You can also hear This Week in Texas Music History on Saturday on KERA radio. But subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss an episode. And our thanks to KUT public radio in Austin for helping us bring this segment to you.

And if you’re a music lover, be sure to check out Track by Track, the bi-weekly podcast from Paul Slavens, host of KERA radio’s 90.1 at Night.

• Click the player to listen to the podcast:

• Expanded online version:

This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll remember an eclectic Texas musician who continues to defy categorization.

Doug Sahm was born Nov. 6, 1941, in San Antonio. He began performing on local radio at the age of 8. Although Sahm grew up listening to country, pop and rock and roll, he also was strongly influenced by R&B, jazz and conjunto. In 1964, Sahm formed the Sir Douglas Quintet. The group released several hit records, including “She’s About a Mover,” “Mendocino” and “Dynamite Woman.” The Sir Douglas Quintet was very much a rock and roll band, but it also incorporated other musical influences, such as conjunto, country, blues and R&B, to give it a distinctly Texas sound. Throughout the 1970s, Sahm continued forging a unique style that blended honky tonk, blues, conjunto, western swing, R&B and rock and roll. By the 1990s, Doug Sahm’s eclectic musical tastes helped form the foundation for his most successful group, the Grammy Award-winning Texas Tornados. Together with Augie Meyers, Flaco Jimenez and Freddy Fender, Sahm helped popularize the Tornados’ uniquely Texas sound throughout the world. Sahm died Nov. 18, 1999.

Next time on This Week in Texas Music History, we’ll look at a classic Texas dance hall that has become a world famous tourist destination.

In the Art&Seek Saturday Spotlight, we’re skating for a cause. The Art of Skateboarding gathers 200 skateboards designed and decorated by local artists, celebrities and art students. The event begins at 7 at Southside on Lamar in Dallas. If you attend, you can bid on the boards, with the proceeds benefiting Texas Scottish Rite Hospital.

Click here to ready Cindy Chaffin's recent post on the event.

The Globe, the Rose, the Theatre: They're some of the most famous names in the history of theater, yet we didn't really even know what they looked like until a Dutch drawing of one theater interior was found in 1888. It also turns out that the theaters themselvers were hardly fixed in some classic form. They were often hastily improvised, "ongoing projects" — with parts added on as needed. Or as the competition dictated.

One point, for example, that Julian Bowsher, senior archaeologist with the Museum of London, discussed during the Boshell Family Lecture on Archaeology at the Dallas Museum of Art, was the changes affected at the Rose (about which much more is known than the Globe). The Rose apparently took shape in 1587 without a fixed roof over the stage. Later, its circular shape was seriously altered — because a stage roof was added. That meant the sightlines along the sides had changed.  In effect, a flat-front proscenium stage had become a thrust stage — which is what the later Globe adopted.  The roof, Bowsher pointed out, also now permitted new "special effects." It could hold pulleys for "gods" to fly in and out. These explanations, Bowsher said, were arrived at partly through consultations with working actors.

To give some idea of the dimensions of the Elizabethan stage: At 75 feet across, the Rose's was a little smaller than the current stage at the Wyly Theatre. As for seating, the Wyly holds fewer than 600. The Globe? It held somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000. Imagine the lungs it took to be heard in the balconies' back rows.

Bowsher is the author of The Rose Theatre: An Archaeological Discovery and a new book, The Rose and the Globe (to be released in December). He spoke with Krys Boyd for Think.

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The Undermain Theater opens its 26th season Nov. 14 with the Len Jenkin play, Port Twilight, or The History of Science. The Undermain is the only Deep Ellum stage company founded in the '80s that still survives — still in Deep Ellum.

We took the occasion to talk with Katherine Owens, one of the founding members and the company's artistic director. Owens has directed more than 60 stage productions, including ones in LA, Europe and off-Broadway. She spoke about the Undermain's intractable but invaluable basement space, the sci-fi future that exists in Port Twilight, choosing playwrights for their language and her company's own Campaign for the Future.

