By: Martha Thomas

This month, Theatre Project sets out to fill two grievous gaps in Baltimore's cultural portfolio. First, if you believe the people at Squonk, our city needs an opera, and the Pittsburgh-based theater company, which rose rapidly from its rust-belt birthplace to Broadway, is happy to provide. Second, if you heed Roger Brunyate, artistic director of the Peabody Opera, you'll realize that we're ripe for a holiday tradition somewhat more localized than Disney on Ice. His answer is a homegrown version of a raucous British tradition: the pantomime, a play generally based on a children's fairy tale that includes stock characters, music, and lots of shouting from the audience.

Squonk's Baltimore: The Opera is a multimedia show featuring videotaped footage of local folks and noteworthy sites around town. The company has used this format in Albany, Pittsburgh, and Orange, N.J., among other places. Regionalized lyrics are worked into songs composed by co-artistic director Jackie Dempsey and performed by a band on stage, with the video backdrop as well as performances by three local dance companies. "Each production is specific to that place," Dempsey says, "but it's also more abstractly about a sense of place." Featured in the production is an interview with jazz singer Ruby Glover, filmed just days before her death in October.

Later this month, between Boxing Day and Twelfth Night (mark your calendars, Anglophiles!), The Pantolites will present a "pantomime" version of Puss in Boots—a tradition (one that has nothing to do with Marcel Marceau) for all ages with roots in Commedia dell'arte. The stylized production of Brunyate's adaptation will feature James Kinstle, artistic director of the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, as Widow Weptalot, the traditional dame in drag. 

MUSIC

By: David Dudley

Ian Nagoski—musician, record store owner, and amateur ethnomusicologist—spent three years assembling Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics, a twenty-four track compilation on Atlanta's Dust-to-Digital records. Zany and heartbreaking, it's a time capsule of singular sounds plucked from the 78 RPM record's pre-war heyday—there's a frenzied Uilleann piper, Chinese opera, lush Indian movie music, and a sweet-voiced 10-year-old Finnish boy with a zither singing Socialist poetry. But Nagoski wasn't drawn to sheer musical oddity. "People engage in all sorts of bizarre musical behaviors, but that wasn't what I wanted to get across," he says. "All of this was music I thought was just jaw-droppingly beautiful."

If there's any unifying theme, it's the peculiar intensity of these performances, many of which capture subcultures that didn't survive the twentieth century. A rousing Lemko wedding song roars along with klezmer momentum, the musicians—members of an oppressed Carpathian ethnic group expelled from Poland after World War II—oblivious to their fate; when a 1927 practitioner of Serbian gusle music howls his nationalist verse, you can almost smell the Balkan bloodshed. (Slobodan Milosevic, Nagoski notes, was a big gusle fan.) Nagoski tracked down native speakers of dying dialects in an effort to discover what, exactly, these people were singing so passionately about. But, he says, that background isn't as important as the communion with the past the voices offer. "Not speaking the language, you can still appreciate what it takes to create the performance," he says. "There's that moment when the needle drops and the sound comes out and fills the space—your ear understands that this is a person." (Available at the True Vine Record Shop, 1123 W. 36th St., 419-235-4500, or from Dust-to-Digital, P.O. Box 54743, Atlanta, GA, 30308-0743, www.dust-digital.com)

ART

By: Jack Livingston

Through December 21 at McDaniel College's Esther Prangley Rice Gallery, Baltimore-based artist and MICA educator Michelle La Perrière presents Amalgam (loss and celebration), an exhibition that explores the cyclical nature of life.  During La Perrière's early to mid-forties, a number of people close to the artist died tragically, including two of her family members. In the following years, she created a succession of revelatory works in memoriam to those lost. In 2005, La Perrière accepted an invitation to attend the Jentel Artist Residency in Wyoming. Under the influence of pending motherhood (her daughter was born less than six weeks after her return) and the healing environment of the mountain retreat, she produced a breakthrough series of spacious monoprints on paper. Infused with quiet atmospheric images (many from nature) amid delicate color washes, the pieces revel in mindful connection, fluidity, and acceptance. Upon her return, La Perrière enhanced the series by hand. This cinematic suite, titled "Prayers (in memory and joy)," is the centerpiece of La Perrière's current exhibition, a show universal in topic and profound in sensibility.

LITERATURE

By: Susan McCallum-Smith

Ten years after our arrival, my husband and I are eligible to become citizens of the United States. I've lived here long enough to puncture some of my more cockamamie notions, but I still dream of the idea of America. A glorious idea encompassing Monument Valley, Shaft, freedom of speech, Calamity Jane, Nordstrom's shoe department, and, now, Millard Kaufman.

