Ann Lemons Pollack
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The Color Purple
For every complaint that the Fox stage is too big, here comes a show like "The Color Purple," which needs every inch it. The broad, tuneful, well-sung musical version of Alice Walker's novel opened last night and will run through Sunday. With queen-sized Felicia P. Fields, owner of a wicked right cross, reprising the Broadway
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The Double Bass
People can strike up intimate, and often strange, relationships with whatever is closest and usually warmest–a blanket, a pacifier, a puppy, a parent, a human being, a baseball glove, a musical instrument. Rarely a double bass, but it's possible. "The Double Bass," by German playwright Patrick Suskind, is a strange but entertaining play that examines
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Fires In The Mirror
When Anna Deveare Smith first put "Fires in the Mirror" on a stage in New York, only a few months after the Crown Heights riots of August, 1991, she portrayed 26 characters in a 90-minute play that was staggering in its impact. The riots began when a van driven by a Lubavitcher man (an ultra-conservative
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The Beaches of Agnes
Agnes Varda, 81 years old, is considered the Grandmother of the French New Wave film movement. Belgian-born and starting as a still photographer, she has been making films for more than a half-century, counseling other filmmakers and being a vital part of the seminal group that included Alan Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and, of course, Jacques
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The Grill at the Ritz-Carlton
This is Clayton Restaurant Week, (link is here) with 17 Clayton restaurants offering three-course dinners for $25 plus tax and tip through Sunday. As people who appreciate both good food and good bargains, we felt obligated to participate. It seemed like a good deal, and when we participated in St. Louis version a few years
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Crazy Heart
We've seen it, or its very close relatives, dozens of times through the years, with Bruce Beresford's "Tender Mercies," probably the best example, but "Crazy Heart" is an entertaining, well-made movie, as comfortable as an old shirt and as familiar as an old friend, and featuring Jeff Bridges in an Oscar-contending role. That doesn't make
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William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
William Kunstler, an activist attorney in the days that activists took to the streets, eventually seemed to believe that he was more important than the people he represented, an action that led him from defending those who were fighting for their rights to defending those who would help him into the headlines. "William Kunstler: Disturbing
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Tooth Fairy
With a wrestler known as the Rock turning hockey player, several cute kids, Julie Andrews as Spenser's Fairie Queen come to 21st-century life and a screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who mine the same slag pile for more repetitive nonsense in every one of their many movies, what arrives in "Tooth Fairy" is
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Haveli
If Chinese food is almost as much about texture as taste, we believe that Indian food is almost as much about aroma as taste. That struck us as we were enjoying a meal at Haveli, a new Indian restaurant that’s an offshoot of Bombay Grill in O’Fallon, MO. Owner Hema Patel has brought her chef,
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Caroline’s Cakes
With the approaching Super Bowl, we're about to wrap up the winter eating season. This last day-long orgy of eating is by far the most casual of the season, Thanksgiving and Christmas generally involve sit-down dinners; New Year's Eve, if it's not a dinner, usually is a time for lighter food that goes well with