• Art&Seek Q&A: Orgasm Inc. Director Liz Canner
• Thursday's VideoFest Picks
  

Cheap video cameras and computer editing software have turned wannabe moviemakers into pop culture stars. Stephen Becker reports on a program of YouTube videos at this year’s Dallas VideoFest, which begins today.

• Click the audio player to listen to the KERA radio report:

• Online version:

Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded onto YouTube. Most of it you’d just assume skip. But how do you find the interesting stuff?

VideoFest director Bart Weiss decided that for this year's festival, which begins today at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas, he wanted a program that would showcase the possibilities of online video.

WEISS: “On YouTube right now, there is the most amazing things in the universe that have ever been made, but you probably don’t know where to find them. The problem is there’s way too much. So having somebody give you an aesthetic overview really kind of helps.”

Weiss turned to a pair of University of Texas at Dallas PhD students to curate the program, which will screen on Sunday at noon.

There’s a good chance you’ll be among the millions who would recognize what they’ve chosen. Did you contribute to the more than 1.1 million hits for Grocery Store Musical?

And just a few bars of this song …

… should be enough to remind you of a guy named Matt dancing all around the world.

That video’s been viewed more than 24 million times.

The hourlong show pairs these viral videos with more newsy clips, like the disturbing on-the-ground footage from this summer’s Iranian election protests.

Mona Kasra worked with Kyle Kondas to select the clips. She says the program shows our still-growing infatuation with social media sites like YouTube. Everyday, people use the site to share their creations, comment on others and turn some videos into viral sensations.

KASRA: “We have more access to video technology through our mobile, through the Web cam, through all these cheap consumer products. So you have that video everywhere with you, and you capture the video and you upload it because you know the power of having this many people watching YouTube all the time.”

If the VideoFest program represents the current state of social media, what does the future hold? iPhones and Blackberries already allow us to update our Facebook statuses and send our tweets from anywhere.

Weiss and Kasra feel the next frontier is real-time video. They say that when video editing gets easier on cellphones, the lag time between shooting and sharing will be erased.

As that happens, social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter will become less wordy and more visual.

KASRA: “All those status updates that we are seeing, which are quite textual … more and more we might be able to do that through video, which makes it more intimate and more real.”

Maybe those videos will make it into next year’s program.

Photo: Astrea Media

For the last decade, you haven't been able to watch a football game on TV without seeing an ad for Viagra, Cialis and the like. But have you ever wondered why the commercial breaks during Dancing with the Stars and daytime soaps aren't filled with spots for female versions of those drugs?

If the pharmaceutical industry had anything to say about it, we'd be seeing those ads. That race to create the female equivalent of Viagra is the subject of Liz Canner's documentary Orgasm Inc., which screens Thursday night at 9 p.m. during VideoFest. Canner got the idea to make the film when she got a job working for one of the very companies trying to make a drug for what it vaguely termed Female Sexual Dysfunction.

In an e-mail exchange for the Art&Seek Q&A, Canner discusses why we have yet to see the female "little blue pill" on the market and what making the film taught her about the industry she once worked:

Art&Seek: Did you ever feel conflicted at all when you were making the film, since you worked alongside these people and had gotten to know them?

Liz Canner: I did not set out to make an expose of the pharmaceutical industry.

In fact, I liked the people that I worked with. The documentary is not about them personally. It is about a problem in the way in which diseases and pharmaceuticals are developed by the drug industry. Here is the story of what happened …

After over a decade of producing documentaries on human rights issues such as genocide, police brutality, and world poverty, the violent images from my movies were giving me nightmares and making me depressed about the state of humanity. In order to change the script in my head, I decided my next project would be about pleasure, specifically, the science of female pleasure.

