Canada's Got Talent winner Jacob Lewis ‘back in the office next week' before giving music his all
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
23-07-2025
- Boston Globe
Dropkick Murphys pull from Punk in the Park shows over Trump donations
Dropkick Murphys, who have made no secret of their distaste for all things MAGA – Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Advertisement The Punk in the Park festival is held in a variety of US cities, with the next event scheduled for Advertisement Brew Ha Ha's contribution, which shows up in a 'I felt like people at least had the right to know,' Lewis told Denver's ABC station. 'I just felt like it was the antithesis of what we represent in punk rock.' Mark Shanahan can be reached at
Chicago Tribune
17-07-2025
- Chicago Tribune
Review: Grant Park Music Festival is lifted by an artist-in-residence and a poignant ‘Enigma Variations'
Everyone, it seems, needs to have an 'artist-in-residence' these days. Though lofty, the title, as interpreted in recent seasons by the Grant Park Music Festival and the Chicago Symphony, tends to overpromise. It's becoming industry parlance for 'has at least two bookings with us a season' — significant for the artist and presenter, maybe, but mostly a blip for audiences. Cellist Inbal Segev's residency with the Grant Park Music Festival, which concluded on Wednesday, felt closer to a fair billing. The Israeli-American cellist was here for just a week, but it was a packed one: a Pavilion concert on July 9 (playing Mark Adamo's 'Last Year,' a latter-day 'Four Seasons' inflected by climate change), a recital on July 13 which included some of her own music, and a masterclass on July 15, before concluding with another concert in the Pavilion on July 16. In grand-finale spirit, Segev dusted off Anna Clyne's 'Dance,' a calling card of hers, for the occasion. Not that she needed to do much dusting: Guest conductor Courtney Lewis noted in comments to the audience that, since Segev premiered the concerto in 2019, she has performed about half of its 80 performances since. That deep experience was manifest in Wednesday's performance. Like 'Masquerade,' another widely programmed piece by Clyne, 'Dance' dresses up centuries-old musical forms in 21st-century clothing — the placid round of the third movement, the striding ground bass of the fourth. But even amid more fervid movements like the second and fifth, Segev radiated calm confidence through their percussive chords and fingerboard-spanning dexterity. She often smiled encouragingly at Lewis, or, in the finale, at concertmaster Jeremy Black, with whom she swapped knotty, bluesy solos. Her coolheaded virtuosity soothed, even when the music didn't. As an encore, Segev brought the same tranquil command to the Sarabande from Bach's Cello Suite No. 3. Her sound was magisterial and rich, a full-bodied account — until the very end. On that final resolution, she quieted to a mere, otherworldly wisp, like a final wave from a distance. Lewis and the Grant Parkers were every bit as unflappable in their accompaniment. Voices in the orchestra step forth to double the cello here and there — a tricky alignment in any acoustic. But from my vantage in the Pavilion seating area, these all converged impeccably, most especially the ghostly bowed vibraphone supporting Segev's harmonics. Against 'Dance,' a frazzled 'Fledermaus' overture sounded like it might have gotten the short end of the rehearsal stick. Lewis's sudden, tensile beats left the orchestra guessing at subdivisions, nor did they give Strauss's beloved Viennese waltzes much freedom to bounce. Other gestures — scrunched shoulders, a finger to the lips to hush the orchestra — seemed patently superfluous for a group of Grant Park's caliber. But if Lewis spent Grant Park's blink-and-you-miss-it rehearsal time preparing his poignant 'Enigma Variations,' that was a worthy tradeoff. Lewis cultivated an entrancingly variegated ensemble sound, adding new dimension to even Elgar's most familiar strains. The yin-and-yang themes of 'R.P.A.' seemed somehow connected at the hip, rather than starkly juxtaposed. Later, the seafaring variation which Elgar laconically titled '***' — spurring avid speculation about whose initials, exactly, he was redacting — gained might the same way an ocean storm does: gradually at first, then all at once. Then, of course, there's 'Nimrod,' the piece's most famous excerpt. Strings played the opening with no vibrato, sounding for all the world like the stillness before daybreak. When the sun rose through mounting crescendos, the orchestra was bright but not blaring, the Grant Park brass offering sculpted support. The final variation, named for Elgar himself, likewise refused to be weighted down. The opening scampered with tricksterish levity; later on, when the movement cycles through vignettes from earlier in the piece, Lewis balanced the orchestra so that they sounded like flotsam bobbing in '***'s' surf. Now that's how you play the 'Enigma Variations.' A postscript: Inbal Segev's Grant Park week would have been even more packed, were it not for a day-of cancellation of her Monday recital repeat at the Columbus Park Refectory. Festival spokespeople explained the performance, co-presented by the Chicago Park District's 'Night Out in the Parks,' was canceled due to noise-bleed concerns from a 'Bike Night' hosted on the adjacent parking lot, an event they say the festival learned about that morning. In truth, Columbus Park has hosted hundreds for Bike Night every Monday all summer, complete with food-truck vendors, signage and traffic cops. The most generous read of the snafu suggests this was just an awkward breakdown in communication between the festival and the Parks District. It's worth noting, too, the Refectory building itself, where the concert was supposed to happen, was not double-booked, and was thus available on paper. But the broader cluelessness here from Grant Park strikes at a deeper issue, one certainly not unique to this festival. What, exactly, are arts organizations hoping to achieve through neighborhood events if they don't know all that much about the neighborhoods in question? The festival should take the fumble as a learning opportunity as its 'Night Out' partnership continues: July 17 at Olympia Park, July 24 at Indian Boundary Park, July 31 at Lake Shore Park, Aug. 7 at Jefferson Memorial Park and Aug. 14 at Lincoln Park Cultural Center. The Grant Park Music Festival continues July 18-19 with Augustin Hadelich playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, 201 E. Randolph St. Free; more information and ticketed Pavilion seating at
