Jay Harvey Upstage

Seymour mulls over Andrey II's growing demands. "Little Shop of Horrors" offers  the first soup-to-nuts helping of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, later to become the most definitive movie-songwriting team since the Sherman brothers .  As a stage show, it's  also deserving of a  splashy technical elan from any theater company with the right resources and skills to create the show's bete noire, Audrey II. That's the bloodthirsty exotic plant that lifts Seymour, a lowly plant-shop employee and botanical nerd (Dominique Lawson), to unimaginable success at great moral and ultimately physical cost.  Friday night's audience filled Indiana Repertory Theatre to capacity as the company ended its 2023-24 season. The cast, amplified vocally and presenting itself unambiguously embedded in the characters, drew repeated whoops and hollers in addition to more conventional applause.  Czerton Lim's set design signals the wry turn the show takes immediately in depictin

Takacs Quartet (from left): Andras Fejer, Harumi Rhodes, Richard O'Neill, Edward Dusinberre Separated by an eventful decade, the two appearances here by the Takacs Quartet in the Ensemble Music Societ  series reflect the age's tumult. In 2014, the ensemble's own Hungarian legacy was front and center in the presentation of three quartets by Bela Bartok . On Wednesday evening at Indiana History Center. the group, which now has just one original member, reflected its recent partnership with Julien Labro , a bandoneon virtuoso of distinction. The program showed off the Takacs' outreach as collaborators.  Julien Labro, bandoneonist Not only that, the opening and closing works on the concert grew out of their composers' explicit responses to the pandemic: Bryce Dessner's "Circles" had the churning anxiety about connections suggested by its title; Clarice Assad's "Clash" brought to the fore the harsher realities of a world of lost connections

The Palladium is a worthy site for a wealth of music, and Saturday night it seemed the ideal place for the David Commanday, maestro likely to advance CSO. Carmel Symphony Orchestra, a mass choir and four vocal soloists to present the highly charged religious drama of Giuseppe Verdi's "Requiem." With its lavish updating of Palladian architecture, the retrospective splendor of this pride of the Center for the Performing Arts accommodated every musical and visionary twist and turn of the masterpiece under the baton of the CSO's recently appointed music director, David Commanday.  In the initial outburst of "Dies Irae" (Day of Wrath), the lighting on the rear stage wall turned red. The effect made a repeat appearance when that music returned in the last movement, "Libera me." The subsiding to blue for many of the moments of appeal was wholly in order, enhancing the emotional weight of the score, and the lighting effects fortunately weren't over

 Drummers as leaders of small groups tend to provoke questions of nearly psychoanalytical daring. How is Ari Hoenig casts a broad vision.  their traditional job of support for bandmates changed by imposing their musical signature as the boss? Are they showoffs or servant-leaders? Are they keeping something hidden, even repressed, in order to bring out aspects of their musicianship that they find more important when they're in charge? On Friday evening, I was glad to catch up with the influential drummer Ari Hoenig at the Jazz Kitchen after knowing his work only through 20-year-old trio CDs by the French pianist Jean-Michel Pilc.    On the basis of these two recordings, I was impressed by how well he keeps up with the quirky pianist (in partnership with bassist Francois Moutin) and became convinced his playing is more than ordinarily responsive to what collegial tune and harmony specialists (bass and piano) are up to. He finds the thread of melody within primarily rhythmic functi

Fringe vs. history: Juxtaposed farewell waves from Titanic My fading memories of the megahit "Titanic" focus mainly on two things: the front-to-back embrace of lovers played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and the horrific wonder of passengers viewed at a distance sliding down the steeply tilted deck into the icy Atlantic waters. I don't know why the romantic story and the theme of class conflict disappeared in my mind, but it was recalled for me with zestful mockery in "The Ship of Dreams" Thursday at IndyFringe's Indy Eleven intimate stage. The vigorous one-act send-up of James Cameron's  1997 film builds upon the young theater company Working Class Socialite 's Fringe Festival production from 2022. The show will run through April 21. The production's style privileges even faulty recall. But it will most likely appeal to playgoers just sentimental and knowledgeable enough about the movie to appreciate revisiting it with a jaundiced eye.

The front line was exceptional in Sunday's Hubbard tribute.  Three trumpeters in the front line — contemporary masters as they are — might have promised an excess of blasting. Fortunately, in Sunday's second set at the Jazz Kitchen, Pharez Whitted, Derrick Gardner, and John Raymond saved the onslaught for the climactic choruses of "Byrdlike," Freddie Hubbard's tribute to a slightly older trumpet master, Donald Byrd. The spectacle closed out the Kitchen's 30th-anniversary week. It was a tribute to Hubbard, deceased but musically immortal Indianapolis icon on his 86th birthday. It was easy to be grateful for signs of restraint in the performance, which more than adequately captured the quality that establishment trumpeter Wynton Marsalis noted as most characteristic upon Hubbard's passing in 2008: exuberance. The brassmen lined up for this tribute fortunately had innate good taste to add to the exuberance. In one of Whitted's solos, for instance, he star