As the spirit of the holiday season settles onto our region, Chris Okiishi and Patrick DuLaney are revving the engine on their production company, Crooked Path Theatre, to explore and celebrate with an in-person holiday cabaret featuring a wild array of local talent. It’s set to run for four nights at the newly designed James […]
Genevieve Trainor
Genevieve Trainor lives in Iowa City, Iowa. Passions include heavy music, hoppy beer, and hidden rooms.
Posted inCommunity/News
Best of the CRANDIC Spotlight: Carrie Houchins-Witt can do your taxes and perform Sondheim in the same day
Best of the CRANDIC 2021 winner: Best Financial Planner/Tax Service Carrie Houchins-Witt is a CRANDIC staple both behind and away from the calculator. Over a decade ago, she began putting her passion and skill for numbers into use preparing tax returns for the actors she performed with, learning quickly just how invaluable that service was. […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Book Review: ‘It Can’t Be Easy to Hang a Giraffe in a Cheap Hotel Room …’ by Caldwell Murchfield, illustrated by Bruce Lanning
When I first received this slim volume in the mail, I panicked. How can one get a ~500-word review out of a book of less than 40 pages? I had assigned it to a freelancer, but held back, not wanting someone else to have to grapple with that dilemma. A 40-page poetry book? Sure, golden! […]
Posted inCommunity/News
Best of the CRANDIC Spotlight: Mandi Nichols created the Corridor Community Action Network Facebook page just in time
Best of the CRANDIC 2021 winner: Best Local Facebook Page Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself with an overabundance of diapers that my daughter had grown out of. Disoriented and feeling cut off from friends, family and usual donation options, I threw out a plea on Facebook asking where I might safely gift […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Best of the CRANDIC Spotlight: Andre Perry takes a graceful bow
Best of the CRANDIC winner: Best Nonprofit Director (The Englert Theatre) When Best Nonprofit Director Andre Perry announced his departure from the Englert Theatre this August, the general consensus in the community was that, although his shoes would be hard to fill, his greatest strength as a leader was in raising up everyone around him […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Best of the CRANDIC Spotlight: Iowa City guitarist Randall Davis is a musician’s musician
Best of the CRANDIC 2021 winner: Best Overall Musician So you like to enjoy a night out of live music in the CRANDIC, but you’ve never seen Best Overall Musician Randall Davis perform? Hmmm. I call bullshit. Davis is a fixture, a necessary component of how the musical ecosystem in this region thrives. When I […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Iowa City musician Brian Johannesen named Englert Theatre’s new Senior Programming Manager
The Englert Theatre announced today that it has hired someone to fill one of outgoing executive director Andre Perry’s formidable shoes. Iowa City-based musician and promoter (and former Little Village distribution manager) Brian Johannesen has been named the Englert’s senior programming manager, a role the theater codified in the wake of Perry’s departure announcement in […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Forty years of dreamers: J. Knight celebrates his long-running open mic
Back when The Mill was still around, one of the cultural touchstones most deeply interwoven with its legacy was the Monday night open mics held by musician J. Knight. Countless area musicians started and nurtured their careers there. With COVID-19 and The Mill’s closing, it may have felt like an era was ending. It wasn’t. […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Andre’ Wright creates space in downtown Iowa City for BIPOC people to heal, create and protest
It was the kids who came up with the name. When designer and Humanize My Hoodie co-founder Andre’ Wright accepted an offer from Revival owner Sheila Davisson to make use of her then-vacant Ped Mall space, he didn’t have a name in mind. All he had was a vision, to “really show this community what […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment, Top Story
FilmScene celebrates the reopening of its Ped Mall location
There’s always a bit of nostalgia inherent in film. No matter the subject matter, films are in some small (or, often, in-your-face) way about how we engage with how we record and examine and understand our collective or personal past. Movies both trigger memories and forge new ones. So it’s with several layers of nostalgia […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Iowa poet joins the drive to ‘take back’ the spoken word Grammy (ft. track premiere: Kelsey Bigelow, ‘Poetic Trigger Warning’)
The Grammy Award for spoken word recordings has existed, in some form or other, since 1959. But it hasn’t always, or even often, gone to what 21st century listeners would consider spoken word. Seriously. Jimmy Carter (#NotAPoet) has won this Grammy Award three times. That’s as often as Maya Angelou. (With nine nominations to her […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
Englert Theatre reopens to the public, ‘excited’ for the path forward (VIDEO)
After a long hiatus, the Englert Theatre is once again opening its doors to the public, albeit with strict COVID-19 safety procedures in place. Interim Executive Director John Schickendanz and Board President Carl Brown sat down with Little Village recently to discuss the theater’s current changes and future direction. It’s been a difficult 16 months […]
