Arts and Culture (All)

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Jane C. Elkin - 3/21/13

Bowie Community Theatre’s In the Heat of the Night

This Night is so dark that you strain to see the actors

Bowie Community Theatre is up to its rafters in shady business again. The troupe that brought you Murder By Misadventure and Who Dunit? now turns to the segregated South for a crime drama with the twisted face of bigotry. Matt Pelfrey’s 2010 stage adaptation of In the Heat of the Night is based on the John Ball novel that inspired an Oscar-winning film and an Emmy-winning TV series. The place: Argo, Alabama. The time: 1962. The crime: murder. The victim: developer...

Article - Movie Reviews; by - 3/21/13

Stoker

The Addams Family has nothing on these people

In a palatial old home filled with dead birds and 1960s amenities, 18-year-old India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska: Lawless) is searching for her birthday present. This year the box is empty and her father is a no-show at dinner. India is devastated when she discovers that her father was killed in a car crash. An odd girl who can’t stand being touched and prefers silent observation to social interaction, India withdrawas even further and ignores her well-meaning but...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Diana Beechener - 3/14/13

Oz The Great and Powerful

Pay no attention to the misogyny behind the curtain

In drab Kansas, a two-bit magician named Oz (James Franco: Lovelace) bamboozles country folk with black powder flashes and cleverly hidden wires. He dreams of greatness but settles for life as a glorified flimflam man in a traveling circus, seducing gullible farmers’ daughters. When one cuckolded boyfriend turns out to be the circus strongman, Oz makes a dramatic escape via hot air balloon. If you’ve seen the 1939 film this movie draws from, you know what happens...

Article - Books; by Trudy Mihalcik - 3/14/13

Recycling Jesus, by Peter Abresch

Calvert County author Peter Abresch has a new mystery out just in time to add a touch more intrigue to the election of a new pope. Recycling Jesus, the author’s 10th novel, is a mystery wrapped in the Church’s most venerated relic, the Shroud of Turin. The crime might have gone undetected had not the Shroud’s guard been killed. Retired DEA agent Duncan Crouther is recruited to investigate. He is joined by the well-traveled and good-...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Diana Beechener - 3/7/13

Lore

Overcoming the sins of the father — and the fatherland

What if the people who loved you turned out to be monsters? Could you change your worldview to survive in this new order? Or would the truth end up swallowing you whole? Fourteen-year-old Lore (Saskia Rosendahl: Für Elise) lives an idyllic life in World War II Germany. Blonde and blue-eyed, she’s the picture of youthful innocence, still more child than woman as she romps through fields in suspendered skirts and Heidi braids. A high-ranking SS...

Article - Books; by - 3/7/13

The Reader

Librarians are our literary guides, anticipating our tastes and putting books to meet them in our hands, audio players and eReaders on demand. When you need a book, you ask a librarian. Here, in a special to Bay Weekly, Anne Arundel County Public Librarians review novels by local authors.

Deadrise by Robert Blake Whitehill Deadrise, the first book in the Ben Blackshaw series, will capture your attention and have you on the edge of your seat from page one when the title character finds a wealth of gold, a dirty bomb and the corpse of his father while diving for oysters in the Chesapeake Bay. There’s something for most readers in this book: a suspenseful mystery, fast-paced action, compelling characters and vivid descriptions of the...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill - 2/28/13

2nd Star Productions’ It Runs in the Family

Laugh your way out of winter with this play

The British have been stereotyped as stodgy. The truth is that they are quite bawdy and irreverent. The plays of Ray Cooney — including It Runs in the Family, now playing at 2nd Star Productions — are typical British humor. The British love a farce where nothing is sacred or above ridicule. In It Runs in the Family that includes the clergy, police, doctors and matrimony. “If you tell a lie, make it a whopper,” an actors says in words that could be...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Diana Beechener - 2/28/13

Snitch

There’s no honor among dealers

John Matthews (Dwayne Johnson: Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) is living lush with his new wife and young daughter. Well connected, well dressed and wealthy, he’s the American dream. John’s son Jason (Rafi Gavron: Celeste and Jesse Forever) isn’t quite so happy. Bitter over the divorce of his parents, Jason reviles his father and his money. In a moment of petulance and idiocy, he agrees to have a large bag of Ecstasy sent to his mother’s house....

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill - 2/21/13

True-Life Drama with Scope, Depth and Satisfaction

Colonial Players’ two-person show Trying will surprise you in a good way

Trying will surprise you in a good way. Colonial Players is promoting this delightful two-person show as a work rich in history and contrasts, and it is. It is also a love story, refreshingly sweet and platonic. Judge Francis Biddle, a national and international statesman, needed a personal assistant as he gathered his memoirs and responded to requests for information on the Nuremberg Trial, which he presided over, and the Japanese Internment of World War II, which he had...

Article - Movie Reviews; by Diana Beechener - 2/21/13

A Good Day to Die Hard

Joyless performances make for a bad day for moviegoers

As one who thinks Die Hard one of the best action films ever, I must with a heavy heart urge all fans of John McClane to skip this movie. In 1988, off-duty cop John McClane (Bruce Willis: Looper) walked into an office Christmas party and became a terrorist-killing legend. Twenty-five years later, McClane has dispatched baddies in office buildings, airports, the burroughs of New York and the streets of D.C. The fatigue is starting to show. ...