Author: laura-eve-engel

Maybe I’m too young for bouts of nostalgia, but cassettes becoming nearly obsolete in my lifetime entitles me to a sentimental moment, and here it is: The first time I heard Shannon Worrell, I was 16, my car still had a tape deck, and my best friend had collaged a cassette tape case to read “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Without An Intensely Musical Experience.” On the tape, sandwiched between Barenaked Ladies and R.E.M.—a golden age of radio pop, friends!—was an energy-soaked live performance of Worrell playing “Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” It was love at first listen, and it was years before I learned Worrell was local.



It’s been eight years since “Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” and Worrell’s The Honey Guide does nothing if not kick my arguably unearned nostalgia into high gear. Clocking in at just over 30 minutes, the album ends quickly, and leaves you wondering where the good times went. Before you know it, it’s over, and don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?

But one thing’s clear: Worrell’s songwriting has a cinematic eye, and each song is delivered through a lens that, like nostalgia, is both sincere and rose-tinted. The opening piano ballad “Tennessee” evokes a long tracking shot of an old car driving out of town; the gentle mandolin in “Kitchen” is practically slats of sunlight lighting on a bowl of oranges. An album that begins with a song about moving out and moving on invites the listener to look over her shoulder at what’s being left: “The house burned down/ we can finally leave this town,” Worrell sings over Charlie Bell’s wistful and weepy pedal steel, and damned if I don’t feel nostalgic already.

The thing about nostalgia’s that it’s deliciously indulgent, like turtle cheesecake, and Worrell’s record is comparably rich. The album is thick with string, twang, and image-heavy writing, and the elements that make it perfect for certain occasions—moments when we’re ready to fall right into memory’s safe, matronly lap—are the same elements that make it a little too much for everyday listening.

Which isn’t to say that the album lacks the pop sensibility of Worrell’s earlier, September 67-era songwriting: “C’mon, Catherine” has the momentum and fiddle-gymnastics of a line dancin’ tune, and “Driving in the Dark” is an upbeat, country toe-tapper.

The Honey Guide is a tight, well-produced record and sentimental listen, chock full of local talent—Sarah White, Sam Wilson, and more; the gang’s all here!—and seasoned songwriting. It’s a series of sepia snapshots, a slow drive, a place you go when you’re in the mood for a little heartstring pulling. And we all like to dwell in the things we’ve left behind sometimes, even if the pace of the everyday makes us feel a little guilty for taking the time to do it.

I’ll admit it: The Taming of the Shrew boils my blood, and it’s all I can do to maintain my delicate reviewer’s composure and resist lobbing certain easily called-upon “–ist”s and “–ism”s like hand grenades. Anyone who’s seen Gil Junger’s 10 Things I Hate About You is more or less familiar with the play’s goings-on: Two sisters, Dr. Gentle and Miss High-Pitched Shriek, and the men who pursue them. The pathologically disagreeable Katherine (seen reading The Bell Jar in Junger’s adaptation—how very unsavory!) must be married off before the mass of suitors may descend upon the younger and more amenable Bianca, licking their lips and jangling their coin-purses.

Awww, flowers from Flounder! A wacky Petruchio (Josh Carpenter) subdues a shrill Katherine (Ginna Hoben) in The Taming of the Shrew at Blackfriars Playhouse.

What Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles fans may not know is that the shrew-taming action is cleverly wrapped up as a play-within-a-play (perk up those ears for metatheatrics, English majors!). Katherine and Bianca’s story is paraded before a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, who has passed out and awoken, tricked by a few folks into thinking he’s some kind of nobleman.

So, The Taming of the Shrew itself is one large, comical diversion, and the American Shakespeare Center cast proved well versed in the art. Combining exceptionally strong individual performances, most notably Josh Carpenter’s Petruchio and Scot Carson’s three-role flexibility, with beautifully timed ensemble moments, the Blackfriars crew did everything it could to distract us from what is ultimately a morality play that comes out on the wrong end.

From tutus and a plush “Flounder” hat to Styrofoam pool noodles to Pat Benatar, the staging was quirky and engaging from start to finish, sagging only when Katherine, played by Ginna Hoben, opened her mouth. Unlike high-end automobiles, going from zero to stark, raving mad in 2.5 seconds makes for unsatisfying acting, and unfortunately the shrew herself did little to add nuance to the part. Instead, cast members whacked each other with props and shot water guns into the audience, with a “Look, over here!” volume and flourish. And it worked.

Staunton’s Blackfriars Playhouse simulates many aspects of the theater-in-the-round of Shakespeare’s day—universal lighting that allows the players to see the audience, audience members sitting on stage—and the result is a pleasant permeability between stage and seats. Early in the play, Scot Carson interrupts himself mid-line and growls a good-natured “Wake up!” into the front row. If there’s one thing the Blackfriars folks demonstrate, it’s flexibility: Whether dealing with a troublingly misogynistic (kaboom!) text or a drowsy attendee, this pack of actors meets the challenge with innovation and humor, and the result is an all-around worthwhile theater-going experience. Even if you’d rather the shrew went altogether untamed.

We’ve all heard of brain food, and the debut book of poems from Kevin McFadden, associate program director of the Virginia Festival of the Book, is a full-course meal for the gray matter. One of a handful of books in the new Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series, Hardscrabble offers pun after home-cooked pun, and the result is a satisfying saturation.

Informally divided into three courses by a 28-page riff of a prose poem, Hardscrabble wrings us through a whiplash-quick examination of language in all its elements—sound, structure and sense—and leaves us full and reeling. And, like many a delicious home-cooked meal, the main course is so rich in texture we can almost forgive the way it makes our middles sag.

The brief opening poem, “Is”—“…written this way / to almost resemble // us: / half- straight, / half-sinuous”—demonstrates that in language, as in most things, form follows function. McFadden’s theme needs some re-imagining—language as a sort of meter stick for America’s progress—so he cooks up new forms, building many of his poems anagrammatically, a feat in and of itself, off of single lines grafted from the likes of Robert Frost, Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg, and out of a specific American poetic tradition.

Unlike many contemporary poets, it is through McFadden’s work and wit, rather than a spirit of personal revelation, that we are able to savor these poems. Each pun, each word-transforming triumph, is another bead of sweat on the poet’s brow; his delivery is self-conscious, and many of the poems end with the Emeril-like “Bam!” of a well-delivered punch line.

Still, Hardscrabble isn’t nearly all cooking chemistry and chaos. The delightful gem in McFadden’s cheeky prowess is his connoisseur’s commitment to meaning. He writes, “Between here and there is a t. It astounds no one—nearly. It might astound me.” Hardscrabble’s gift, its real richness, is not its wordplay but its continued wonderment at the complexity and evolution of the English language and of the country that shapes it, the country it continues to shape.