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WEDNESDAY 4/22
Music: Middle Man
The son of literary lion Larry McMurtry, James McMurtry hails from Texas, and rarely leaves. If you're a James McMurtry fan who lives in or around Austin, you might catch 100 gigs a year. If you're a James McMurtry fan who lives anywhere but in or around Austin, you might catch him once every 100 years. This is fitting, as McMurtry is one of those rare artists whose work is so grounded in a particular region that when he leaves it's as though the land he's invaded has been given a jolt of electroshock therapy. McMurtry is a lanky, hairy Texan who sings the songs you'd expect to hear coming from a lanky, hairy Texan. His voice is deep and quivering, his rhythms rollicking, his guitars fuzzy, his lyrics poignant and textured. He's a macho man who doesn't take himself too seriously, and a yellow-dog Democrat to boot. He makes music for life's forgotten truck drivers, welders, and mill workers, fighting to hold onto a slice of blue-collar Americana that becomes ever more elusive every day. He is to Texas what Springsteen is to Jersey or Mellencamp is to Indiana, with a sliver of the fame and twice the talent. Tractor Tavern, 5213 Ballard Ave. N.W., 789-3599. $15 (21 and over). 8 p.m. (Also Thurs., April 23.) MIKE SEELY
THURSDAY 4/23
Stage: Point/Counterpoint
In a way, the story of Georges Seurat and the creation of his pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, is the ideal subject for Stephen Sondheim. Not because of his wry, un-gooey sensibility or his lyric-writing gift, but because of his musical style. As Seurat did with specks of paint, Sondheim likes to build big things out of lots of little ones. So many of his songs are accretions of pithy, cellular phrases—even his most popular slow ballad, "Send In the Clowns": "Isn't it rich?" [rest, rest] "Are we a pair?" [rest, rest] (The song was tailored specially for Glynis Johns in A Little Night Music; not a formally-trained singer, breath control, and thus long arching melodies, were not her strong suits.) Sondheim's patter songs, too, are rat-a-tat chains of do-zens-of-ti-ny-lit-tle-pin-prick-syl-la-bles—"Bit by bit, putting it together," as his title character sings in Sunday in the Park With George, his luminously cerebral 1984 fantasy, with James Lapine's book, on the origin of La Grande Jatte and the making of art. In Act 1, Georges' work gets between him and his mistress Dot. In Act 2, another George, Dot's great-grandson, navigates the art world of the '80s. In the 5th Avenue Theatre's production, opening tonight and running through May 10, computer projections will help recreate the painting in an effect that's had critics gushing. 5th Avenue Theatre, 1308 Fifth Ave., 625-1900, www.5thavenue.org. $22–$91. 7:30 p.m. GAVIN BORCHERT
Film: The Chosen Movies
Besides Obama's recent seder in the White House, what other good news for the Jews do we have to report? There's the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which runs through Sunday, May 3 at several venues. The fest opens tonight with a Tom Douglas gala at the Palace Ballroom, preceding The Little Traitor (based on an Amos Oz novel). Set in 1947 Palestine, where British rule is about to end, it's a gentle, nostalgic account of a bookish boy's friendship with an English soldier (Alfred Molina, always a treat). Some two dozen other titles are on the schedule (see www.seattlejewishfilmfestival.org), which also returns a few favorites from SIFF last year; in the festival's second week, look for Stalags (about 1960s concentration-camp fetish porn!) and Strangers (a love story largely improvised and shot on the streets of Paris during the 2006 World Cup). This week there's also a Seattle Jewish Chorale performance (6 p.m. Wed., Cinerama) and a live comedy night featuring Cory Kahaney (5 p.m. Sun., Cinerama). Related: goy-turned-Jew comic Yisrael Campbell tells jokes for a living in the documentary Circumcise Me (1 p.m. Sun., Cinerama); he comes across as something like the Orthodox Lewis Black. Like countless Jewish comedians before him, he says that jokes "are a valid way of dealing with pain." On which subject, he should meet my wife. Cinerama, 2100 Fourth Ave., 800-838-3006. $50 (most other screenings $8–$11). 5:30 p.m. (cocktails at Palace Ballroom) and 8 p.m. (movie). BRIAN MILLER
FRIDAY 4/24
Film: Holy Foolishness
In his new Bird Song (through Thursday), Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra makes a deliberately clumsy pageant from the Bible story of the three kings who journeyed across the desert and sea to salute the baby Jesus. Shot in rich, almost gorgeous black-and-white, Bird Song is less about the gifts of the magi than the play of light over barren, nearly lunar landscapes. Wrapped in bedsheets and wearing pasty crowns, the three kings occasionally recall the Three Stooges. After a while Serra shifts his attention to the object of their quest: Mary (Victòria Aragonés) and Joseph (film critic Mark Peranson, whose dryly comic accompanying documentary on the project, Waiting for Sancho, runs through Sunday at 7:15 and 9:15 p.m.). Holed up in the middle of a barren, rocky nowhere, Mary's holding a bleating lamb; Joseph's mumbling in broken Hebrew. Their baby is unseen but referred to: "He peed on me," Mary remarks. Throughout, Serra remains an intractable practitioner of droll minimalism. Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., 267-5380, www.nwfilmforum.org. $6–$9. 7 and 9 p.m. J. HOBERMAN
