Rough Music

Sings Like Hell presents Richard Thompson’s 1,000 Years of Popular Music

At the Lobero Theatre, Friday, May 12.
The trio-Richard Thompson, Debra Dobkin, and Judith Owen-entered from the rear of the theater and marched down the aisle to the stage. Followed by a single spotlight, they were already singing and generally making a racket. It felt like the beginning of a medieval ceremony, a piece of the “rough music” that brought the workers of the 12th century out to the commons for a bit of a good time. And so it was, for Richard Thompson’s marvelous new show about the history of popular music really does begin in the year 1190, and then proceeds to pour endless, effortless draughts of popular music from the intervening centuries as though it were all so much golden British ale.

Looking Forward by Looking Back

Jane Fonda Talks About Her Life-and Yours

Jane Fonda will be at UCSB on May 1 for a lecture based on her autobiography, My Life So Far, which has just been issued in paperback. Already a bestseller in 15 languages, Fonda’s book blends a fluid retelling of her extraordinarily eventful life with a series of progressively more challenging ideas about how we all perceive and construct our identities. I spoke with Fonda on the phone last Sunday as she stopped over in San Francisco. What came through in our talk was a mixture: a tremendous, somewhat intimidating sense of honor and responsibility that at first comes across as wariness; and a willingness to think out loud, laugh, and play in the moment that is thoroughly charming.

Detente

Camerata Pacifica’s April Concert

At Victoria Hall Theater, Friday, April 7.
Two unusual and overtly confrontational pieces in the first half of this concert-by Alfred Schnittke and William Bolcom-set the stage for a marvelously warm, if not exactly relaxed Shostakovich cello sonata in the second. Psychologically and, in the case of the Bolcom, chronologically, the evening harkened back to the 20-year era of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union known as detente, when the Cold War melted a little around the edges.

Lonely Town

Hughie, directed by Michael Uppendahl

At Center Stage Theater, Saturday, April 8. Shows through April 15.
In the late 1930s, A.J. Liebling wrote a series of pseudo-ethnographic essays for the New Yorker about the Broadway hotel culture of “telephone booth Indians.” These small-time hustlers stood all day in the lobby payphones of the less fashionable midtown Manhattan hotels, waiting for personal calls, too broke to make anything outgoing, but still desperately looking for an edge, some angle that would allow them another score.

Right This Way

Lawrence Gipe’s Zirkus and Variete

At the Ro Snell Gallery. Shows through April 13.

This exhibition of recent paintings by Lawrence Gipe builds on the metaphor of humans performing in a circus until it contains a world of subtle implications and buried historical references. Acrobats leap and tumble toward one another across eerily empty spaces while teams of unicyclists approach the viewer in tenuous formations. Gipe, who has been a mainstay of the Santa Barbara scene for years, also has a major retrospective at the Arizona State University Art Museum, now through June 10. Like one of his inspirations, Gerhard Richter, he demonstrates technical virtuosity in the service of a highly conceptualized approach to his subject matter. Beginning with photographs and building his images from a mixture of analysis and experimentation, Gipe creates iconic representations that address the contradictions of modernity and urbanization with fresh, subversive, and often dark perspectives.

Nine Become One

Camerata Pacifica’s March concert.

At Victoria Hall Theater, Friday, March 17.

Bassoonist John Steinmetz got Camerata Pacifica’s March concert off to an even more than usually jocose start on Friday by introducing the evening’s opening number with a string of deadpan puns and one-liners that had everyone laughing. Composer Joseph Rheinberger was helpfully located within the context of the tradition of composers with “burger” in their names, and his composition, the Nonet in E-flat Major, Opus 139, was deemed a dangerous piece, “to be played without safety precautions.” (As in “no net.”) Steinmetz finished with an entirely sincere and on-target characterization of the piece as designed to entertain, and capable of communicating a sense of deep delight.