Reggie Watts, With Openers Casey Rocket, Simon Fraser, Cepeda Cheeks and Val Werner Blue Whale Comedy Festival Cain’s Ballroom Tulsa August 24, 2024
Reggie Watts tickled me first through YouTube. Clips of his specific brand of disorientation humor were going viral one after another in the early 2010s, and as the kind of neurotic, acid poetry-obsessed, alcoholism-adjacent college graduate that Watts makes his bread off of, I was instantly struck by the brilliance of his work. You can hardly call it stand-up: His is a brainy, free-association comedic act, which relies less on punchlines than on red herrings, the diversion as the point. Listeners are taken through a range of accents, registers, made-up songs, and stories with little or no punchline, simply for the fun of it.
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Cassidy McCants
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Aug 30, 2024 7:12 pm
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View from the bar at Notes of Marrakesh.
Notes of Marrakesh 315 S. Trenton Ave. Tulsa August 24, 2024
The façades of Trenton Avenue’s 300 block, particularly on the east side — home to Maples 918 Tacos & Cantina, Adorn Designs, Cody Mayo Studios, and Hummingbird Fine Craft — are pretty subtle. So subtle, apparently, that it’s not uncommon for folks aiming for Maples to unknowingly stumble into Studio Row’s newest addition, Notes of Marrekesh. And sometimes they stay, as I heard owner Sovana Benis tell one early-afternoon customer last Saturday.
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Kathryn Parkman
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Aug 30, 2024 10:22 am
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Madison Reyes & Spencer Henry sharing a morbid hot take with a guest in Tulsa.
Author Talk: “Obitchuary: The Big Hot Book Of Death“ Circle Cinema Tulsa August 15, 2024
Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes do not fear death. They laugh in its face. Last week at Circle Cinema, at least a hundred spooky nerds were laughing with them.
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Z.B. Reeves
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Aug 25, 2024 12:23 pm
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Charlotte Bumgarner
Charlotte Bumgarner: “Promise” EP Release Show LowDown Tulsa Aug. 16, 2024
For a singer-songwriter whose songs feature on a Spotify playlist named “broken love songs to feed your misery,” Charlotte Bumgarner’s music inspires a surprising amount of joy when heard live. On stage, decked out in pink bows and surrounded by floral arrangements, Bumgarner is much more fun than the Boygenius-adjacent vibe of her recorded songs — a contrast that was especially apparent at the recent release show for her new EP, “Promise.”
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Alicia Chesser
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Aug 25, 2024 11:59 am
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Lillie Taylor as Tzeitel in "Tevye's Dream"
TPAC Produces: Fiddler On The Roof Tulsa Performing Arts Center Tulsa August 18, 2024
“I didn’t know Tulsa theatre could do that.” It’s a sentence I regularly hope to get to say to myself while watching a show. I got to say it last weekend, halfway through the Tulsa Performing Arts Center’s self-produced Fiddler on the Roof, when a line of actors with wine bottles balanced on their hats took a wedding dance number from “ok, that’s impressive” to “actually jaw-dropping” and the audience lost its collective mind.
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Mitch Gilliam
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Aug 16, 2024 1:30 pm
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Latch himself; Latch Fest 2024 T-shirt artist Dan Rocky.
Latch Fest 2024 Whittier Bar Tulsa Aug. 9 & 10, 2024
Sitting side by side at Whittier Bar on a slow afternoon, Latch Fest organizers Laura Voth and Bradley Metcalf were musing on what it is about a concert weekend dedicated to a bar cat that just … works. “Bradley and I are polar opposites, but our hearts are in the same place,” Voth told me. “We’re both made of fur and claws.”
