Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896
October 19, 2025
October 19, 2025 | Published by the Students of Johns Hopkins since 1896

Arts & Entertainment



COURTESY OF DAN MANSION
Mansion is a Baltimore native who has been making music for five years.

Dan Mansion: The life of a Baltimore musician

Baltimore’s disparate music scene is one of the most underappreciated great things in both the country and in the City itself. Even in an urban sprawl with eight universities, local talent is so often unexplored in favor of whatever pop sound defines each genre nationally.


COURTESY OF WILL KIRSCH
Florida-based band LANNDS played Baltimore as a part of their east coast tour.

LANNDS puts on an enchanting performance

I’m 21 years old, and I feel old as shit. Somehow, I managed to skip right over the quarter-life crisis and hopped right into the deep pool of existential dread that 40-year-old men live in fear of. That being said, premature adulthood has encouraged me not to spend my weekends in sweaty frat basements anymore.






COURTEST OF WITNESS THEATER
Gemma Simoes Decarvalho and Usman Enam starred in IQ, a featured play.

Witness Showcase highlights talent both onstage and behind the scenes

On Friday, September 29, Witness Theater’s Fall Showcase premiered in the Swirnow Theater. This year’s lineup featured the debut of five original and student-written short plays, including Kiana Beckman’s Please Form a Line Here,Anita Louie’s IQ, Vanessa Quinlivan’s Invisible, Emma Shannon’s Perfect Strangers and Michael Feder’s Neighbor.





GAGE SKIDMORE/CC BY SA 3.0
British actor Colin Firth plaus Harry Hart, a main character in Kingsman.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle lacks charisma

This past Friday, Kingsman: The Golden Circle premiered in theaters. If you’re unfamiliar with the title, then you missed out on one of the best comic book films of the past five years. The Golden Circle is the follow up to the impressive Kingsman: The Secret Service (adapted from the comic book of the same name).


MSCHOCHET/CC0
The City Paper’s yellow news boxes are a Baltimore icon.

Looking back on the City Paper’s past

For the past 40 years, City Paper (CP) has served as a beacon of alternative news and arts in Baltimore, an outlet for creative individuals to write and read stories outside of the constant onslaught of the mainstream media.


AMPLIFIED 2010/CC BY SA 2.0
Kwame Kwei-Armah is the artistic director at Center Stage, which hosted Play Lab between Sept. 22-24.

Play Lab invites audiences to revise original plays

The Fall Play Lab at Center Stage featured the performance of two one-act plays that were edited and revised over the course of the weekend. Audiences were able to engage with and comment upon the two original works: Handle It, by Rachel Knoblauch and To the Flame, by Miranda Rose Hall.



THE COME UP SHOW/CC BY-SA 2.0
Atlanta-based group EARTHGANG released their five song EP Rags at the beginning of September 2017.

Innovative music holds surprises for listeners in our era

The easiest way to present yourself as a boring, uninteresting and lame person is to start a sentence with the words, “Music isn’t the same nowadays...” or “I was born in the wrong era.” That is a mindset that many fall into — feeling that all of the “good stuff” has passed and that new music is garbage.



PUBLIC DOMAIN
Donald Glover was one of many to make history at the 2017 Emmys.

The Emmys highlight diverse TV performances

This year’s Emmys were far from perfect. We had a controversial, perhaps in poor taste, appearance of Sean Spicer, Sterling K. Brown was unceremoniously cut-off in the middle of his powerful acceptance speech and, as always, some great performances were overlooked.


Vacation shows Tentative Digital Theatre Company’s potential

As a crowd of around 30 students tentatively stepped into the SDS Room of the Mattin Center on Sept. 15, they encountered a sparse ring of black plastic chairs and white lamps. The audience members filing into the circle of seats had gathered to watch Vacation, a play by Hopkins junior Michael Feder.


COURTESY OF THE CURRENT SPACE
The pieces featured in Confirmed Mood shared a common focus on form.

Current Space opens new exhibit

Hidden in an unassuming building on North Howard Street, Current Space, one of Baltimore’s numerous art galleries, is currently presenting a new exhibition, which attempts to engage viewers on the very abstract levels of form and color.


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