Kaufman is 90 years old and has just published his first novel, Bowl of Cherries. This tardy entry into fiction is forgivable; he's been a busy man. Raised in Baltimore and a graduate of Johns Hopkins, Kaufman fought with the Marines in the D-Day landings, co-created Mr. Magoo, and is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter.

Bowl of Cherries is narrated by wunderkind Judd Breslau, who finds himself, after a series of ludicrous misadventures, awaiting execution by "ganching" (don't ask) in the fictional Iraqi province of Assama. "The jail is a shithouse, and that's not a metaphor," says Breslau. "It is fashioned, like all the public buildings and private dwellings in the capital, of human excrement." Breslau has become embroiled in the race to uncover the secret agglutinate that holds Assama's shit, sorry, Assama's architecture together. This dusty corner of the Middle East is threatened by unwelcome attention from "the banner-bearers of enterprise, the go-getters, the carpetbaggers, the leeches, the loan sharks, the hucksters, of everything from shit to Shinola."

Bowl of Cherries whip-cracks along, the plotty nonsense forgivable due to Kaufman's acrobatic prose and eccentric characters, whose filibustering often takes the form of accidental profundity: "We live in Hamlet times," one says, about the catastrophic meddlings of America, in "a new ice age of self-doubt and indecision."

Nathan McCall, author of the controversial memoir Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America, wouldn't argue with that. His first novel, Them, examines the life of Barlowe Reed, a 40-year-old African American who believes every United We Stand bumper sticker is a hypocritical symbol of how far we haven't come.

 Barlowe lives with his hot-headed nephew, Tyrone, in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward, the birthplace and final resting place of Martin Luther King Jr. The Fourth Ward once boasted the "richest negro street in the world," and although the neighborhood has fallen into disrepair, it "seemed to finger-pop to its own soulful tune," and has a main street that Barlowe finds damned near perfect: "You could buy groceries, get your teeth fixed or cop a vial of crack cocaine; you could get discount life insurance … take in a foot-stomping church service … and attend to your banking needs; you could get a seven-dollar haircut, a good game of nine-ball and a back-alley blow job, all on the same block."

 His community pride is shattered when a white couple moves in next door. Gentrification has arrived on his doorstep; "them crackers" are coming, and nothing will ever be the same. The white couple, Sean and Sandy Gilmore, has decided to "go black," as their realtor so crudely puts it, due to economic necessity and a deliberate attempt to integrate. But when Sean endures resentful stares during a walk one Sunday afternoon—"Sean could actually feel his whiteness"—and returns home, frightened and angry, Sandy remarks that "now we know how it feels being a suspect all the time." Sandy and Barlowe strike up an unlikely and thorny friendship. As community tension builds, they bicker over the back fence, trying to move beyond "too much water under the bridge."  

Despite McCall's admirable, if occasionally clunky, effort, Them is a missed opportunity. Even though Barlowe and Sandy are forced to face their own prejudices, their conversations never move beyond pat misunderstandings. McCall fails to hunker down deep into the risky, chewy issue of race and find the words to articulate what his characters can't.

Australian illustrator Shaun Tan, on the other hand, has produced an instant classic without using any words at all. This jaded reviewer is hopelessly smitten by The Arrival, his graphic novel about migration. His exquisite drawings, four years in the making, tease the boundaries of a child's imagination while stretching the tale-spinning muscles of an adult's.

A man leaves his homeland to find a better life. His wife and child stay behind, stalked by a nameless terror—its tail switching—until he can save enough money for their passage. Upon his arrival in a new world, in a port akin to Manhattan anchored by hazy twin statues bridged by a handshake, he is hurled into the disorienting maelstrom of the immigrant experience. He walks the streets, baffled by bizarre architecture, whimsical creatures, and fantastical vegetables, and struck dumb by his inability to communicate in a language as indecipherable as hieroglyphics. While searching for work and assailed by loneliness and doubt, he meets other immigrants who share their stories of persecution, exile, and joy.

Tan is a genius at marking time. A year passes, sketched by the seeding, budding, blooming, and decomposing of a single flower. The monotonous sea passage is clocked by clouds that take on magical formations in the reader's gaze.

This perfect holiday gift is bookended by passport-sized sketches of men, women, and children of different ethnicities and nationalities, whose eyes reflect the commingling of heartbreak and hope felt on the threshold of arrival. One day, years ago, my husband and I had our own photos taken, joining all those who came before us, looking for America. 

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