Aug 30 – Sep 6, 2017
Hail to the Bard: Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s remarkable history enters a new stage
Rooted teaming up with Urbana Café for new coffee program
Megan Tysoe’s Rooted Juicery + Kitchen is expanding to the Central Business District with a new, caffeinated approach to serving plant-based treats to Cincinnati. Tysoe, the founder of what is now quickly becoming a chain in Cincinnati, will open the doors of her third Rooted location in early October of this year, and she will…
Awards Season Gets Underway with Toronto Film Festival
As I prepare to make my annual trek up to Canada for the most important of all fall film festivals, the Toronto International Film Festival, I’ll have my first opportunity to form critical takes on the year’s most important movies. And I’ll be writing in my September columns about what I find. Last year, I caught the…
Detroit Post Punk foursome Protomartyr prepares for its anticipated forthcoming album, ‘Relatives in Descent’
Joe Casey, frontman for Detroit’s Protomartyr, possesses a modest sing/speak voice that’s as agitated as it is evocative. His singular delivery is complemented by an ominous Post Punk clatter that is as claustrophobic as it is often epic, as if the listener is falling into an all-encompassing vortex of sound and emotion. Protomartyr’s fourth album, Relatives…
MPMF.17 Schedule: Sunday, Sept. 24
Skyline Chili Stage (Taft Theatre) 10 p.m. Walk the Moon (Cincinnati) AltPop Rock In 2010, Cincinnati’s Walk the Moon played a high-energy club show at the MidPoint Music Festival for a small but enthusiastic crowd of no more than 50 people. This year, Walk the Moon triumphantly returns to its hometown festival as headliners and…
Minimum Gauge: Does getting goosebumps from music mean you’re in better touch with your emotions?
HOT: Music and Goosebumps A University of Southern California student is the source of the latest “no duh” study that probably doesn’t mean anything but will likely score tons of headlines from information-starved music-news outlets not wanting to write about Taylor Swift anymore (oh, hi!). Published in the very-smart-sounding-so-it-must-be-legit Oxford Academic, the study finds that…
MPMF.17 Schedule: Saturday, Sept. 23
Central Parkway YMCA Stage (Masonic Cathedral) 9 p.m. The New Pornographers (Vancouver, Canada) Indie Rock/Pop In 2000, The New Pornographers’ debut album, Mass Romantic (later declared one of the best Indie Rock albums ever made), yielded the deliriously compelling “Letter to an Occupant” and heralded the beginning of an unbroken 17-year string of recorded excellence. From the hair-raising…
Morning News: Immigration advocates rally for DACA, local reps respond; council candidate Maney challenges incumbent Seelbach to debate
Good morning Cincy. Before we get to news, a quick note — last night I was at the Mercantile Library for an incredible performance put together by arts organization Chase Public in which 14 people interpreted lines from the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” which is inscribed in the base of the Statue of…
MPMF 2017: Tickets and other information
MPMF has been relocated to four stages on Fifth Street between Sycamore and Broadway streets: the Taft Theatre, the Ballroom at the Taft Theatre, the Cathedral at the Cincinnati Masonic Center and the Ballroom at the Masonic Center. For the first time, the entire festival microcosm is within one city block. This change allows for…
Young’s complaint against Cranley fundraising hits Hamilton County courts
Cincinnati City Councilman Wendell Young filed a lawsuit in the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas Sept. 4 against the Cincinnati Elections Commission over an advisory that allows LLCs to donate to political campaigns independent from their owners. Young, along with Council candidate Kelli Prather and Cincinnati residents William K. Woods and Clint Watson, say…
Morning News: Downtown church wrangles with Confederate memorials; Trump admin. rescinds DACA
Hello all. A late happy Labor Day to you — hope you got the day off and did something rad with it. Also, let’s have a moment of silence for summer. Ok. Done. On to the news. Should a church in downtown Cincinnati remove a stained glass window and a plaque commemorating Confederate generals? That’s…
On Screen: Street People
The review on RogerEbert.com for Damon Davis and Sabaah Folayan’s documentary Whose Streets? includes a singularly significant line that speaks to this current moment in our civic and cultural lives. “Fifty years from now, when people ask about the Black Lives Matter movement, I will tell them to see this movie.” The film captures, in stingingly unblinking…
On Screen: ‘Wind River’
Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water) takes the helm on Wind River, a spiritual sequel of sorts to both Hell or High Water and Sicario, his first attempt at film writing. Prior to settling in behind the camera, Sheridan patrolled the other side, working as an actor in action-oriented television fare, from one-off appearances on shows…
Morning News: Ad from former Cranley campaign manager targets Simpson; one year in, streetcar ridership missing marks
Good morning all. I’m gonna get to the news here in just a minute, but bear with me. I’m still recovering from the laughter and crying at the Comet last night, which hosted a fundraiser for Kathy Y. Wilson. You should know her from her columns in CityBeat or her articles in Cincinnati Magazine or…
Your Long Weekend To Do List (Sept. 1-4)
FRIDAY 01 EVENT: SHAKESPEARE IN THE QUEEN CITY Shakespeare has arrived in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Museum Center is the temporary home of a rare edition of the Bard’s “First Folio,” the first published collection of his most famous works. Published in 1623, the edition — on loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.…
Stage: A Slow Weekend — But Big Things Are Just a Week Away
Labor Day weekend is the unofficial end of summer — but it’s also the last slow weekend before local theaters crank up their opening productions. So maybe it’s time for a bit of a preview. If you want to get a head start, however, the Cincinnati Playhouse’s production of Shakespeare in Love will offer previews on Saturday…
