arts and culture : Buzz

The crew of The CW’s “The Next: Fame Is At Your Doorstep” searched for Charm City singers with potential, according to an episode recap in Baltimore City Paper. The episode highlighted four singers performing at the Hippodrome: country singer Jenny Leigh, choir director Shannon Ramsey, pop singer Jordan Baird and teenager Chris Bivins.
 
Baird’s charismatic rendition of Gavin Degraw’s “Not Over You” won over audience members, who voted for him to be the winner of the night who gets sent to semi-finals in Los Angeles.
 
Read how the other Baltimoreans fared here.

The Brandywine River Museum in Pennsylvania will be hosting an exhibit of art inspired by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, who lived for a time in Baltimore.

Antiques and Arts Online describes how Poe inspired abstract expressionist artists after his death.

“Poe's popularity soared in France shortly after his death, especially with avant-garde French writers and artists who appreciated his emphasis on the psychologically dark, perverse and strange.” The article also highlights two works from the Baltimore Museum of Art: Antonio Frasconi’s “The Raven IV” and Horst Janssen’s “Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe”.
 
Edouard Manet, Gustave Doré, Paul Gauguin, James Ensor, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, Harry Clarke, Barry Moser and Robert Motherwell are among the artists featured in "Picturing Poe: Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe's Stories and Poems,"   which runs Sept. 8 to Nov. 15. Read more about the exhibit and Poe’s take on illustrations here. 

Looks like Baltimore illusionist Spencer Horsman might make it back to “America’s Got Talent”, according to the Baltimore Sun. Co-host Howard Stern chose Spencer Horsman as one of his wild-card picks. His competitors will include Ben Blaque, who uses crossbows and Todd Oliver whose dog doubles as a ventriloquist doll.

Read more here. 

For his upcoming album, electronic composer Dan Deacon drew inspiration from his hometown of Baltimore, according to an interview with Deacon that appeared in Rolling Stone magazine.
 
“The aptly titled America, due out Aug. 28 on Domino Records, is Deacon's tribute to the country he has come to love, from the deserts of New Mexico to the Guilford Avenue Bridge in his hometown of Baltimore,” the magazine writes.

Deacon hopes to ignite citizen pride through America, which presents “the beautiful deserts, the mountains, the forests, the coasts. But also the beautiful cities that are rapidly decaying in front of our eyes," he tells Rolling Stone.

Deacon also channels the pop beats of Wham City and recalls visits to Baltimore County’s Pretty Box to spark creativity. He also presents a chamber ensemble mixed with the Peabody Institute and the city’s music scene.

John Waters had enough of hitchhiking and headed back to the stage. To commemorate the 25^th anniversary of his film set in his hometown city, he will launch Hairspray: In Concert! next year, according to Broadway World.

Hairspray: In Concert! will premiere with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra Jan. 11-13, 2013, and with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Jan. 24-27, 2013, writes Broadway World.

The cast includes Broadway stars Nick Adams, Marissa Perry and NaTash Yvette along with Waters himself. Read more about it in Broadway World. 

Baltimore is one of the nation's coolest cities, according to Forbes. 

The magazine ranked 65 largest cities according to their "coolness," using seven measures. Cities were graded on the number of recreational activities, entertainment options, restaurants and bars per capita, as well as cultural composition, median age, unemployment rate and net migration. It used the help of Sperling's Best Places to assess the entertainment options. 
 
“Baltimore is in transition because it has been down and out for a long time but it’s beginning to come back because it’s affordable,” says Sperling’s Best Places in Forbes.
 
Houston, Texas took the top honor because it enjoyed a 2.6 percent job growth last year, which drew plenty of young professionals to the sprawling metropolis. Really. 

Our neighbor to the South, Washington, D.C., took the No. 2 spot. 

You can read the entire story and a slideshow here. 

The New York Times recently interviewed actress and comedienne Rain Pryor, who has many ties to Charm City.

The 43-year-old daughter of Richard Pryor, she became artistic director of the Strand Theater Co. and moved to Baltimore several years ago.

You can read more of the interview with Pryor and Kelly Carlin, daughter of George Carlin, here. 

Last month the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra gave 104 amateur musicians a taste of what it's like to be a part of a professional orchestra. These individuals participated in BSO Academy, a weeklong camp of lessons, rehearsals, master classes and, finally,  a concert at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.
 
The New York Times profiled many members of the BSO Academy, including a cold-war-era Navy pilot; a judge’s assistant who took up the viola just three and a half years ago; and a French horn player who was able to make it through the vigorous preparation and performance despite a tremor from her Parkinson’s disease.
 
