Copious Notes

Lexington native Laura Bell Bundy, above, originated the role of Elle Woods in the Broadway production of "Legally Blonde - The Musical" in 2007. SummerFest will present the first local production of the show in July. © Herald-Leader photo by Aaron Lee Fineman.

Kentucky Conservatory Theatre/SummerFest and the University of Kentucky Theatre both announced lineups for next season, today. For  KCT/SummerFest it is the first time announcing a year-long lineup. The SummerFest lineup also boasts the first local production of Legally Blonde – The Musical, the show that catapulted Lexington native Laura Bell Bundy to a Tony Award nomination when she originated the role of Elle Woods in 2007.

Shuling Fister in "3Dimensions: Winter Dance Concert," which is Jan. 27 and 28 at the Guignol Theatre. UK Theatre will present its second-annual Winter Dance Concert next year. © Herald-Leader staff photo by Rich Copley.

Neither announcement came with dates, but you will notice one show is on both of them.

University of Kentucky Theatre

• Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton
• On the Verge (or the Geography of Yearning) by Eric Overmyer
• Winter Dance Concert
• Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by Moises Kaufman
• Spring Awakening – A New Musical, music by Duncan Sheik and a book and lyrics by Steven Sater

Kentucky Conservatory Theatre/SummerFest

Spring

• 24 Hour Theatre Project – An event in which theater artists will create a 10-minute play in 24 hours.

Summer

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
• A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
• Legally Blonde – The Musical, music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin, and book by Heather Hach

Fall

• The Girl Project – Original works created by conservatory students and mentors.
• Spring Awakening – A New Musical, music by Duncan Sheik and a book and lyrics by Steven Sater

Jim and Melissa Wilkeson are starring in the Woodford Theatre's production of "Almost, Maine," Jan. 27-Feb. 12 at the Falling Springs Arts and Recreation Center. © Herald-Leader staff photos by Rich Copley.

Jim and Melissa Wilkeson are doing something this weekend they have not done in 16 years of marriage: they’re performing opposite each other in a play.

Both Wilkesons are familiar to Lexington theatergoers. Jim has played roles such as Dub in Dearly Departed and Christmas Belles and the title role in Fortinbras at Studio Players. Melissa played Patsy Cline’s biggest fan in Studio’s blockbuster production of Always … Patsy Cline and recently had multiple roles in Balagula Theatre’s The Book of Liz.

They have been in the same shows a couple of times recently — as in Christmas Belles — and in the Midway 10-Minute Play Festival.

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But no show has brought them together on stage until The Woodford Theatre’s production of John Cariani’s Almost, Maine, which opens Friday (Jan. 27, 2012) and runs through Feb. 12 at the Falling Springs Arts and Recreation Center in Versailles.

“Our dogs aren’t very happy,” Melissa says. Jim adds, “Our dogs hate us right now. They’re like, ‘Are you ever going to be home again, ever again?’”

Aside from the canine conundrum, Jim says, “It’s great to finally be in something together and see how it works, see how we look on stage. We looked pretty good on the altar.”

While the Wilkesons have not shared the stage much since tying the knot, their union was born of nine intense months at the Burt Reynolds Institute of Theatre Training in Jupiter, Fla., where they were both students and company members. There, they worked long hours, sometimes performing in a children’s theater show, a black-box show, a mainstage dinner theater show and in lessons with Reynolds — all in one day.

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“We were together all the time,” Wilkeson recalls. “We did nothing but theater from the time we woke up until, literally, sometimes Burt Reynolds would come in and say he wanted to have a class at midnight.”

Their relationship grew quickly as they started dating in November 1993 and got engaged soon after, on Christmas Eve. But they had a long engagement.

“There was no way on God’s green earth I was going to marry him after not living in the real world for nine months,” Melissa says of the institute.

They tied the knot Oct. 21, 1995, at the Cathedral of Christ the King in Lexington. Four days later, they moved to New York — “pursuing our theater dream,” Melissa says.

