Performing Arts

A few years ago, Isaac Hopkins was browsing Wikipedia when he came across an entry for the 1969 “Jimmy Carter UFO Incident.” As many people presumably would, Hopkins found the notion of the then-gubernatorial candidate seeing a UFO in Leary, Georgia, before addressing a Lions Club International meeting hilarious. His next reaction was a little less conventional: “This could be a musical.”

Six months before his 1980 assassination, John Lennon took his four-year-old son Sean on vacation to Bermuda while wife Yoko Ono ran the family business back home in New York. For nearly five years, Lennon’s guitar had hung, unstrummed, on a wall above the couple’s bed. He canceled his subscription to Billboard, learned how to bake bread, and became a househusband and stay-at-home dad for Sean.

Stephanie Blank has a secret. No, not that. Even TMZ has reported on the ridiculously civilized parting of the ways between the veteran Atlanta charitable fundraiser and her husband of 16 years, Home Depot co-founder and Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank. We’re talking about a real secret here.

Drag queen Lena Lust (nee Lester West) has worked in more than seventy Atlanta clubs since gradually moving down South from Chicago during the seventies.

When True Colors Theatre Company asked Chris Coleman to direct his old friend Kenny Leon and the luminous Phylicia Rashad in the 1975 play Same Time, Next Year, the former Atlantan and cofounder of Actor’s Express first thought, “Oh my God, that’s kind of random.” Then he became titillated by the thought. “Getting the job of making Kenny Leon make out with Phylicia Rashad —come on! Who is going to turn *that* down?”

There are myriad tales of people making deals with the devil, but they all share similar endings (spoiler alert: bad things happen). Although the outcomes are predictable, we’re still drawn to these cautionary fables, the most famous of which is the chronicle of a certain Dr. Faust and his misguided barter—an eternal soul for fleeting youth.

Chris Kayser reflects on what his years playing Scrooge taught him and offers advice to those who will take on the role next.

As any eastside commuter can attest, one rarely drives through the Krog Street tunnel—the graffiti gallery/underpass connecting Cabbagetown and Old Fourth Ward—without spying an aspiring musician or model posing for a photo shoot.

As The Seed & Feed Marching Abominable, Atlanta’s iconic kooky community marching band struts into its 40th anniversary today at the Inman Park Festival parade, the act has a souvenir for fans. To celebrate four decades of silliness, the band’s fundraising arm, the Seed & Feed Marching Abominable Endowment, Inc., a 501c3 nonprofit, is selling the act’s brand new 2015 "Naughty Bits" calendar.

Now in its fifth year, Art on the Atlanta BeltLine is the largest temporary public art exhibition in the Southeast, according to Elan Buchen, the BeltLine’s coordinator for art and design. This year, visual arts installations stretch not only along the Eastside Trail but also along six more miles of future BeltLine trails along the southeast and westside corridors.