Then, strangely, while I was in the middle of shooting the movie, I was offered a job editing erotic videos for a pharmaceutical company that was developing an orgasm cream for women. The videos were to be watched by women during the clinical trial of their new drug. I accepted the job and gained permission to film my employers for my own documentary. I thought the experience would give me access to the secretive world of the pharmaceutical industry and insight into the latest scientific thinking about women and pleasure.

I did not set out to create an exposé, but what I uncovered at work compelled me to keep filming and investigating. This insider perspective allows Orgasm Inc. to scrutinize the everyday patterns of pharmaceutical company work in order to explore a culture that has been perverted to place the drive for profit above our health. So much for pleasure …

Art&Seek: How has the process of making a film about the pharmaceutical industry affected how you feel about the healthcare debate going on now?

L.C.: Through working on Orgasm Inc., I have become acutely aware of how the healthcare debate has been framed. The pharmaceutical industry has been let off the hook for a number of things – one of them being that for the past 20 years, drug companies have been involved with expanding our notion of what constitutes health and illness. Ordinary life problems have been renamed as diseases with the help of Madison Avenue. Shyness became Social Anxiety Disorder; heartburn turned into acid reflux disease and incontinence became Overactive Bladder Syndrome. This over medicalizing has contributed to the over prescribing of pharmaceuticals and the rise in healthcare costs. The U.S. makes up just 5 percent of the world’s population, but we account for 42 percent of the world’s spending on prescription drugs (yet we don’t live any longer than others).

Art&Seek: A lot of men seem to be happy with taking Viagra, Cialis, etc. From your research in the film, do you think we will ever see a similarly effective drug for women, or are we talking apples and oranges in making the comparison?

L.C.: I have been waiting for a Viagra-type drug for women that worked for almost a decade. This was going to be the end of my documentary. While making Orgasm Inc., I discovered that the clinical trials of the drugs for female sexual dysfunction and for erectile dysfunction had very high placebo rates (30-40 percent). This speaks to the psychological aspect of sexual experience and points to the potential of help through coaching, sex advice and encouragement.

Art&Seek: During the film, you essentially had a representative from one of the companies that is pushing this idea of Female Sexual Disorder say she needed to quit her job because she didn’t believe in what she was trying to sell. What did you think when you heard her tell you that?

L.C.: It’s unusual to interview someone and have them experience a life epiphany right in front of you. In this case, Lisa was selling a cosmetic genital surgery procedure to doctors. During the interview, she realized that the surgeries were making women look like little girls. She turned to the camera and said that she needed to quit her job.

I think there are quite a number of people who find themselves feeling conflicted about things they have to do for work. However, it’s rare to find someone with the courage to admit this on camera. Lisa’s discomfort with what she was selling caused me to believe that there was something really wrong with designer vaginas, so I started investigating it further. In the movie, you learn what I discovered.

The Art&Seek Q&A is a weekly discussion with a person involved in the arts in North Texas. Check back next Thursday for another installment.

Congratulations to Wade Griffith of Dallas, the winner of the Flickr Photo of the Week contest! Wade was the third ever winner of our contest and has contributed more photos to our Flickr pool that anyone. His winning photo is part of a series he shot recently. We liked the collection so much that we decided to run some of the other photos below. Wade follows last week's winner, Hector Arencibia.

If you would like to participate in the Flickr Photo of the Week contest, all you need to do is upload your photo to to our Flickr group page. It's fine to submit a photo you took previous to the current week, but we are hoping that the contest will inspire you to go out and shoot something fantastic this week to share with Art&Seek users. If the picture you take involves another facet of the arts, even better. The contest week will run from Monday to Sunday, and the Art&Seek staff will pick a winner on Monday afternoon. We'll notify the winner through FlickrMail (so be sure to check those inboxes) and ask you to fill out a short survey to tell us a little more about yourself and the photo you took. We'll post the winners' photo on Wednesday.