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Jill Flint as Jill Casey, Paulo Costanzo as Evan Lawson, Mark Feuerstein as Dr. Hank Lawson, and Reshma Shetty as Divya on USA Network's "Royal Pains." © USA photo by Justin Stephens.

With all the chatter about Justified‘s return last week, we kind of overlooked the fact that another basic cable hit series of local interest was also coming back.

USA Network’s Royal Pains has returned (new episodes at 10 p.m. Wednesdays) and Divya, the character played by University of Kentucky graduate Reshma Shetty, is in some hot water having prescribed the wrong medication to a patient. In last week’s season premiere, she went through several painful admissions to the patient, art dealer Eric Kassabian (Wilmer Valderrama), and her friend and hospital administrator Jill Casey (Jill Flint). But if previews are any indication, her slip-up could take a toll on her professional relationship with Dr. Hank Lawson (Mark Feuerstein) whose concierge medical service in the Hamptons she helped co-found.

Shetty was one of the stars of the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre in the early 2000s and earned her master’s from UK.

Since Royal Pains premiered in 2009, her character has gone on an extensive personal journey from the confident and coddled daughter of an Indian-American family trying to stealthily pursue a medical career against her family’s wishes to this season, where she is on her own after having refused her family’s desire for her to enter into an arranged marriage. This season’s screwup will be another challenge to keep us tuning in, as well as Evan’s (Paulo Costanzo) roller coaster romance with Paige (Brooke D’Orsay), the on-again, off-again romance between Jill and Hank and all those dramatic medical crises - the one percent sure do get sick a lot.

Timothy Olyphant and Carla Gugino in the second episode of season three of "Justified." © FX photo by Prashant Gupta.

After a stage-setting season premiere last week, Justified went for a more self-contained second episode that brought in an old friend, maybe to more of us than just Raylan.

Carla Gugino showed up as Karen Goodall, and considering she played another Elmore Leonard Karen, Karen Sisco in a short lived ABC series, Leonard fans logically speculated that this was a cameo by one of Leonard’s other characters. We are told that Goodall had another last name, but I didn’t discern a definite answer as to whether she was Sisco.

Anyone could discern a lot of chemistry between Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) and Karen, who had a past in Miami. And she seems open to whisking him away. But leave him alone, Karen. Raylan’s a family man now, as several scenes reminded us.

Karen is there as part of the episode’s story about a witness protection crisis when one guy in protection murders a marshal who was in town to check on him and others in protection. Before killing the marshal, the murderer tortured him into divulging the locations of other witnesses. Goodall is part of a team brought in to protect the other witnesses who we rightfully assume are in danger, including a mom and her two young daughters.

While it is a story contained to this one episode, the situation shows us some characters in new ways that may be illuminating as the story goes on. The soon-to-be-murdered marshal, is an old friend of Art’s (Nick Searcy), and during a visit, he reflects on a past that sound’s quite similar to Raylan’s cocky, reckless present. Then, in dealing with scumbag who killed his friend, we see that Art is not as by-the-book as we thought.

Rachel (erica Tazel) also comes through as a woman of action while protecting the mother and her daughters. She authoritatively blows away one of the goons who comes to kill the family. But in later scenes, we see that even though this was a nameless thug who was bent on killing a woman and two children, the killing had impact. She doesn’t want to talk about it.

Justified is already racking up quite a body count this season – actually, it would be an incredible number of murders and police shootings in Central and Eastern Kentucky. But this is a show that usually acknowledges death has consequences. It will be interesting what the consequences are for Rachel, as season three goes on.

