Arts and Leisure: Metro Weekly magazine - Weekly schedule of gay Washington DC entertainment - films, movies, theater, dining, and music.

Stage | Double Serving

If you like your slapstick shameless and your gags spelled out, yelled and repeated, ''Servant of Two Masters'' is pants-wettingly funny

Published on May 24, 2012, 3:33am

At one point in the middle of the complicated hijinks of the Shakespeare Theatre Company's The Servant of Two Masters, Truffaldino, the servant in question, turns to the audience and asks: Surely, after a season of Shakespeare and a Eugene O'Neill festival, we can keep up? Silly, irreverent but keenly on point, it was a moment of commedia dell'arte as it was meant to be: theater playing to its audience like a mischievous child. Of course, by the time Carlo ...[more]

Music | Retro Grooves: Electric Guest

You may be surprised where Electric Guest takes you on Mondo, but you most certainly won't be disappointed

Published on May 24, 2012, 2:32am

There's a new R&B-flavored electronic rock band on the scene, and there's a reason listening to Electric Guest's debut album will remind you of contemporary acts as disparate as Beck and Gorillaz, or Gnarls Barkley and Broken Bells. The reason, of course, is Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton, who produced Electric Guest's impressive Mondo just as he has with the above-mentioned acts. Burton was actually in Gnarls Barkley with Cee Lo Green, and Broken Bells is his current band with ...[more]

Events | Heated Verbiage

Capturing Fire returns for second summit of slams and spoken word

Published on May 24, 2012, 2:29am

There is power in words. D.C.'s Regie Cabico knows that. Just read a few lines of his poem ''Love Letter from Andrew Cunanan.'' I have told more lies than a psychic hotline.$23 a minute lies. Embellished truths that payfor my hotel, saline solution & gasoline.All I know are the details of condom wrappers& the jolly music of handcuffs. {Regie Cabico (Photo by Dan Vera)} Lindsay Tauscher knows, too. That's why she's been working with Cabico to ready Washington for ''Capturing ...[more]

Film | Black Out

The only reason why ''Men in Black III'' is tolerable is because it unabashedly falls into its old, successful rhythms

Published on May 24, 2012, 2:26am

Men in Black III shouldn't have happened. That's not to say that it was a particularly bad idea – it doesn't even approach the terrible lows of the sequel that preceded it –but it is a disaster of Hollywood mismanagement. To call it ''troubled'' is like claiming Will Smith is ''wealthy'' or that Tommy Lee Jones has a face that ''resembles'' exposed rock crag. It's not wrong to say those things, yet they don't capture just how disastrous, how filthy ...[more]

Stage | Maps and Mythology

Lonely Planet's message finds clear focus, while Metamorphoses is long on dazzle and short on substance

Published on May 24, 2012, 2:12am

The specter of AIDS haunts Steven Dietz's Lonely Planet – and yet the disease is never mentioned by name. But it is AIDS causing the play's lead character Jody to get so wrapped up in his safe world of maps, he has mostly shut out the vastly more complicated real world. What good are maps if not used as guides to a better land, or a better life? {Loneley Planet (Photo by Christopher Banks)} That's the central symbolic question of ...[more]

Stage | Gay Skate: Xanadu

Signature Theatre's ''Xanadu'' has more gay appeal than the Broadway original

Published on May 24, 2012, 1:35am

''It appeals to more than just the gay audience, but for some reason it appeals to our sensibility the most,'' says Matthew Gardiner. In fact, the incredibly campy musical Xanadu is self-aware of its gay appeal. ''This is like children's theater for 40-year-old gay people,'' goes a funny line from gay playwright Douglas Carter Beane's book, which sends up the same-named 1980 film. Starring Olivia Newton-John, the movie Xanadu has become something of a cult classic. Gardiner, who helmed Signature ...[more]

Stage | All Skate

As Signature's ''Xanadu'' becomes a delightful destination, glitches pale next to the dominant pleasures

Published on May 24, 2012, 1:33am

Leg warmers, roller disco, an Aussie pop star cavorting on the big screen as a muse from Greek mythology…. Gee, the '80s got off to such a strong start, how did the decade ever manage to go awry? Not that the cinematic mess that is Xanadu is a complete cultural stain. The soundtrack — brimming with Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra hits such as ''Magic,'' ''Suddenly,'' ''I'm Alive'' and the ecstatic title song — is nothing to be ashamed ...[more]

Stage | A Little Bloated

If you can't keep up with the overabundance of characters, Meal's message will get lost in the details

Published on May 18, 2012, 3:02pm

How does a family endure? Studio Theatre 2ndStage's The Big Meal is entirely preoccupied with that question, and curiously, its answer is found in an average-looking Ohio restaurant that tracks decades over hamburgers and spaghetti. Although in this joint, the worst thing to see is your food. Playwright Dan Franc turns the act of eating into a somber metaphor for death, meaning that when a character's ''order'' is up, the waitress (Sarah Taurchini) appears – a symbolic twist on the ...[more]

Film | Bull's Eye

The marriage between top-notch acting and real-life narration pays off in Bernie

Published on May 18, 2012, 2:55pm

Let's get one thing out of the way: Bernie is about much more than a real-life murder. ''What you're fixin' to see is a true story,'' a title card promises at the film's onset, and ultimately, that story is much wilder than the mystery of how, in 1996, an 81-year-old heiress was stuffed into a freezer with four bullets in her back. (Yes, even wilder than that.) Bernie, at its heart, is a dark comedy about small-town culture in East ...[more]

Dance | School Dances

Kennedy Center offers college ''dance sampler platters'' next weekend

Published on May 17, 2012, 5:06am

''Do you know that I performed at the national festival 20 years ago?'' Diane DeFries of the American College Dance Festival Association says she hears that comment often. ''It's amazing how many people working [in dance] have been involved with the organization, or were involved as students,'' she says. But the general public? ''It's sort of been a secret,'' she laughs, ''because we never had tickets.'' This year, ACDFA's biennial National College Dance Festival has doubled the number of its ...[more]

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