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RS Benedict
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Mar 21, 2024 11:40 am
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RS Benedict
Jabber and Hester.
In the Blood Saint Rose Theater Albany N.Y. March 15, 2024
Suzan-Lori Parks’ In the Blood, a gritty urban remix of The Scarlet Letter, presents the struggles of a single mother named Hester, and uses her story to examine the moralism and hypocrisy of American society. Capital Region’s Harbinger Theater company chose the play as a swan song for the Saint Rose Theater, whose future looks dim with Saint Rose College’s impending closure at the end of the academic year.
It’s a heartrending farewell, and not just because of the death of the college. In the Blood, though tinged with sharp humor, is a dark, unflinching drama that is not afraid to make the audience uncomfortable. It goes places, and many of those places aren’t easy to look at.
I ran into a work friend — a fellow civil servant — in the Egg’s subterranean entrance before the Live concert. “I feel very young,” she said, because she didn’t.
None of us did. None of us were. The crowd was overwhelmingly gray-haired Gen Xers and bespectacled elder Millennials. We were all here to see Live, a band whose name lends itself to “who’s on first” jokes, a band whose heyday happened when Clinton was president. The ghost of my 10-year-old self vibrated with excitement to see “Dolphin’s Cry” performed in person; my current self acutely felt my age.
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RS Benedict
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Feb 19, 2024 4:45 pm
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David Quinones Jr.
The Minutes Albany Civic Theater Albany, N.Y. 2/15/24
While attending a production of Tracy Letts’ The Minutes in New York City, capital region theater director Brian Sheldon noticed the crowd becoming “extremely uncomfortable.” That, he said, is when he knew he had to tell the story. And so he brought the stage play about small town politics to the political and surprisingly small town of Albany (or, as local residents often call it, “Smallbany”). Over the course of one solid act, The Minutes depicts a local government assembly meeting which goes awry — humorously at first, and then horrifically by the end.
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RS Benedict
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Feb 2, 2024 12:14 pm
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RS Benedict
Fever Pitch The Linda, WAMC’s Performing Arts Studio Albany, N.Y. Jan. 27, 2024
The most striking feature of Taína Asili’s evolving multimedia concert/performance piece Fever Pitch, for me, was the tone.
Most art about climate change is heavy with despair. Fever Pitch leans into optimistic melodies with an energetic beat.
“While my lyrics may be holding the weight of stories related to our climate crisis,” Asili wrote via email after the show, “the drums, guitar, and bass can ground us and/or help us to reconnect with our courage and resilience.”
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RS Benedict
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Jan 17, 2024 2:18 pm
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The E‑Block The Palace Theater Albany, N.Y. Jan. 13, 2024
A dense crowd huddled in the lobby of Albany’s Palace Theater Saturday to see local R&B group The E‑Block play a free concert. The crowd went no farther; this performance did not take place on the grand stage, but in the lobby itself, wedged into a corner across from the concessions stand. The unusual location, the unbeatable ticket price (literally free), and the unaffected performance of the band made it feel as if we’d stumbled upon an impromptu jam session among friends.
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RS Benedict
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Dec 11, 2023 11:35 am
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Mikaela Davis.
Mikaela Davis with special guest Maybird Lark Hall Albany, N.Y. Dec. 7, 2023
In the depths of dreary winter, after a week of short and sunless days, as intermittent flurries dusted the sidewalks of Lark Street with snow, Mikaela Davis and Maybird played a set out of time and space.
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RS Benedict
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Nov 21, 2023 11:13 am
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Yeachin Tsai, Birds Migrate Over Sea
Visual Poetry: New Vistas Arts Center of the Capital Region 265 River St Troy, N.Y. Through Dec. 20
Yeachin Tsai’s thick brush strokes start with the gestures of Chinese calligraphy but loosen into poetic abstraction. His vivid piece “Birds Migrate over Sea” evokes the movement of birds over white caps without strictly representing them. Instead, black and white acrylics whirl like wings or waves before tones of blazing copper. In the playful “Summer Orange,” fruit wedges take flight like a flock of gulls.