While it concentrated on the witness protection story, this episode did not ignore the central storyline. At the end of the season premiere, we knew Boyd (Walton Goggins) got himself tossed in jail so he could get to Dickie Bennett (Jeremy Davies),  not so much to finally exact revenge on Dickie for shooting Ava (Joelle Carter), but to find out where Mags money was hidden. It turns out it is with a guy named Limehouse (Mykelti Williamson) who is introduced in the episode’s final moments. In the ominous scene, he is butchering a side of beef while threatening a minion who failed him with a painful punishment or painful death if he ever messes up again. Limehouse is clearly one of this season’s bad guys, but it’s going to take a few episodes to discern what kind of bad guy he is.

The scene of the episode came early though in a jailhouse visit to Boyd by Raylan. As Raylan enumerates his complicated situation with Winona (married her, divorced, got her pregnant while she was married to another man and is moving in with her) Boyd replies noting his own indiscretions with Ava (living with the woman who murdered his brother) and tells Raylan if he’s seeking absolution, “You’ve come to the wrong sinner.”

Yep, there may be good guys and bad guys. But in Justified’s world, everyone’s a sinner.

George Clooney, left, and Shailene Woodley in "The Descendants." © Fox Searchlight Films photo by Merie Wallace via the Associated Press.

Click here for a list of Oscar nominees.

George Clooney’s two Academy Award nominations solidify his status as a perennial Oscar nominee and distinguish him a regular multiple nominee.

In this year’s nominations, announced with considerable charm by Louisville’s Jennifer Lawrence Tuesday morning, Clooney was tapped for best actor for his performance as an out-of-touch dad in The Descendants, also a best picture nominee, and he received a nomination for best adapted screenplay for The Ides of March, a taut political drama filmed primarily in the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky areas. While it was considered a contender in other categories such as best picture, best director and best actor for star Ryan Gosling, the screenplay award was the only major category nomination Ides received.

Still Clooney will go to the Academy Awards Feb. 26, like he did in 2006, with more chances to win – which he did then, picking up the Oscar for best supporting actor in Syrianna. He was also nominated for best director and best original screenplay that year for Good Night, and Good Luck, his film about legendary TV newsman Edward R. Murrow.

And once again, Clooney is considered to be in the hunt for the actor honor. On NPR Tuesday morning, longtime Hollywood reporter Kim Masters framed the acting race as between Clooney and fellow Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt, nominated for his performance as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane in Moneyball, who also received a best picture nomination as a producer of the film and could be named as a producer nominee for Tree of Life.

On the Today show, Pitt said it would not be strange competing against his good friend, Clooney.

“It’s more fun to have a freind there,” Pitt said. “No one does it better that George. I say, give him all the trophies, and when you run out of trophies, make some new ones and give him those too.”

Pitt and Clooney will face a formidable contender in Frenchman Jean Dujardin, star of The Artist, the silent Hollywood homage that received 10 nominations and is currently considered the frontrunner for best picture. Also nominated are  Demián Bichir for A Better Life and Gary Oldman for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Joining The Artist, Moneyball, The Descendants and The Tree of Life  in the best picture race are five other films: Warhorse, Midnight in Paris, The Help, Hugo, which has the most nominations with 11, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Among pleasant surprises, the Academy seemed to get a bit more youthful and lightened up with nods for Jonah Hill as a best supporting actor nominee in Moneyball, who is primarily known for his work in bawdy comedies, and a pair of major nominations for the bawdy comedy Bridesmaids: Melissa McCarthy, who won an Emmy last year for her role in the sitcom Mike and Molly, and best original screenplay for Saturday Night Live star Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.

A little sign of hope for announcer Lawrence, a best actress nominee last year for Winter’s Bone, to possibly be in the running next year was a best actress nomination for Rooney Mara for her performance in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Lawrence will be the heroine leading another action-drama series when The Hunger Games opens in March.

Joining Mara are Glenn Close for Albert Nobbs, Viola Davis for The Help, Michelle Williams for My Week with Marilyn and Meryl Streep for The Iron Lady. Two-time winner and 17-time nominee Streep is considered a frontrunner to pick up her first Oscar since 1983, when she was honored for Sophie’s Choice.