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Cassidy Petrazzi
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Aug 9, 2024 5:30 pm
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"Migrating Monarchs" and "Our Tones, Our Wrists, Our Home (Ngữ Điệu, Cổ Tay, Nhà)" by Nic Annette Miller
Hayley Nichols and Nic Annette Miller: Natural Rhythms 108 Contemporary Tulsa Through Sept. 21
I was lucky enough to get out of Oklahoma’s sweltering heat recently, as my family and I spent our annual week at the Pecos River in Cowles, NM. It was the first year that we let our young boys fish. On our daily nature walk, we ventured down to the “big rock” where a little group of rainbow trout was visibly swimming below in a natural pool. Within minutes of casting the line, we hooked a fish — a beautiful six-inch rainbow. As it came hurtling out of the river, we were all screaming with excitement and delight, but the joy was quickly replaced with terror at watching my husband work to get the hook out of the fish’s mouth and back into the water. Immediately, one of our sons announced that he was done with fish and fishing, while the other was eager to get his line back in the water and catch dinner.
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Z.B. Reeves
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Aug 9, 2024 12:30 pm
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Jordan Vinyard, "Kissing Booth" (2021)
Jordan Vinyard: Command + C, Command + C, Command + CTAC Gallery Tulsa Aug. 2 – 24, 2024
Kinetic sculpture — sculpture that moves — is a tough beast to tame. It tends to move slowly, and often strangely, and like its predecessor, the modern static sculpture, it leans towards subtlety. The current show up at TAC Gallery, Jordan Vinyard’s Command + C, Command + C, Command + C, forgets these facts. It pushes too much good work into too small a space, and doesn’t provide enough contextualization to allow Vinyard’s slow, thoughtful pieces to be felt.
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Alicia Chesser
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Aug 2, 2024 1:12 pm
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"Replaying It Over Again" by Sally C. Garner
“Living” Living Arts of Tulsa Tulsa Through Aug. 24, 2024
I’m not sure how, growing up in the Tulsa burbs, I got so obsessed with the fringes of art. Maybe it was through my mom, a musician, who hooked pre-teen me up with the arts programming on the Bravo channel, where I first got a glimpse of people like Laurie Anderson, Nam June Paik, John Cage — the whole 20th-century lightning storm of contemporary practice.
Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship Tulsa Through Aug. 10
Standing in 𐓏𐒰𐒿𐒷́𐓒𐒷 (Markings): 𐓏𐒰𐓓𐒰́𐓓𐒷 𐒻́𐒷 poetic forms, the current exhibit at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship space, I feel as though I’m actually inside a poem — which makes sense, given that exhibit organizer Chelsea T. Hicks is a poet, specifically an Osage “text-based experimental visual artist” who often works in the space of reclaiming her native language.
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Cassidy McCants
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Jul 28, 2024 11:37 am
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Edwin Canito Garcia and Zhenya Yevtushenko
Yevtushenko Reads Yevtushenko WOMPA Tulsa July 19, 2024
If you haven’t been to WOMPA yet, I’ll start by saying it’s unlike anything else in the city. It holds offices, event spaces, a hair salon, a screenprinting studio, vendors, art galleries, places to cook out, Airbnbs. Most of all, though, it feels like a place you can go, be, and maybe spark some creativity of your own, whether or not you think of yourself as an artist. It’s packed with color, antique and vintage-looking decor, extravagant rugs, maximalist-chic sitting areas.
Thunderwof (on the right, with DJ $ir Mike at left) rolls out a new mixtape
Thunderwof Mixtape Release: “Boys Don’t Cry But, Wofs Shed Tears.” Heirloom Rustic Ales Tulsa July 19, 2024
If you’ve been to a comedy show in Tulsa in the last few years, there is a high probability a man named Thunderwof made you laugh. With his new mixtape called Boys Don’t Cry But, Wofs Shed Tears., that man — the government-named Chaz Stephens — aims to get your head nodding too. Last Friday’s release set at Heirloom Rustic Ales showed his move into hip-hop is far from a joke.
When a musician could, ostensibly, play anything, then I think about their artistry as a matter of choice or taste. There’s at least a dozen-deep roster of shredders performing in Tulsa every night of the week, swapping configurations with ease and creating little pop-up conglomerates, shoulder to shoulder onstage with hours-long sets tossing solos to each other. This is its own kind of joyful, chaotic magic, much-beloved by a large base of listeners, and something this city is known for.
