set of his rootsy country music, much of which seemed rooted as much in John Mellencamp's tradition as Hank Williams'. He closed the brief set with "Wherever You Are," his No. 1 country single, which, frankly, sounds like it would do just fine in the Americana and album rock formats as well.

You might recall that Crow was forced to cancel her Feb. 28 show after revealing she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She made occasional comments about both her health (Sheryl: "I feel great" Audience: "WOOOOO!") and allusions to her one-time romantic relationship with Lance Armstrong (Sheryl: "Austin's been so cool to me" Audience: "WOOOOO!!"), but she seemed in excellent shape, if very thin. She was joined by a five-piece band and a string section.

Opening with "Run Baby Run," she hit the hits ("My Favorite Mistake," "Strong Enough," "All I Wanna Do") and delivered the goods in a manner that is best as "enthused professionalism." "Good is Good" is a perfect song for our current state of moral reductionism ("good is good/ and bad is bad"). "Letter to God" projected notes to him on a backdrop. She gave a pro-tequila intro to "Leaving Las Vegas" that seemed to miss the song's point rather dramatically. She plowed into "Mississippi," the song Bob Dylan gave her, and Ingram joined her for "If It Makes You Happy." She found the middle of the road and hung out there, which is where everyone likes her to be.

—Joe Gross

Musical theater

TEXARTS MAKES 'MUSIC MAN' SING

The songs in Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man" extract melody and rhythm from daily life. The seamless relationship between music and environment helped the show win the Tony for Best Musical in 1958 (beating even "West Side Story"). And though it submits to some of the kitschier conventions of mid-century American musical theater (improbably truncated arc, love trumping criminal activity), "Music Man" offered its audiences what was then an innovation of the beloved form.

TexARTS Presents, a new arts group/training academy founded by Todd Dellinger (former executive director of Martha Graham Dance Center) and Robin Lewis (choreographer and Broadway performer), staged a concert version of "Music Man" at the Paramount Theatre on Saturday. The evening gave the not-quite sold-out crowd a glimpse of the Lakeway-based company, which hopes to become a regular producer of classic musicals in the area. If its splashy, by-the-book "Music Man" was any indication, TexARTS should look forward to a bountiful future.

More than 80 performers, both amateur and professional, populated this "Music Man," directed by Lee Roy Reams, who visited town last fall as an Austin Cabaret Theatre performer. Headlined by Broadway regulars Rebecca Luker (as Marian) and Jim Walton (as Harold), the show featured local actors, dancers, singers and musicians with a wide range of ages and experience levels, including students from the TexARTS summer program.

Luker and Walton appeared together in a 2000 Broadway revival of "Music Man," for which Luker received her second Tony nomination. While both delivered typically solid performances, Luker seemed not to be in full voice (though she did hit the money note at the end of "My White Knight"). Of the local performers, theatrical grande dame Karen Kuykendall (as the mayor's earthy wife), dancer Barrett Davis and actor Andy Richardson (as Winthrop, Marian's shy 10-year-old brother) hinted at a very happy marriage between TexARTS and the local arts community.

— Tommy O'Malley

Theater

THE TRUTH? 'TROY' MISSES ITS MARK

In frank sexual terms, Mark Schultz's "A Brief History of Helen of Troy" examines the relationship between beauty and accountability. The story of an emotionally unmoored young girl named Charlotte, "Troy" questions the truths to which people cling. These questions, as presented in Mark Pickell's listless production for Capital T Theatre, tend to be more annoying than troubling.

Charlotte is a young girl who lives with her distant widower father Harry, a heavy drinker who spends countless silent hours in front of the television. Easily bored, Charlotte often orchestrates explosive situations to break up the monotony. For example, she levels explicit charges of impropriety against her hot-tempered father on more than one occasion, threatening to run away each time. Charlotte's most evident character trait is impulsiveness, and her favored mode of interaction is manipulation.