Tim McGraw on stage in Rupp Arena in February 2010. © Herald-Leader staff photo by Pablo Alcala.

If you can think back to a time when the big stories about Tim McGraw were that he was baseball great Tug McGraw’s kid and he had a controversial first hit single in Indian Outlaw, then you’re amused noting that it now goes without saying a new McGraw album is highly anticipated.

In two decades in the music business, McGraw has built up a catalog of hits albums that aren’t always  inspired creations but are reliably good. The man gets to see the best of Nashville’s prolific songwriters and has a longstanding production crew. He knows how to make a contemporary country album.

McGraw’s latest, Emotional Traffic, is also highly anticipated because it was held up in a legal dispute with his label, Curb records, though Southern Voice was an October 2009 release, so it’s not like fans have been waiting forever.

What we get when the album drops Tuesday (Jan. 24, 2012) is a crowd-pleaser of a record with everything a Tim McGraw fan could want. There are the upbeat love songs you’re sure he’s singing to Faith Hill (Right Back Atcha Babe), the clever, fun tune (Felt Good on My Lips), not-so-clever fun tunes (Touchdown Jesus, which someone will pair with a bunch of Tim Tebow clips, if they haven’t already) emotional ballads (Better Than I Used to Be) and the genre-crossing duet (Only Human with Ne-Yo). It gives you competing earworms.

It’s not exactly Live Like You Were Dying, his 2004 career milestone, but it’s reliable McGraw. The song that sparks a twinge of discontent is The One That Got Away, because he does such a lovely job with the David Pahanish-Joe West tune it feels like a little window is opened to his soul, and you want to see him go there a little bit more.

After all, he’s not a novelty act or a celebrity kid. He’s an established country star, and if you’ve been watching him for a while, you highly anticipate him using that stature to take his game to another level.

Audio Adrenaline's Mark Stuart performs with Albert Kiteck and Adam Agin of No Hope Collective at Broadway Christian Church. (c) Herald-Leader staff photos by Rich Copley.

Photo gallery: Audio Adrenaline and the Know Hope Collective at Broadway Christian Church.

The second Audio Adrenaline frontman Mark Stuart opened his mouth Saturday at Broadway Christian Church, it was clear he would not be singing to any great extent.

Audio A retired from the stage and recording studio in 2007 after serious medical issues silenced Stuart’s singing voice.

“I developed a voice disorder from screaming at concerts for 20 years,” he told the audience in a raspy voice that didn’t sound much better than it did at the group’s last Lexington concert, a few blocks over from Broadway Christian in Rupp Arena in the Spring of 2007. “But the thing is, in losing my voice, I have become the voice for thousands of orphans in Haiti.”

Will McGinniss performs at Broadway Christian Church.

And that’s what brought Stuart and Audio Adrenaline bassist Will McGinniss to Lexington Saturday along with worship artists the Know Hope Collective. The group led the audience at Broadway Christian in worship and talked extensively about the Hands and Feet Project, Audio A’s charity that operates orphanages in Haiti and the Know Hope Foundation, which operates in Haiti and the Ukraine.

They told the stories of several orphans, including Stuart’s adoptive daughter, Christela, who they said was born in Haiti to a 14-year-old girl in an outhouse, dropped into the toilet and left to die. Very soon after that, she was rescued by United Nations Peace Keeping troops. Stuart said that after the dramatic rescue, which they showed video of, the soldier who was lowered into the pit to retrieve Christela asked to name her.

Christela, Stuart said, means “Christ was here” in Creole.

“When you reach out to help the abandoned, you understand what it is for God to reach out to us,” Stuart told the crowd.

The event opened with the story of Mackenson, a boy born during the Haitian earthquake in January 2010 who was given up to the Hands and Feet orphanage by his mother who did not want to care for him after it was discovered he was HIV positive. Today, a video about the boy said, he no longer has HIV.

