Wham City’s “Jurassic Park” {thanks, Ed Schrader}

From today’s b, the paper

Having the distinct pleasure of performing in Wham City’s stage adaptation of “Jurassic Park” (the film), I can tell you that it is quite a thing to watch first hand, as a group of totally insane people solidify into a working body of theatrical lunacy, roughing through all the road blocks and glories of d.i.y. theater, with director Donna Sellinger at the wheel.

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The recently established Windup Space at 12 W. North Ave. has the ambience of the loose-fitting cardigan you once wore to emulate Kurt Cobain after seeing him on MTV Unplugged.

The space is charmingly kitschy, with a section loosely modeled after the Road House bar from Twin Peaks, yet comforting and approachable, attracting everyone from the fella grabbing a cold one after work to bouncy lovers of the mathy, psychedelic maneuvers offered up by bands like San Francisco’s Triclops!, who will perform there Wednesday.
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The Annex Theater in the Station North Arts District is a persistent little gem that has all the trappings of a way-off Broadway theater, complete with scurrying cats, a patchwork collection of well-worn couches, the smell of Natty Boh and cigarettes and an unquenchable vibrancy that you can feel resonating from the sketchy asylumish hallway. As you walk into the dark, subterranean nook, it feels packed with about 80 people. It’s the real thing.

Last Friday and Saturday, we were treated to a collection of short plays based on the cartoons of Hanna-Barbera. The crowd — consisting of moms, with pleasantly boisterous children, to MICA students to perhaps the guy you work with who heard about this wacky event on WYPR — was quite receptive, picking up and putting up with a variety of interpretations. The whole production took about an hour, give or take a few quick intermissions and the short video by Mark Brown, who offered up a surrealist transition into the second half of the show.

Some of the sketches stuck closely to the original scripts, like Justin Durel’s hilarious a cappella performance as Tom from “Tom and Jerry.” The sketch, “Quiet Please (A Tom and Jerry play),” was a slapstick escapade with wonderfully executed physical comedy and suspense-laden lighting maneuvers, ultimately ending with a pie in Tom’s face, always a hit. Other sketches dove into more political territory. The Smurf skit, called “Shmurph Election ’08,” had actors and actresses smoke, drink, cuss and act about as un-Smurf like as one could imagine, throwing in some Barack Obama-oriented political banter between shock tactics.

The costumes and props, considering the apparent small budget and limited resources, were top-notch and at times phenomenal. “Space Ghost” received uproarious applause at its climax when a monster the size of a Neon took the stage to challenge our hero Space Ghost in a physical showdown. Even adults shivered in their seats at the sight of the gargantuan creature manned by multiple stage hands. Yet the smaller props, like the meticulously-crafted Zorak from the same skit and the simulation of an explosion, using puffy cloud cutouts and some elbow grease, in the “Tom and Jerry” sketch, proved to be as effective in garnering positive reactions from the crowd.

The performance of Snagglepuss, played by local thespian /musician, Andy Abelow, was one of the standout deliveries of the night, and was enhanced even more with the help of a costume that transformed Abelow into a visuallyconvincing lovelorn cat.

The master of ceremonies was Evan Moritz, who organized the event and is a founding member of The Annex Theater. He was pleased that about 80 people attended each night. “It’s nice to see that people in Baltimore support that aspect of the arts,” he said. “It makes me feel like the art scene in Baltimore is more than just music.”

For more info on upcoming events at The Annex Theater, go to myspace.com/copycatannex

Hovering around the veggie-oil bus {thanks, Kari Altmann}

Being on the Round Robin tour of Baltimore performers is kind of like being a character from a TV sitcom. Sometimes you go places, and people know who you are and have a general idea of what to expect. If they’re at the show, it probably means they can at least stand your presence enough to put up with you for a few hours. Yet like customers at a mall with its anchor stores — JC Penney, Lord and Taylor, etc. — people aren’t necessarily coming out to witness every aspect, but they end up doing it anyway, and at times like it enough to buy your CD. And more and more people are coming out to see what this Baltimore thing is all about, i.e., the whole package, which is one of the best things about this tour.
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As I write this opening sentence, our beloved veggie oil bus is threatening to stall out on the Verrazano bridge. It feels as though she’s wheezing her last breath, exhaling the ghosts of whatever food the fuel cooked in its former life.

We’re finally leaving New York, a city that, as the Grateful Dead once posited, “just won’t let you be,” a lyric that has proven itself valid over the past few days for the Baltimore Round Robin Tour, with agro bouncers, slippery money handlers and coke-fueled dance floors jammed with hundreds of weirdos like us, if we had bigger wallets and better cheekbones.
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A Funny Clown {thanks, KARI ALTMANN}

The Baltimore Round Robin tour feels like a study on the social dynamics of traveling lunatics, with yours truly being one of them.

We have a pretty colorful bunch of performers here in Baltimore, and dropping 55 of them on an unsuspecting community can create some interesting results, such as performance artist/Wham City member Josh Kelberman, aka A Funny Clown, getting picked up by the Boston police in full medieval clown attire (above) as a result of multiple calls about “some guy in a clown suit chasing people.”
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From today’s b, the paper:

Baltimore City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has proposed a live-entertainment licensing bill that would reinvent the process for granting venues the right to put on live entertainment, including bands, dance parties, plays and just about everything but stripping. She says the bill would do away with the clunky zoning program as the means for deeming whether someone can have a guy playing fiddle at his coffee shop on a Thursday at 3 p.m., and instead move to a licensing system where a board decides whether the venue owner is fit for the fiddler.
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OK, gang, it’s time for some new Superlatives of Baltimore categories! (Apologies to City and Baltimore magazine)

You pick ’em! I will give my little opinion, too.

PLEASE NOTE: Some of these may be illegal or unappreciated. Information for amusement purposes only.

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Papa T {Thanks, Ed Schrader}

Papa T (Tyrice A. Dixon) is a Baltimore troubadour in the truest sense of the phrase. You might have seen him on the corner of Charles and Preston, strumming pleasantly coarse blues and singing with an inflection that seems almost Jamaican.
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Elena Johnston {Brian Krista, b}

Like sweaty, multicolored time capsules, show posters are cultural snapshots, giving you a genuine sense of where a town’s scene was for that moment in time, authentically exuding the energy of a place in a way that can’t be captured in any other medium.
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