Category Archives: Brian_McTavish

It’s about choices in this life, whether it’s plastic or paper, debit or credit, married or single, rich or poor.

Well, that last one isn’t really much of a choice, I guess. Especially if you’ve misplaced your bootstraps. Where did I put those darn things?

So what’ll it be for modern music lovers seeking stimulation in the techno-beating heart of the city on Saturday night: Linkin Park or the Frost: Winter Electronic Music Festival?

If you’re truly committed to the rhythm and are truly able to pay for it (bootstraps alert!) you might be able to sample both in a single night. How’s that for a choice?

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It’s 1971 and I’m in seventh grade.

One day after school I find myself hanging out in a longhaired schoolmate’s suburban St. Louis garage. His two-day-old band is grinding its gears trying to sound like Black Sabbath and he wants to be Ozzy Osbourne so bad even I can taste the ambition as he shakes his greasy blonde locks and belts out “Iron Man” with a pimply sneer that’s probably been practiced more than a few times in the bedroom mirror.

It’s good to be young, I think, because if you’re old, you’d look crazy doing this. Just like the 62-year-old Osbourne, the eternally nutty rock god and reality TV icon, will no doubt look on Saturday at Sprint Center.

But he does it so well.

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“Shrek the Musical” has almost everything you could ask for in a truly entertaining all-ages romp based on the first and best installment of the Dreamworks hit animated movie franchise.

The Broadway Across America show running through Sunday at the Music Hall definitely delivered the satiric and toe-tapping goods in Wednesday’s opening night performance. It featured everyone’s favorite big green ogre with a Scottish brogue not looking for love but still finding it amid a bevy of fractured fairy tale characters, from a civil-rights-minded Pinocchio to a sarcastic Gingerbread Man no less sassy for being stuck on his baking tray.

Eric Peterson as Shrek delivered the right mix of stubbornness and tender-heartedness in the title role, along with an audience-pleasing enthusiasm for repeatedly uninhibited farting and belching. Hey, give the people what they want, right?

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Why did “Cats” – opening tonight at the Music Hall – become such a successful Broadway musical back in the day?

Could there have been just as big a hit show about, say, canines?
 
Not in a million dog years!
 
Cats are mysterious and play hard to get. Dogs are obvious and born to please. Not to say which one makes a better pet, but be honest: Which one would you rather know more about?
 
I can imagine being mildly intrigued by a cat’s inner life. The only thing I can even remotely imagine about a dog’s insides is what it just swallowed as fast as it could for dinner – and with any luck it wasn’t the surplus Halloween candy left on the kitchen table. Bad dog!

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 “You de man!” hollered a fan as Max Weinberg settled in behind his drum kit at the start of his big band’s first of two shows Sunday night at Jardine’s.

As a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and as the former TV bandleader for Conan O’Brien (including the latter’s ill-fated stint as host of the “Tonight Show”) the savvy stick man’s fame couldn’t help but precede him.

But it was really “de men” – 14 vibrant young players on trumpets, trombones, saxophones, stand-up bass and piano fronted by their charismatic veteran leader – that made the next 90 minutes of popular instrumental music in the swinging style of Count Basie such a sensational experience.
 

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Vintage rock idol Roger Waters re-erects his former band Pink Floyd’s magnum opus of personal alienation, “The Wall,” when the metaphorical mastermind leads the spectacle-laden “The Wall Live”

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