CultureVulture.net

2 weeks ago | culturevulture.net | Lewis Whittington

Throughout his career Winton Marsalis has kept alive the legacies of the big-bands jazz eras. As musical director-conductor of Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, he puts his signature on classics and rarities from Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie. In LCO performances he joins his trumpets on the bandstand and weighs in with his distinctive sound for a new generation of jazz fans.

3 weeks ago | culturevulture.net | Josh Baxt

“One of the Good Ones” is a funny but uneven meditation on Mexican identity in Southern California – and perhaps everywhere. Set in upper crust Pasadena, the show starts with Ilana Gomez (Angelique Cabral) trying to negotiate a bouquet of flowers from Pedro (Santino Jimenez), a Latino delivery driver. Ilana is self-conscious (perhaps even ashamed) that she speaks almost no Spanish. With help from her fluent daughter, Yoli (Cree), she eventually makes the exchange.

1 month ago | culturevulture.net | Lewis Whittington

The hit film ‘Conclave’ is a dramatization of Vatican politics as the college of cardinals (Curia) are tasked with electing a pope. Philip Shenon’s ‘Jesus Wept,’ a sprawling history of the last seven popes, needs no dramatization, the facts are compelling enough and his book clips along at the pace of a Le Carré thriller. The book track the pontiff early careers as clergymen and the success and failures of their papacies starting with Pius XII (1939-1958), through pope Francis’ (2013-2025).

1 month ago | culturevulture.net | Brian Lipton

The one-person show, often with the performer playing multiple characters, has produced some of the New York theater’s most memorable evenings, from Jefferson Mays in “I Am My Own Wife” to Jodie Comer in “Prima Facie” to Andrew Scott’s current turn in “Vanya,” in which he effortless essays all eight roles in an updated take on the Chekhov classic.

1 month ago | culturevulture.net | Michael Simpson

“House of India “is an engaging, sometimes quite funny, take on South Asian immigrants in the American Midwest. Set in the House of India, a traditional Indian restaurant in a dying strip mall in Akron, Ohio, the play takes a lens to authenticity and the people trying to achieve it. Ananya (Mahira Kakkar) opened the restaurant thirty years before with her late husband, now memorialized in a portrait in the restaurant.