“It was a musically enthusiastic, even obsessive, bunch. Most spend countless hours a week practicing and playing in wind bands or community orchestras or chamber groups, in many cases more than one,” writes the New York Times. “It’s an older group. Many returned to music with fervor in retirement or in homes recently emptied of growing children. For some, music-making is the backbone of their social ties or an escape from the pressures of work.”

You can read the entire story here. 

The Washington Post has given a shout out to the fast-growing Howard County theater troupe Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. 

The theater made headlines recently when it announced that it is moving from the county to downtown Baltimore's Mercantile Trust Building in 2014. The move will make it the city's third largest theater company, after Center Stage and Everyman Theatre.

The Mercantile building is currently a nightclub, featuring liquor, a disco ball and a basement bar called the Bedroom.  The renovation to turn this nightclub into a theater fit for Shakespeare will take $4 million.
 
"The expansion into Baltimore is a major development for a $540,000-budget troupe that has grown steadily since it opened a decade ago with a Twelfth Night" that drew 100 people, the Post writes. 

You can read the entire story here. 

Andrew Zimmern spent three days eating through Baltimore’s finest fare for his Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods America this week.  Baltimore will be a part of the show’s seventh season, which begins airing sometime this fall.
 
Zimmern’s Baltimore stops included Chap’s Pit Beef, Hollins Market, Lexington Market, the Arabbers' Carlton Street Stables, and Woodberry Kitchen. He also spent time on the Eastern Shore and in Baltimore County, where he tweeted that Ellicott City restaurant Shin Chon “is one of top ten Korean BBQ experiences in America. A must for anyone who loves food. Major discovery.”
 
Read more about Zimmern’s in the Baltimore Sun story.

Ten years after HBO first aired The Wire, Funnyordie.com brings us The Wire: The Musical. This musical parody turns the gritty show about inner-city Baltimore into a laugh-inducing musical.  

The voice over boasts, “Experience The Wire’s realistic portrayal of America’s decaying inner cities through the magic of song.”
 
The Wire: The Musical brings back many actors from the series including Michael Kenneth Williams, Sonja Sohn, Andre Royo, Larry Gillard Jr. and Felicia “Snoop” Pearson. The video has gone viral with more than 400,000 views.

Broadway World describes the latest Everyman Theatre play a "hit in every way."

The last play of the season, "You Can't Take It With You," is a Pulitzer-Prize winning play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. It tells the story of a "bohemian household where fireworks are made in the basement, one daughter (Essie) dances in her tutu all over the house taught by her Russian ballet teacher Kohlenkov (the magnificent Nelson)," Broadway World writes.

The play runs through June 17 and is the last show Vincent Lancisi is directing at the theaters spot in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District. It moves to downtown Baltimore's west side spring of 2013.

Broadway World praises the detailed period set and the all-star cast. You can read the entire review here. 

Open Walls, the innovative mural art project in Station North, is getting more love. 

This time it's from the Huffington Post, which recently featured several photos of the murals and interviews with organizers, including street artist Gaia.

"From March to May the neighborhoods of Station North and Greenmount West have played host to internationally known Street Art names of the moment like Vhils, Sten and Lex, Swoon, Jaz, MOMO, and Interesni Kazki getting up on walls alongside a list of local and regional talents," the Huffington Post writes. 

The director of Hairspray and Pink Flamingos apparently enjoys hitchhiking and is now making his way across the country, according to Baltimore Fishbowl. 

John Waters "has hitched halfway across the country over the past week — yes, he started out in Baltimore — and, last we heard, is currently somewhere in Colorado," Fishbowl writes.

The movie director camped out in an indie rock band's van in Ohio, according to DCist. The blog cites live Tweets from band members of Here We Go Magic. 

Then a middle-aged couple drove him through Kansas. 

"We suspect that Waters’s Kansas hosts may have been less hip to his work than the indie band was, but they still knew they had a national treasure in the car," Fishbowl writes.

You can read the rest of the story here. 

Baltimore independent filmmaker Matt Porterfield has had another honor bestowed upon him. 

The Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University has selected the Putty Hill director for its 2012-2013 Artist Residency Awards.

"The Artist Residency Award program offers significant resources for innovators across all creative disciplines, selected each year by the center’s curators and director," Broadway World writes. "These unique residencies include considerable financial resources, along with the technical, intellectual, and staff support, along with (mental and physical) space in which to develop new work and engage with Ohio State classes and the Columbus community."

Porterfield and the three other selected artists/organizations will receive $200,000.

He plans to use the resources to work on another film, Broadway World writes. 

Porterfield has also won the Sonheim Prize and was included in the Whitney Biennial.