Now, here's more from Wade:

Wade Griffith

Title of photo: Finishing Touches

Equipment Used: This was all photographed with my Nikon D90, mostly using a wide-angle Sigma 10-20mm lens for that documentary, photojournalistic look.

Tell us more about your photo: The photo Finishing Touches was one picture in a series of B&W images that I shot of my older brother getting a half sleeve tattoo on his arm for the first time. He sat for a couple of 7 hour sessions on two different Sunday afternoons, and I was there about half the time to document it. A good friend of mine, Chris Clements, is an award winning tattoo artist at the new shop on Lower Greenville in Dallas called Stainless Studios. I was also shooting the photos to promote the business as well.

Art Conspiracy is a grassroots fund-raiser, art auction, concert and all-around heck of a party.  The venue and the beneficiary change every year, and today details were announced for ArtCon 5.

Here's the skinny:

Date: 7 p.m., Dec. 12

Location: A warehouse at 511 West Commerce, Dallas. It will be transformed into a performance space and gallery for the evening.

The Art: 150 artists contribute their work, all created on Dec. 11, just for the event.

The bands:  Telegraph Canyon, The Crash that Took Me, The Boom Boom Box and RTB2

Your host: The fabulous Paul Slavens, of 90.1 at Night, now on KERA radio, soon to be on KXT.

Admission: $10

The beneficiary: Resolana. The group provides rehabilitative arts programming to women in jail in Dallas.

If you are an artist, and want to participate, you need to take action at noon today.

You'll hear a lot more about Art Con here in the coming weeks, because Art&Seek is partnering with the group on this year's event. So stay tuned for more.

Press release after the jump

Art Conspiracy is Turning Five

December 12^th event is equal parts off-the-grid art show, concert and fundraiser

November 3, 2009 – DALLAS, TX – What started off as a “one time only” fundraiser has become one of the most anticipated annual art events in Dallas.  On Saturday, December 12, starting at 7:00 p.m., Art Conspiracy will mark its fifth year of bringing artists and musicians together to “conspire” for good causes.

This year’s Art Conspiracy will be held at 511 West Commerce in Dallas. Once again the Art Conspiracy crew will transform an empty warehouse into a one-night-only art gallery and performance space. The event will feature music from Telegraph Canyon, The Crash That Took Me, The Boom Boom Box and RTB2, video installations from Edward Ruiz, art from 150 Dallas area artists and emcee, Paul Slavens, host of KERA-FM’s 90.1 at Night.

Art Conspiracy differs from other arts fundraisers because the artists do their work on site the day before the event. On the eve of Art Conspiracy, artists work in shifts to fill 150 18 x 18 plywood canvasses. During the actual event on Saturday, December 12, all pieces will be sold in rapid-fire live auctions. Starting bids for all pieces is $20.

“We’ve worked to make Art Conspiracy unique, it’s an event built on creativity but the end game is doing good,” says Cari Weinberg, Executive Director, Art Conspiracy. “Art Conspiracy is fun, fast-paced and accessible to everyone. Over the last five years thousands of people have given us their time, talent and support. The result is a collaborative night showcasing the best of the creative community in Dallas while raising money.”

This year Art Conspiracy has formed a partnership with KERA’s Art&Seek, an online community at artandseek.org where creative people can come together to find, discuss, create and react to art. “Art Conspiracy shows that powerful – and really fun –  things happen when artists come together as a community,” says Anne Bothwell, director of Art&Seek.  “And our Art&Seek community shares so many of Art Con’s values and goals, it’s a natural fit. We’re excited to partner with Art Conspiracy as it continues to grow.”

In 2009, Art Conspiracy will donate the proceeds of the event to Resolana, an organization that provides rehabilitative arts programming for women in the Dallas County Jail and Dawson State Jail in Dallas.