Study: Majority of Ohio death row inmates suffer from mental illness, cognitive disabilities
Now that it has resumed executions after winning a fight over controversial lethal injection drugs, Ohio is set to put 26 people to death over the next three years. Of those inmates, the vast majority have intellectual disabilities, struggle with profound mental illness or suffer from severe childhood trauma and abuse, according to a study…
Morning News: ‘Enquirer’ editor departs; Springer mulling run for governor; Bevin blasts public school teachers for coming to work
Good morning all. Ready for a news update? A group of Cincinnati City Councilmembers are looking to get the city to divest from companies tied to private prisons. Investments held by the city’s pension fund include more than $2.5 million in stocks tied directly or indirectly to the for-profit prison industry. You can read more…
Cincinnati officials seek to divest from private prisons
Cincinnati officials say they’d like to get the city’s pension investments out of the private prison business. The city of Cincinnati’s pension fund holdings include more than $2.5 million in stocks for private prison companies. But an effort spearheaded by Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld’s office and backed by a majority of council and Mayor John Cranley…
Braxton releases another Graeter’s collab; Blank Slate’s brewer joins Fifty West
Graeter’s ice cream and Braxton beer lovers across the Tristate come together once again to share the treat of another collaboration: the limited-edition Blueberry Pie Brown Ale. The beer takes inspiration from Elena’s Blueberry Pie, one of Graeter’s most iconic seasonal flavors, and was brewed with blueberry, vanilla bean and graham cracker. Like the ice…
What a Week! Aug. 23-29
WEDNESDAY, AUG. 23 Chuck E. Cheese has begun phasing out its longtime house band, the Pizza Time Players. Comprised of Chuck the rat, Grimace wannabe Mr. Munch, Helen Henny the chicken, hound dog Jasper T. Jowls and the somewhat culturally insensitive pizza chef Pasqually P. Pieplate, the animatronic band has been an act since Chuck…
Cincy Celebrates King Records Month
It’s safe to say that compared to 20 years ago, Cincinnatians are now more aware of King Records, the revolutionary record label that helped shape the sound and spirit of American music. With King Records Month, September’s celebration of the iconic label’s contributions, the many local boosters and artists who’ve helped raised King’s profile over the past…
Scott H. Biram’s 10th solo album is more dirty, passionate Country Blues
Though a solo performer, Scott H. Biram doesn’t sit on a stool and gently strum his acoustic guitar like one might expect from a singer/songwriter. With distortion always within arm’s reach, he plays electric guitar and stomps beats out on a board while he sings his ragged Roots rave-ups and soulful ballads in concert. Biram’s…
‘The New Colossus’ Reinterprets Our Freedom
Chase Public unveils The New Colossus, a riff on the nonprofit Northside literary arts center’s popular Response Project series, Tuesday at the Mercantile Library and Sept. 7 at Chase Public’s headquarters. It is named for the famous Emma Lazarus 1883 sonnet that is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, with its unforgettable lines like “your…
An Art Show with Punk Spirit
Various art sites around town — ranging from institutional galleries and museums to more DIY artist-driven spaces — offer collector-focused exhibitions like the one currently on view at the Art Academy of Cincinnati called Pretty. Vacant.: Works Celebrating the Spirit of Punk, Selected from the Collection of George and Linda Kurz. Such exhibitions at traditional museums…
A confident, hopeful rapper in ‘Patti Cake$’
There is something familiar about Patricia Dombrowski (Danielle Macdonald) — aka Killa P, aka Patti Cake$ — an aspiring rapper from New Jersey who is barely surviving life on the other side of the tracks, despite big dreams and unexpected talent. Writer-director Geremy Jasper, a New Jersey native himself who initially made his name in…
‘Take a Good Look’ at a rediscovered game show
As we get further away from the 1950s and ’60s, a period that for many adults is nearly two lifetimes ago, we are in serious danger of forgetting one of the funniest people in human history. In his day, Ernie Kovacs was a comic genius of almost immeasurable proportions. His rapier-sharp wit was delivered with…
Louisville Staging ‘Angels in (Trump’s) America’
Meredith McDonough has loved Tony Kushner’s immense Pulitzer Prize-winning two-part play, Angels in America, since she was 16. She attended its 1994 Broadway debut six times while enrolled in a summer pre-college program in New York City. “You could get $20 rush tickets if you waited in line all day,” she says. “It was two rows…
Local museums and libraries are bringing visual and literary arts to listeners via podcasts
When established, the Cincinnati Art Museum was revolutionary. Public art collections were rare in 1886, especially in areas as far west as Cincinnati. More than a century later, the museum has birthed another novel idea: Art Palace, a podcast that brings together a roster of local voices — actors, musicians, dancers, writers, scientists, curators and more —…
What’s the Hops: Surprise! It’s Almost Oktoberfest
A few weeks ago, Cincy lost the dear Blank Slate Brewing Company. According to a statement published from owner Scott LaFollette, “The reason for our closure is pretty simple. We ran out of money.” He also noted that with the influx of local craft breweries, it became more costly to stand out in the crowd. Just a…
Have Your Kuchen and Eat It, Too at Katharina’s Café-Konditorei
For my boyfriend and I, going to Olive Garden and scarfing down enough breadsticks to fill a freight train is our go-to for date night. We’re creatures of habit, which, I admit, has probably hindered our culinary experiences to some extent. So when Newport’s Katharina’s Café-Konditorei showed up on my radar, I jumped at the…
