The Barnstormers performed a staged reading of George Bernard Shaw’s You Never Can Tell on Saturday, April 20. You Never Can Tell is the first play the Barnstormers ever performed; This brought a certain nostalgia to the show, as it is also the 100th anniversary of the formation of the theatre group in January 1919.
Cage The Elephant released their fifth studio album, Social Cues, on Friday, April 18. Cage The Elephant consistently impresses me with the range of music they put out. There are songs I absolutely love, songs I cannot stand listening to and songs that I simply forget. I’ve found that it’s difficult to take in an entire Cage The Elephant album at one time because their music is so high-energy and intense that it’s hard to figure out which tracks I actually enjoy. Social Cues is no exception in that many of the songs blend together on first listen. However, the album definitely has some standouts, and Cage The Elephant never fails to prove their musical prowess.
As April Awareness winds to a close, the University’s chapter of Out in Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics (oSTEM) broke new ground with their inaugural annual drag show, “Drag Them,” on Sunday, April 21. The thrilling evening was hosted by the two event organizers, Miss Anne Thropy and Suey Sigh Delle — juniors Coleman Haley and Jane Brusilovsky respectively — in full drag and bio drag (when a female dresses in the style of male drag queens).
Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals joined Childish Gambino, Jaden Smith and BLACKPINK as one of the opening performers for Coachella on Friday, April 12. But before taking to the highly-coveted stage in Indio, Calif., he took us back to Ventura County in his 11 track LP, Ventura, which comes just six months after the 2018 release of Oxnard. If Oxnard’s hit song “Tints,” featuring Kendrick Lamar, was the song that helped me deal with my homesickness and longing for sunny Southern California last semester, Ventura’s “Make It Better,” featuring Smokey Robinson, is the next perfect song that will get me through this particularly gloomy spring season.
The John Astin Theatre presented their second weekend of Mauritius at the Merrick Barn. Directed by James Glossman, a lecturer in the Theatre Arts & Studies program, the show centered around two denominations of postage stamps issued in 1847 by British Mauritius, then a colony off the southeast coast of Africa.
Renowned Shakespeare critic James Shapiro came to Hopkins on Thursday, April 11 to deliver an outstanding Turnbull lecture he called “Lincoln, Booth, Shakespeare.” He read for the first time an extract from his latest, yet to be released novel, Shakespeare in a Divided America.
The city of Baltimore is no stranger to stories of violence and corruption. In the spring of 2015, Baltimore made national news headlines when Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, died from injuries sustained in policy custody.
LSD’s inaugural and eponymous album finally dropped on Friday, April 12 after the group pushed it back from the original release date of Nov. 8. Because of this I was expecting awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping new beats and a bountiful well of new music to listen to until the summer’s inevitable slew of bouncy pop starts coming at us. While the new stuff we got off the album was great, five out of the album’s nine songs were previously released as singles, and the final track is a remix; I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed.
To some extent all romantic comedies are the same. You might think that that’s a bad thing, but I’d argue in the genre’s defense. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with following a good formula. That being said, if you don’t like rom-coms, The Perfect Date isn’t for you. If you don’t like high school rom-coms, then you probably shouldn’t even bother reading this review. But if, like myself, you’re the type of person who’s seen To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before multiple times and would watch it again right now, then you also need to stop reading this review because you have to go watch The Perfect Date immediately.
Standing in the crowd of the Fillmore Silver Spring on Friday night, I was immediately taken back to my childhood, one of the hallmarks of which was listening to music in our family SUV. Whether we were going shopping for groceries or picking up new threads at the local Marshalls, my parents would always play music in the car. The selection was usually pretty eclectic — it included everything from Mendelssohn’s E minor violin concerto and random excerpts from Bach’s solo cello suites to Dream Theater’s Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory and excessive replays of The Pussycat Dolls’ “Don’t Cha.”
The return of the spring season always seems to bring with it two things: better moods and better music. In this past week, Vampire Weekend, Khalid and Kevin Abstract have all released much anticipated albums (not to mention Anderson .Paak, but he gets his own article).
I went into Shazam! with pretty high hopes. It had been very well reviewed, and I’d heard some really good things. Zachary Levi is a great actor who looked perfect for the role of the main character, kid-turned-adult-superhero Billy Batson, and the trailers were exciting and hilarious. Things all looked positive, and I was genuinely eager to see it opening night. So, with all that being said, I want to be very clear — Shazam! was not a good movie. I enjoyed it, and I’m glad I saw it, but it was not a quality film.
Nipsey Hussle was murdered a week ago. He was standing outside his clothing store, The Marathon Clothing, on Slauson Avenue, the street he grew up on in Los Angeles. He got into a confrontation with a man trying to enter the store. The man left, got a gun, came back and shot Nipsey.
By now you have probably seen the viral Planet Earth clip of a courtship dance where a bird of paradise distorts itself into a dabbing, blue, smiley face as a way of asking for its mate’s consent.
The latest iteration of Pet Sematary opened last Friday, April 5 based on Stephen King’s original novel of the same name released in 1983.
A large part of The Twilight Zone’s cult appeal stems from its inherently strange qualities, not only in its plot, but also in its status as an emblem of a different time and a different intellectual atmosphere in American history. The show itself, with its stilted acting, filtered sound and dramatic score, often does feel like it came from another dimension, an aspect that only increases its lurid appeal.
Humanities students at Hopkins are used to not getting the same opportunities as their STEM counterparts. Friendly fire proved just as fatal, however, when faculty members in the Writing Seminars started closing the door on students attempting to enter the overstuffed Tudor and Stuart Room in Gilman Hall on Tuesday, April 2. The Writing Sems department selected Gilman 388 (as opposed to the usual Mudd 26) for its intimacy, but it’s truly a shame that more students weren’t able to attend the reading of Margolies Visiting Writer Ilya Kaminsky.
The Barnstormers finished their opening weekend of their 100th anniversary spring musical, Cabaret, in Swirnow Theater. Directed by Max Hunter, the artistic director of The Bridge Production Group, and produced by senior Julia Zimmerman, the show centers around a Berlin cabaret called the Kit Kat Klub and the lives of those involved in it.
Red Emma’s hosted a multimedia presentation of the latest issue of World War 3 Illustrated, a left-wing political comic magazine, on Friday, March 29. This issue, “Now is the Time of Monsters,” focuses on the rise of capitalism and fascism. And though the theme may be broad, each featured artist hones in on one specific evil in the world, from Mark Zuckerberg to forced evictions in Detroit.
Ask Baltimore musician Cris Jacobs if he has a favorite song from his most recent album, Color Where You Are, and he’s unable to give a direct answer. “I can’t really say that I do,” he said. “Different songs have different emotional levels and different purposes.”