The orphanage and charity were named after one of Audio Adrenaline’s signature songs, Hands and Feet, one of only two Audio A songs that were performed Saturday night. The other was their hit Big House, Stuart’s one real turn at singing as he barked the verses and pantomimed throwing a football across the stage to McGinnis on the line, “A big, big yard, where we can play football.”

The group formed in the late 1980s at Kentucky Christian College in Grayson, and Broadway Christian senior pastor Erine Perry got to know the group when he was a youth minister in nearby Chesapeake, Ohio.

No, raising rock ‘n’ roll memories was not the point of the Saturday night’s event. But it was a few moments of fun in the midst of what has become a very serious endeavor for the Audio Adrenaline veterans.

Know Hope Collective performs at Broadway Christian Church.

The Rev. Ernie Perry, senior minister at Broadway Christian Church, holds a series of photos of the youth group he led in Chesapeake, Ohio in the mid-1980s, and the band that would become Audio Adrenaline was part of their community. © Herald-Leader staff photo by Rich Copley.

Audio Adrenaline was on stage at the Ichthus festival in the early 2000s when Katelyn Perry looked up and saw her dad, the Rev. Ernie Perry, dancing on the stage with his other daughter, Kyleigh, and some friends.

Katelyn and some pals from Southland Christian Church, where Perry was on staff at the time, asked him, “How did you get up there, dancing at Ichthus with Audio Adrenaline?”

Perry replied, “You had to play basketball with them when they were nobodies. You had to know them when they were sleeping on your floor.”

Being on stage at Ichthus was just part of a longstanding friendship that will be renewed once again when Audio Adrenaline plays Broadway Christian Church in Lexington, where Perry has been the senior pastor since February.

Lead singer Mark Stuart of Audio Adrenaline performs Feb. 3, 2000, at the Valley View Baptist Church in Louisville. © Herald-Leader photo by John Sommers II.

That Audio Adrenaline is playing a concert will be a surprise to many Christian music fans who know the band broke up in 2007 after vocal problems left lead singer Mark Stuart unable to perform. While the voice issues still plague the frontman and Owensboro native, Perry says he has seen Audio A do a few performances in recent years as fund- and awareness-raising events for it’s Hands and Feet Project, a charity that supports orphanages in Haiti.

“I’ve seen them do a comparable concert a couple of times,” Perry says, noting one was at Kentucky Christian University, where the group formed in the 1980s. “They’ll do a lot of the old Audio songs, the hits. We told them to bring in the bigger speakers, so they’re going to rock it a bit. Mark is also a great worship songwriter, though some of the worship songs that he has written have come out of some dark, difficult times in his life. So we’ll rock, we’ll worship, and they’re going to tell their story — the history of Audio Adrenaline.”

It is a history that Perry witnessed firsthand when he was just starting out as a minister in Chesapeake, Ohio, just north of Ashland.

He and his wife, Pam, had graduated from Kentucky Christian in 1979, when they went to work with a mission in Chesapeake and ended up being the youth minister at Chesapeake Christian Church. Perry says the group started out small but quickly grew as he and other youth began reaching out to troubled kids in the area.

“Our youth group was made of misfits,” Perry says. “Kids from broken homes, dysfunctional homes. They had stuff in their ears and eyes and nose long before that was the cool thing to do — we’re talking the mid-’80s here.”

Ernie Perry with his wife Pam and daughter Katelyn in the 1980s.

Perry gets choked up a few times filpping through a photo album from those days. Several times guitars and drums show up in the pictures; this was a group that liked to rock hard. That made them open to a group of Kentucky Christian kids who were forming a band.

Perry stayed in touch with the school working with its annual student conference, Summer in the Son. That’s how he met the guys that would become Audio Adrenaline, originally formed as A-180 in 1986.

“They liked our kids and related to our kids,” Perry recalls. “They came to Chesapeake, Ohio, and rented an old dilapidated house, and they were so poor — college students.”

