Audience

WHY? and Serengeti

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In the highly fickle and competitive world of music, bands that may be “great” individually but sound similar to other artists in their genre bracket, there’s a good change they get lost in the static. It is those musicians that straddle genre lines, blending influences to create a sound all their own, that are not only making themselves memorable, but becoming essential to staying relevant to listeners’ eclectic tastes.

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Cirque-A-Palooza!

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This is the show that the performers would put on for each other. The juggler dropped his pancake (more on that later), the sword swallower even choked up just a little bit of the spaghetti from his dinner (I’ll leave that one alone). That said, even before the show started, I felt like I was in on the jokes, maybe even sitting in Stefan’s living room, dancing a little too wildly and drinking more than I should. So along with other performers, the audience and I cheered the successes, forgave foibles, and generally had a delightful time doing so.

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Ferrante brings back Groucho Marx

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Just then, the lights begin to dim as a loud voice comes on over the loudspeakers, the once-deafening shouts of a crowd in conversation with itself dying down as a spotlight follows impresario and tonight’s host Stefan Haves down the right side of the theater to the main stage. Mr. Haves is known for “frequently drawing on LA talent to re-invent physical theater, circus, and clowning — stubbornly breaking every artistic wall in a town whose theatrical conventions and filmic traditions often tend toward maintaining that stubborn ‘fourth wall’ [pasadenaplayhouse.org].”

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