“In an uncertain economy, being the beneficiary of the Art Conspiracy is  a tremendous gift . . . a real godsend,” says Bette Buschow, Executive Director, Resolana.  “Resolana has recently been assigned its own classroom space in the new addition to Dallas County Jail and over the last six months, our programming has grown from six hours of classes per week to 16-20 hours per week.  The funding from Art Conspiracy will make a HUGE difference in our ability to support and sustain this growth and in our ability to serve the women at Dallas County Jail.”

Since 2005, Art Conspiracy has raised over $50,000 for groups including

• Preservation LINK, an organization that teaches audio and visual media to students in South Dallas and Fair Park
• La Reunion TX, an arts residency in the making on a 35 acre urban forest engaged as outdoor studio space and gallery.
• St. Anthony Community Center, a center that offers visual art, music and dance to more than 800 children in South Dallas.

Art Conspiracy is street level philanthropy. Members of the creative community in North Texas pool their talents to create bi-annual fundraising events that support other nonprofit arts programs. Art Conspiracy events are designed to be affordable and offer everyone a chance to purchase original artwork at a reasonable level. Art Conspiracy is a 501c3 organization with IRS nonprofit status (so your donations are tax deductible!) More information is available at www.artconspiracy.org

Media Info:

Art Conspiracy organizers, musicians, and artists are available for interviews. For more

information and/or Art Conspiracy artwork, please contact Cari Weinberg at

cari@artconspiracy.org or call 214-794-3510.

Art Conspiracy Details:

Date: 7:00 p.m., Saturday, December 12

Location: 511 W. Commerce, Dallas, TX 75208

Participants: 150 Dallas Artists, 4 Bands

Admission: $10

Benefiting: Resolana

Cedric Neal as Puck and Matthew Steven Tompkins as Oberon

• Lawson Taitte's review in the Dallas Morning News

• Critical Rant & Rave review by Alexandra Bonifield

• Laura Noble's review in SMU's Daily Mustang

• Mark Lowry's review for Theater Jones

• Joan Arbery's review for Renegade Bus

• Elaine Liner's review for the Dallas Observer

• Mary Clark's review for Pegasus News

• Arnold Wayne Jones' review for the Dallas Voice

• KERA radio review:

• Expanded online review:

For its debut in its new home in the Wyly Theatre, the Dallas Theater Center has taken William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream — and pumped up the volume.

[music from Keri Hilson's “Knock You Down”]

Despite his efforts with adding music to the play, Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty hasn’t really made a musical comedy out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

He’s made a dance party re-mix.

Moriarty uses big pop hits – like “Knock You Down” by Keri Hilson and “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas – to inject a lot of high energy into this Midsummer. And he’s got youthful energy here as well. He’s filled out the cast with students from Southern Methodist University and Booker T. Washington Arts Magnet High School. So Shakespeare’s magical comedy of troubled lovers and troublesome fairies undergoes a kind of urban dance club overhaul. We get bubble machines, squirt guns, graffiti art and lots of audience participation.

This Midsummer is colorful, it’s physical, it’s fast. But it also lacks subtlety — to say the least. Moriarty has seriously cut and re-written Shakespeare's text. In perhaps his biggest change, he's dropped the entire sub-plot of the foundling boy, the cause of the break-up of Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies. He covers this hole, for instance, by replacing "Indian boy" — a reference to the child — with "donkey boy," an unmetrical joke about Bottom being turned into an ass.

Other changes are more trivial, which actually makes them puzzling on occasion. Why does Bottom announce that the play he and his fellow mechanicals have devised for the nuptial feast at the end is not "preferred" — Shakespeare's original term — but "chosen"? What difference does it make?

In any event, I don’t object to cutting Shakespeare on principle. It's far more significant that in his direction, Moriarty has streamlined the characters and emotions of any darkness or doubts. This Midsummer's pell-mell race never pauses, never complicates. We don't encounter much that's truly heartfelt or thoughtful. By the end, passion's blindness, the bitter war between the sexes, these all get quickly resolved with Nerf guns. Would that we could.