The youth group chipped in to give the group silverware and furniture. They went to Perry’s office for devotions and to use the phone.

“They’d say, ‘Hey, Ernie, can we use your phone? We need to find a truck to get to the show tonight,’” Perry recalls. “I’d say, ‘Are you serious? Tonight?’”

The relationship ranged from business such as helping the band find gigs to spiritual counseling to pure friendship. One summer a youth group member played bass on tour with the band when Will McGinniss couldn’t travel due to an illness in his family.

“Mark Stuart and his girlfriend would baby-sit our daughter sometimes,” Perry says. “She’ll brag that Mark Stuart changed her diapers.”

And it’s a friendship that endured through the band being signed to Forefront Records, changing its name to Audio Adrenaline and recording hits such as Big House and Hands and Feet.

As Stuart’s vocal distress grew, Perry says he saw the band go through the difficult decision to call it a day.

“There are going to be a lot of people there Saturday night who remember them from back in Chesapeake and Ashland and have watched them through the years,” Perry says.

Afterall, though they became rock stars, they never stopped being Kentuckians.

Note: Admission to Saturday’s Audio Adrenaline concert is first-come, first-served. Doors will open at 6 p.m.

The David Crowder Band isn’t going out with a bang or a whimper, but with a tsunami of music.

For the band’s sixth and final studio album, it has released a 34-song epic that goes just about everywhere the Crowder Band has been, including a heapin’ helpin’ of bluegrass toward the finale, and forges some new territory such as a rock opera-esque grandeur toward the middle of the project.

Like almost everything Crowder has done, there is a plan, a design underlying it, this one being fairly clearly stated in the extensive title, Give Us Rest or (a requiem mass in c [the happiest of all keys]). The nearly two-hour album is built on the mass stucture including a mighty, modern Kyrie and extensive contemplative section bookended by some flat out fantastic songs, pop-oriented at the beginning and footstomping bluegrass toward the end. (Dude, if you guys want to retire to Kentucky, we’d love to have you.) As I am not Catholic, I will not pretend to be terribly knowledgeable about what Crowder has done to make this a true mass, but the album is as captivating as the experience of a mass, well beyond what we usually expect from a pop release.

Overall, Give Us Rest communicates a pervasive love of music in many, many forms – this is the band that has credibly brought banjo and the I Am T-Pain app onto the Christian concert stage, often in the same show. And it communicates a consuming love of God and desire to make music for God.

The final stroke of genius though is after all the great songs like Sometimes and Come Find Me, the complexity of the music and the structure of this project, this is how Crowder and his band exit: a humble, as unplugged-as-you-can-be-in-the-studio rendition of the hymn, Because He Lives.

Most Christian music fans hate to see Crowder and his band go. There is too much formulaic, passionless music in the Christian genre to see an act of this talent and integrity disband. But over the past decade, the group has earned the right to chart its own course and say when the journey is over. And if this it, the David Crowder Band has left us with a masterpiece.

Miranda Lambert performs during the 42nd Annual CMA Awards show on Wednesday Nov. 12, 2008 in Nashville, Tenn. © AP photo by Darron Cummings.

Miranda Lambert has postponed her sold-out concert Friday at Rupp Arena in Lexington due to a death in her family. The rescheduled show will be Feb. 26.

Lambert’s father-in-law, Dick Shelton, died Tuesday in Oklahoma, according to a statement from Lambert’s publicist. Shelton was the father of Lambert’s husband, fellow country music star Blake Shelton. His death prompted the cancellation of concerts this weekend in Charlotte and Greensboro, N.C. , as well as Lexington.

“Thank you to the fans for all the support and prayers,” Lambert said in the statement. “This is a really difficult time for our family and the most important thing is being together. Tell your loved ones you love them.”

Tickets purchased for Friday’s sold-out concert will be honored at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 26, according to the release.