'Grease!' slides into Lyric Opera House
Back in the 1970s, producers Kenneth Waissman and Maxine Fox drew on their memories of Baltimore's Forest Park High School to help create a musical that went on to have one of the longest runs in Broadway history. The show was "Grease," written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, and it ran 3,388 performances. Last year this look at a 1957 high-school class had its first Broadway revival; a touring production opens a one-week run at the Lyric Opera House, 140 W. Mount Royal Ave., Tuesday.
Directed and choreographed by Jeff Calhoun, under the supervision of Tommy Tune, this campy production stars Rex Smith as greaser Danny Zuko, Davy Jones as deejay Vince Fontaine and Sally Struthers as Miss Lynch, the English teacher. Show times for "Grease!" (the revival has added an exclamation point in the title) are 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, with matinees at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $27.50 to $47.50. For more information, call (410) 889-3911.
@ "The Slave Series," by Sandra Rowe, is one of the works by 11 African-American artists in the exhibit "The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism" now at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Organized by California artist and professor Charles Gaines, the show examines the effect of criticism on African-American artists including Rowe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems, Pat Ward Williams and Fred Wilson (whose installation "Mining the Museum" had a tremendous impact at the Maryland Historical Society two years ago). In "The Theater of Refusal" the artworks are accompanied by texts drawn from mainstream criticism, and, according to Gaines, the show attempts "to reveal the strategies of marginalization in the critical writing . . . that punishes the work of black artists." At the Fine Arts Gallery of UMBC, 5401 Wilkens Ave., through Dec. 17. For information, call (410) 455-3188.
John Dorsey