Matt Tallman, Rukhmani Desai, Lee Trull as troubled lovers

Matthew Tompkins and Liz Mikel do manage one tender moment when they reconcile as the quarreling fairy king and queen. Kudos to them. Cedric Neal and Abby Seigworth are also likable as Puck and Helena. And once again, we get to enjoy Neal's terrific singing voice, previously showcased in last year's Tommy.

But we're more aware of these actors’ exertions as triathletes. Moriarty shows off the Wyly’s many levels and stairs by turning the space into an elaborate aerobicise center. The frantic cast runs and clambers and spins and climbs.

And then they dance-dance-dance.

[music from I Gotta Feeling – including the exhortation, “Jump on that sofa.”]

“Jump on that sofa.” Yes, this is a celebration — and a welcome one. With the Wyly, the Theater Center has a new home at last. Moriarty uses Shakespeare’s royal wedding party (and the blessing of the house) at the end of Midsummer to mark the occasion. The play may well have been written for an aristocratic wedding; the rituals chime with the moment at the Wyly. He’s also cast Robyn Flatt as Egeus, a mother of one of the young lovers (originally, Egeus is a father). Flatt, of course, is the head of the Dallas Children’s Theater. She’s also the daughter of Paul Baker. He was the founding artistic director of the Dallas Theater Center, and he died last Sunday. So the theater company’s past and its future are wedded here.

But by the end, one begins to feel less a sense of joy than of overkill. Chamblee Ferguson is one of our finest local actors, and he plays Bottom, Shakespeare’s great and touching comic creation. (As a member of the amateur acting company that puts on a play for the royal wedding feast, Bottom is also Shakespeare's most significant font of acting lore outside of Hamlet — not for nothing is the gentle Bottom rewarded with a most rare vision that he also, poignantly, loses.) But when Bottom must perform his tragical-comical-heroical death in the play, Moriarty has Ferguson die again and again and again, trying to top each death scene with something ever more outlandish. It's classic comic shtick and a bravura moment for Ferguson, but it's more than a little hammered home.

And then Moriarty actually has Marcus Mauldin as Flute, the bellows-mender, try to top that.

This betrays a certain –  insecurity. As with the climbing and the comedy, Moriarty can't seem to leave well enough alone, doesn't trust the text: The audience is being pummeled into enjoyment. After all, it’s one thing to end Midsummer – as Shakespeare himself does – with a collective physical release, a welcome dance number. Moriarty provides two dance numbers. Then a third, then a fourth and then the balloons cascade down — like the ending of a prom dance.

I don’t intend it as condescending when I recommend the Dallas Theater Center’s production to any parent who has a young teen they want to introduce to Shakespeare. This Midsummer is big, noisy fun. Shakespeare's most poetic romantic comedy has been turned into a clattering, knockabout farce — with dance grooves.

But is that all that Midsummer should be? Considering what Shakespeare has to say about love and madness, about marriage and sexual warfare, is big, noisy fun – enough?

[music from “I’m Yours”]

This is your last opportunity to reserve tickets for Free Night of Theater 2009. This year, 25 Dallas-area theaters are participating in the program.

This is the second year for the ticket giveaway, which is run through the Dallas Office of Culture Affairs.

On Mondays, you will be able to reserve tickets for shows coming up the following weekend. For shows beyond that weekend, you will need to wait until the Monday before those shows to reserve those tickets. Tickets will be available on five consecutive Mondays.

If you would like to reserve tickets, log on to the Free Night of Theater Web site at noon on Monday to make your picks.

We'll be doing our best to help you chose the show that's right for you. We've asked participating theaters to send us a guide to the shows that they are offering, and we'll post them in this space as they come in.

Here is a list of shows opening this week. After that, you'll find guides to future shows.