Tsai’s work appears in the Visual Poetry: New Vistas exhibition at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy. The exhibition is two shows melded together, explained co-curator Joseph Mastroianni: Both interpret the theme of visual poetry to varying degrees of abstraction. As in poetry, there’s room for traditional meter and rhyme, but there’s room for experimental free verse, too.
During a show at Albany’s Fuze Box Sunday, performance artist/activist Vermin Supreme unveiled the platform of his 2024 presidential campaign, and that platform is ponies. (He’s a single issue candidate.) Ponies will revitalize America, he said. Ponies lower our dependence on foreign oil. Ponies are a renewable resource. And ponies are delicious.
The evening’s spectacle transformed Albany’s perennial punk rock nightclub into a political rally from a parallel Dadaist universe.
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RS Benedict
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Sep 26, 2023 10:03 am
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Fracesco Cordaro and Will Roane at the festival.
New York State International Film Festival The Linda/ WAMC Performing Arts Studio Albany, N.Y. Sept. 22 – 23
The eighth annual New York State International Film Festivalc elebrated small things. With all films under 30 minutes in length — some as short as three minutes — each entry had to keep its focus tight. Entrants examined the world on a micro scale, telling brief, quirky, intimate stories.
In Onur Yagiz’s Faith the Conqueror, a Turkish nerd smokes too much weed and inadvisably pursues the woman of his dreams. Eli Shapiro’s It’s a Dog offers a farcical glimpse at a balding man’s neuroses. In Allison Plante’s Tea Time, a young woman blurts out her same-sex attraction to her soon-to-be-former roommate as she packs her things to leave the apartment for good. We get only a glimpse of our characters and their inner and outer lives; the future of their relationship is uncertain. “No kiss,” Plante said during the post-screening Q&A. “Maybe later. But not now.”
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RS Benedict
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Aug 30, 2023 8:00 am
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Pop musicians have a reputation for artificiality, but there was nothing manufactured about Delaney Silvernell’s show at Albany’s Fuze Box last Friday. The former contestant of The Voice gave a down-to-earth performance of songs straight from the heart to an audience of loved ones.
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RS Benedict
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Aug 15, 2023 10:33 am
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Patrick Dodson Photos
At a Medicine Singers show, barriers are loose suggestions, meant to be crossed: barriers between music styles, and cultures, and time. The group’s sound combines powwow drumming with psychedelic rock guitar, Eastern Algonquin vocals with electronic soundscapes, tradition with experimentation. They’re a genre unto themselves.
During their performance at Troy’s live music venue No Fun this past Friday, the musicians removed the typical barriers between artist and audience, too.
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RS Benedict
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Aug 10, 2023 9:18 am
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Marisa Cavanaugh's You Always Loved With One Foot in And One Foot Out, on display at Albany group show.
The Feels, a group exhibition showcasing the work of ten Albany area abstract artists, invites the viewer to do just that: feel the phantom texture of smooth ceramic and rough grit and soft fabric; feel the sense of impermanence in fragile materials and moving images; feel the triumph of the subconscious over the rational mind.
“I kept the title vague,” said site director Christie Rose, “because the title says a lot about the exhibition. Just like abstract art, it can be looked at in many different ways.”
Housed in the Albany Barn, a creative arts incubator in the former St. Joseph’s Academy, the Feels emphasizes abstraction, emotion, and organic shapes. It invites us to form our own connections to the work and draw our own conclusions. The exhibition runs through Aug. 25, with viewing hours by appointment only.
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RS Benedict
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Jul 27, 2023 10:54 am
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Only Aimee Mann could make a giant concrete orb packed with hundreds of strangers feel intimate. But during her show Monday night at The Egg, Albany’s oddly-shaped performing arts center, the seasoned musician conjured the aura of a very good therapist’s office with a comfortable couch, of earnest 3 a.m. dorm room conversations conducted lying on a pillows on the floor lit by fairy lights (conversations that, in my experience, were usually accompanied by Aimee Mann wafting from a laptop’s speakers like perfume from a lilac bush).
