MORGANTOWN — A production two years in the making, the Morgantown Theater Company’s performance of "The Music Man" is coming to the historic Metropolitan Theater this weekend. Typically, it takes about four months of rehearsal before the play is performed in front of an audience, ...
An artist has been selected to design and complete a new mural in town. Rafael Blanco will create the mural on the Westover bridge pier located near Hazel Ruby McQuain Park and the Walnut Street Landing. The mural will feature a man playing a saxophone and a woman biking. Blanco said ...
BY ALISE CHAFFINS The subject of grief seems to be permeating pop culture right now. Not simply death and sadness, which have always been a staple of movies and television, but a closer examination of how we behave in the midst of profound loss. AppleTV+ recently released “The Sky is Everywhere,” which is yet another look at the way death affects those it touches. The story opens on Lennie (Grace Kaufman), a promising young musician who lost her sister Bailey (Havana Rose Hiu) to a heart condition. Despite her dreams to attend Julliard, she is struggling to play the clarinet ...
BY ALISE CHAFFINS Science fiction has been asking us to look at the dark side of artificial intelligence for a long time. Isaac Asimov gave us “The Three Laws,” and those have been used by filmmakers to ask questions about how AI might impact our daily lives. As devices like Alexa and Siri become more commonplace, we are seeing more movies that look at how they might be abused by bad faith actors. Steven Soderbergh’s latest movie “Kimi,” streaming on HBO Max tackles this issue. Angela Childs (Zoe Kravitz) is an agoraphobic whose disorder is amplified by the COVID-19 ...
BY ALISE CHAFFINS When we think of heroism, what often comes to mind are the big acts where countless lives are saved. In Asghar Farhadi’s latest film, “A Hero,” currently streaming on Amazon Prime, the hero is birthed, ruined, and born again from a number of seemingly small acts. Through the film, we follow Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi), a man imprisoned for failing to pay back a debt after his partner absconded with the money. He is out on a two-day leave and the woman he hopes to marry, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldoust), comes to him with a handbag containing 17 gold coins that ...
Moses Storm tells the audience in his new HBO Max special “Trash White” that he is not trying to teach anything. This isn’t something that’s intended to be important in the vein of Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette,” but instead to be an actual comedy special. I would say that he half succeeds in this endeavor. Storm’s special is a deep dive into what it is like to grow up in poverty. He was one of five children his mom raised alone. A portion of his life was spent living on a bus, but when they had a home, they still struggled. He shares stories about how food stamps were ...