THIS WEEK'S SHOWS

Show: Blue Beach
Theater: Teatro Dallas
Free Night date(s): Nov. 5 at 8:15 p.m. and Nov. 6 at 8:15 p.m.
The story: In celebration of Days of the Dead and Halloween, we are presenting Blue Beach, a play that takes place in an unkempt old hotel in the Southern coasts of Mexico. The father of a family, an engineer and a politician, has invited his family to inform them of a problem that affects both the hotel and the family. When he presents them with a plan to save them and the hotel, this invitation opens doors that will reveal some of the family's darkest secrets. Blue Beach is presented in English.
Back-stage access: Blue Beach is a work of fantasy, a mystery reminding us of the haunting literature of Mexican writer Juan Rulfo.
This show’s for you if you like: Mystery, suspense and stories about the underworld.

Show: Premiere!
Theater: Rover Dramawerks
Free Night date(s): Nov. 5, 6 and 7 at 8 p.m.; Nov. 7 at 2 p.m.
The story: A comic look at the petty tyranny of fame from the creator of one of the most famous of petty tyrants. Gil is the comedic playwright of his day, doomed to hit after hit, when he just wants to be taken seriously, darkly, academically. Like…dare he say it? The Bard. A hilarious series of events leads to the discovery of a “new” long lost tragedy by, ahem, William Shakespeare. When does a forgery become art itself? Is truth absolute or a function of aspiration, democracy … and marketing?
Back-stage access: This script mirrors the convergence of real issues and events in Wasserman's life, especially as it neared its end. Best known for the Tony Award-winning Man of La Mancha, a musical so popular that several productions are running worldwide right this moment, he saw that work as well as most of his other successes as the virtue of the individual against the system, the state, the church and even against fate itself. Usually it's easy to sympathize with the poor, struggling and failed. So imagine the irony of having lunch with one of the most successful comedic writers of all time 25 years ago to find out he felt trapped and a failure, unable to produce “serious, impacting works.” We'd promised to protect the writer's name until Martha Wasserman, the playwright's widow, gives the “ok” – but three Broadway hits in a row kind of narrows it down, eh? To think of this successful writer as trapped is staggering. And there's only one more powerful name in the world that could do it. Yep, The Bard Himself.
Back-stage access 2: Our leading man has just appeared on the back page of Parade magazine on behalf of Nutrisystem!
This show’s for you if you like: Intelligent comedy with fun characters. And you Don’t need any Cliff's Notes about Shakespeare either!

Show: Talk Radio
Theater: Upstart Productions in conjunction with Project X: Theatre
Free Night date(s): Nov. 5, 6, 7 and 8
The story: Barry Champlain is Cleveland's most popular and controversial talk radio host: the outspoken pundit everyone loves to hate. Every night, he holds the looking glass up to the listeners of Night Talk, exposing America's flaws and blemishes with stinging indictments of the status quo, much to the entertainment of his audience and the corporate brass at Metroscan Broadcasting, who want to bring his show into national syndication. Nominated for the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and revived with great success on Broadway in 2007, this is a scathing look at contemporary American culture that is as shocking and compelling today as it was two decades ago.
Back-stage access: Following the performance – an Upstart Productions exclusive screening! Talk Radio: Life After Death: The 25th Anniversary of the Assassination of Alan Berg, an Interview with Judith Lee Berg and Stephen Singular, author of Talked To Death: The Murder of Alan Berg and the Rise of the Neo-Nazis, the book that inspired the 1988 film Talk Radio directed by Oliver Stone.
This show’s for you if you like: Network with Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway; Bill Maher; Alex Jones; Michael Moore; Larry King; Howard Stern; Reality TV

Also playing this week:

• The Last Call Comedy Showcase, Pocket Sandwich Theater, Nov. 6 and 7
• Don't Dress for Dinner, ICT Mainstage
• TBAAL's Children's Chorus and Youth Orchestra Concert, The Black Academy of Arts and Letters
• Port Twilight, Undermain Theatre