Working on the intimate Hyde Park Theatre stage, director Pickell (and co-designer Billy Dragoo) employed an uncomplicated aesthetic concept, dividing the stage into three major points of action (the living room, the dining room and the bedroom). Though most scene changes required only lighting adjustments, the transitions were protracted, often noisy distractions — a problem, given the set's simplicity.

Adding to the physical confusion was the unfortunately misguided cast of six actors (all of whom, it should be noted, emerged with their dignity intact). Theresa Baldwin (Charlotte) and David Precopia (Harry) notably tried to find purpose in their characters' actions, which grow increasingly discomforting during the play. They struggle to balance their characters' love and resentment for each other, which seriously fogs the plot's trajectory. Only when Kevin Jones (as Gary, Charlotte's guidance counselor) and Ryan Ciardo (as Freddie, Charlotte's older schoolmate) appear does Schultz's noncommittal dialogue sound anything other than forced.

("A Brief History of Helen of Troy" continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through July 8. Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St. $10-$20. 444-6920, www.capitalt.org.)

— T.O.

Alternative rock

SONIC YOUTH RIPENS WITH AGE

Sonic Youth will be remembered for its guitars: noisy, overdriven, feeding back, clanging, humming, squalling. The band conquered the American rock underground with those guitars, a great band name, relentless touring, a bunch of great records, a few so-so ones and a few stinkers.

They did not conquer the American rock underground with tight songs, which they tried to write after jumping to a major label in 1990. Though the move to Geffen Records introduced Sonic Youth to kids who didn't live near good record stores, those first few major-label albums smacked of effort, which is not a good look for a band this inherently cool. Most of their attempts to write rock tunes — in the alt-rock tradition they accidentally founded — were simply not all that successful. That is until this year, with the release of the shockingly good, shockingly short "Rather Ripped."

Friday night at a packed Stubb's, Sonic Youth cranked out all of "Ripped" (plus a few older gems for the lifers) in a low-key set that found them sticking mostly with the pleasantly chiming, relatively clean guitar sound in which they've worked since 1995's "Washing Machine."

Opening with "Incinerate," a corker off "Ripped," the quartet was augmented by former Pavement bassist Mark Ibold (which let bassist Kim Gordon, the youngest 54-year-old ever, sing and do her patented hopping-on-high-heels dance). "Catholic Block," "Jams Runs Free" and "Sleeping Around" turned into interlocking guitar flurries. "Rapture" became a lullaby, and everyone sang along with "100%," a minor hit from '92 that sounded like a bad grunge tribute, which it was.

Awesome Color, a band newly signed to Sonic Youth leader Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label, opened the show with a churning mass of noisy rock in the style of the Stooges. Really, really in the style of the Stooges. Their drummer looked like a 12-year-old skate punk. Not too shabby.

Twenty years ago, the members of Sonic Youth were indie superstars. Ten years ago, it looked like their moment was gone. Now, it seems like they could do this forever. I hope I get old before I die.

— J.G.

Classical music

DETAILS BEDEVIL

Saturday evening's concert at the Festival-Institute at Round Top by the Texas Festival Orchestra with conductor Pascal Verrot featured familiar masterpieces by Mozart and Beethoven. After top-drawer readings of works by this French conductor with two previous summers' incarnations of this orchestra, I heard these talented student players getting the right idea of the music but missing some of the details.

Like his Classical colleagues, Mozart presents in his music a transparent texture demanding clean starts and stops. The Overture to "Don Giovanni" featured harsh timpani and most players trying to keep up with the (appropriately) brisk tempo. I missed hearing most of the accents and little outbursts in the slow introduction that heighten the dramatic tension of the music.

The Salzburg master's Clarinet Concerto with faculty soloist Håkan Rosengren employed a very small string section (the prerogative of the conductor and the soloist) and a general equalization of louds and softs that turned the orchestra into a backup band instead of a partner with the soloist. For his part, Rosengren had a tone that was consistently beautiful from loud to disappearing-soft; unfortunately, there was little of the expression and shape that takes the music from beautiful to eloquent.

In Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 after the intermission, Verrot obeyed some directions that particularly pleased me. He observed all the repetitions in the score and took out a couple of traditional changes in the orchestration — this symphony was played precisely as Beethoven wrote it. Despite its familiarity, the Fifth remains a challenge to play, and this reading suffered from unsteady pacing and an in-my-face brass section.

As on previous occasions, the trip to Round Top was a pleasant little jaunt, and even the less than perfect music-making still was worth the trip.

— David Mead

Art

A 'FLING' TO REMEMBER

Young talent abounds in "Summer Fling," a tidy little show at Art Palace curated by artist Ali Fitzgerald. Herself proficient at creating compelling figurative tableaux, University of Texas graduate student Fitzgerald not surprisingly chose three artists from her own UT backyard who do the same.

Christa Palazzolo, a 2005 UT bachelor of fine arts graduate, is an identical twin. Hence it might not be readily apparent that her larger-than-life-size, full-body oil portraits, "Christa Lee" and "Cari Lynn," are not actually two views of the same young woman. No matter. They project a weird richness no matter what you know of them. "Christa" awkwardly wears girly dress-up clothes, her face smeared with red lipstick. "Cari," equally awkward, sports tomboy duds. And both look terribly uncomfortable, as if they were in the wrong costume.

Senalka McDonald's small collage paintings feature one or two expressively — and sometimes colorfully — rendered characters placed within a mostly empty picture plane. Yet the sexually charged, violence-tinged dramas between the figures smartly collapses any cartoonish flair McDonald's paintings may hold on first glance.

Randy Muñiz, however, steals the show with his monumental "Traffic Jam (Dueling Fans)," a 5-by-11-foot charcoal drawing. The 19-year-old UT undergraduate crafts a small, intense opera in black and white, a rush-hour scene except with farm and zoo animals — their faces full of apprehension — piloting cars. They jostle around an enormous bus, its windows crowded with people who've draped their arms outside, the rest of their bodies obscured. Muñiz conjures a wonderful, nightmarish world, full of anxiety and resonant beauty as well.

("Summer Fling" continues 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesdays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through July 12. Art Palace, 2109 E. Cesar Chavez St. Free. 496-0687, www.artpalacegallery.com.)

— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

Cow-punk

A SALTY SLICE OF BIRAM'S COW-PUNK

Scott H. Biram was cussing up a heat wave Saturday at the grand opening of the second Parlor pizza joint, at Guadalupe and 43rd streets. Into a microphone that distorts his voice to sound as if it were echoing through a megaphone, he mumbled like a drunk on a porch, "You're gonna hear a lot of cuss words tonight." And then he rattled off a laundry list of body parts and four-letter favorites.

Hyde Park homeowners abutting the new Parlor feared riffraff might be a concern at a pie factory with a full bar and live music. But as quickly as opposition to its opening was born, Biram's cow-punk christening stymied it. No stage meant no view of the seated, trucker-hatted one save for the few gathered around him, rapt like cavemen staring at fire.

Biram previewed cuts from next month's self-written "Graveyard Shift," recorded after infamously getting pancaked by an 18-wheeler and the subsequent burial of his best friend. On "Been Down Too Long," he spewed about walking the highway at night and biting off more than he could chew. When he repeatedly asked for an "amen," the Parlor congregation happily obliged.

Biram's blues are as derivative as Jack White's and Jon Spencer's before him. Fortunately, his facility and style are on par with them, making for innovative homage to the old-school, black blues players who are either dead or decaying. Of course, that's when Biram's not pulling a Hank Williams Sr.

Amid the hootin' and hollerin' and bludgeoning of guitar, a boy of about 8 bounded through the doors, only to have his mother catch up with him and cover his ears. But he immediately weaseled free, intrigued by Biram's man-behind-the-curtain sermon. If that boy represents the new generation of Hyde Park, he just signaled the beginning of the end of the neighborhood.

— Michael Hoinski