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Yahoo
‘Shari & Lamb Chop' Review: Shari Lewis and Her Most Famous Puppet Get the Star Treatment They Deserve
It's fitting that Shari Lewis, the iconic ventriloquist and puppeteer at the center of Lisa D'Apolito's winning documentary 'Shari & Lamb Chop,' never seemed to get too hung up on religion (at one point in the film, Lewis tells us that she thinks the best religious ceremony is life itself). Another person, someone more compelled by providence or divine fate or what-have-you, would likely have been been far more preoccupied with the origin story behind how they met their most famous partner, their felt-y little soulmate. For Lewis, it was thus: she was a young entertainer, appearing on an episode of 'Captain Kangaroo' in 1956, when someone commented on how heavy and unwieldy her ventriloquist dummies were for a relatively diminutive gal like her. She looked around, found a lamb puppet she (by her own, very amusing words) 'didn't know,' and the rest is history. Lewis wasn't very sentimental, but she was open-hearted, and dwelling on how she and Lamb Chop came to be wasn't exactly her thing. That suits D'Apolito's doc, which covers the majority of Lewis' life and work in less than 90 minutes, little time to dwell. More from IndieWire 'Night Always Comes' Trailer: Vanessa Kirby Tries to Save Her Family Home Over the Course of One Crime-Fueled Night Why 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' Director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson Looked to Spielberg and 'Jaws' for Inspiration But don't let that slim running time fool you: D'Apolito covers a staggering amount of ground here, much of that possible because of Lewis' special brand of candor. A straight-shooting Type-A overachiever who could do just about anything in the performing arts realm, Lewis is undoubtedly best known for her work with Lamb Chop, the wee lamb puppet with whom she shares the title of the film. Despite that seemingly blasé way the pair first met, the documentary is willing to get a bit more touchy-feely than Lewis herself, making a sterling argument that the duo were really just two pieces of one entity. That's not to say that Lewis herself didn't make that determination many times throughout her life, but again, each interview (and D'Apolito surely had a treasure trove of archival footage to raid for this) that focuses on the topic is relatively straightforward about it. That Lewis and Lamb Chop (and Hush Puppy and Charlie Horse) were part of one, greater whole is a given. Funnily enough, that attitude makes that relationship all the more special. (Still, when Lewis tells us that she went 'looking for God' in her puppets, and only found it when Lamb Chop arrived, it's one of the most touching and incredibly self-aware moments of any doc this year.) Told mostly in linear fashion (and a bit breakneck because of it), Lewis' early days alone would make for a neat feature. The daughter of a magician and a pianist, creativity was in young Shari Hurwitz's blood, but as she explains in an older interview, ventriloquism proved to be the 'most natural thing' she did. That natural proclivity led Lewis to do nothing less than forever change the face of children's television, a point made early and often throughout the doc. It's certainly not wrong. As well-known as Lewis (who passed away in 1998 at the age of 65) is for her work with Lamb Chop and friends — and, depending on your generation, either the hit '60s series 'The Shari Lewis Show' or the beloved '90s joint 'Lamb Chop's Play-Along' — D'Apolito's doc makes it clear how very much she accomplished with and without the puppets. And D'Apolito and editor Andrea Lewis (no relation) inject lots of Shari Lewis into the film, by way of a variety of archival interviews (a later one is also used as voiceover throughout the film), though these moments often leave us hungry to see more sequences of Lewis actually performing. Those are the real stunners, and a series of cleverly deployed talking head interviews (including Lewis' daughter Mallory, her sister Barbara, her assistant Mary Lou, plus starry admirers like David Copperfield and Sarah Sherman) help contextualize the full breadth of Lewis' incredible talent. Fellow puppeteer Megan Piphus Peace especially stands out, particularly when she explains just how remarkable Lewis' ability to puppet two of her creations at the same time, while also performing as herself. And who really was Shari Lewis? As the documentary chugs along through the messier moments of Lewis' life (mostly in the late '60s, after 'The Shari Lewis Show' was canceled, and then later into the '80s, when her marriage to Jeremy Tarcher was failing), we get many glimpses, but fewer answers. 'The Queen of Reinvention,' as Mallory Lewis termed her mother, tried a little bit of everything before coming back into the fold with 'Play-Along,' much of it bizarre to look back on. (Footage showing everything from Lewis and Lamb Chop appearing on 'Playboy After Dark' to Lewis dancing, quite well, with a life-sized Fred Astaire puppet must be seen to be believed.) Things picked back up in the '90s with the creation of 'Play-Along,' which most everyone believes is Lewis' real legacy and her greatest achievement. As she grew older, Lewis became even more work-focused and pinpoint-precise, laser-focused on delivering the best possible show for her best and most lasting audience: kids. Those kids? They're likely to find this documentary especially compelling, offering a new way into Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop, one that somehow delivers the facts with the kind of showmanship only Lewis could offer. Grade: B 'Shari & Lamb Chop' will be released by Kino Lorber in select theaters on Friday, July 18. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst Solve the daily Crossword
