Monthly Archives: February 2017

News By Allen Fennewald | 22 hours ago

Photos by Allen Fennewald

The D.C. Youth Slam Team qualifying competitors gather at D.C. FreeStyle Center.

Washington Poetry propels young people onto stages in front of hundreds of people and in the midst of world leaders.

Slam poetry is a growing artistic platform among youth, and programs have sprouted in schools and out-of-school organizations across the nation, fostering hundreds of spoken word poetry teams who compete in national contests like Louder Than a Bomb and Brave New Voices. Explosive performances on stages travel far beyond crowded auditoriums via the internet to inspire the next generation of performers and offer insight to those in power on the state of the youth zeitgeist.

[Its about learning] that there is an explanation for the state that youre in, and that once you can see that web of causality, you can actually effect change in a positive way, said Joseph Green, poet and Split This Rock Youth Programs coordinator. Your words can get in front of people who matter, and its not good policy if its not informed by the people who are going to be affected by it.

Split This Rock Youth Programs is a part of the national socially active poets network whose members have performed for advocates like the Coalition for Juvenile Justice and for government officials at the White House. Their website unabashedly calls for youth to engage in public leadership for social justice: Calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets. Youth programs offer poetry training and workshops, host open microphone events and assemble the D.C. Youth Slam Team for Louder Than a Bomb, which they won last year.

Whats unique about those spaces is that they are from young people, yet they are facilitated by adults, said Tara Dorabji, director of strategic communications for Youth Speaks, a 20-year-old nonprofit that produces youth poetry slams and festivals, including the annual Brave New Voices slam poetry competition. Our mission is to work with young people and facilitate spaces where they can really activate their voice through arts and arts experiences, and then build skills from there and apply their voices in different ways, at times, making choices and having opportunities to apply their voice and their poems in the context of larger social justice issues and movements.

Split This Rock Youth Programs coordinator Joseph Green speaks to the audience before the D.C. Youth Slam Team qualifying competition.

One of the eight team-qualifying slams for the capital city team was held on a warm fall evening in the basement space of Real Talk D.C. on Pennsylvania Avenue, about a half mile from the United States Capitol. The qualifier was part of the weekly Floetic Fridays open-microphone event, held in the safe sexual health awareness organizations headquarters, known as the FreeStyle Center.

Although adults organize these events, Dwayne Lawson-Brown, Real Talk D.C.s youth health educator for social mobilization, said the slams show how the youth take ownership of the events through the words they share.

Here in D.C., the adults who organize it recognize that this is for the youth, Lawson-Brown said over stacked boxes of donated pizza as hip-hop beat through the basement arranged with metal folding chairs and couches that faced a small triangular stage. This is their voice. During the slams and the open mics, for the most part, adults arent really involved. Youth ... or near-age youth are hosting the event.

Lawson-Brown said the only role adults play is setting the stage in a community that fostered the 2014 National Youth Poetry Slam champions. Washington has a tight poetry scene, he said, which allows poets to feel comfortable and accepted in their work. The active spoken word poet offered himself as the sacrificial goat poet, speaking the first poem of the night, which is meant to loosen up the crowd and judges before the contest begins.

Young people participate in poetry for many different reasons personal expression, therapeutic outlet and social action. Qualifying competitor Antonio Poetic Hardy, 17, said he writes poetry to keep the creativity and passion of his inner child alive, which helps his work in the graphic design business he recently started. I feel as though you should always keep that fire alive, and thats what writing and expressing myself through pen and paper means to me.

Andrew Hesbacher, 19, earned third in the qualifier. Hesbacher got addicted to bacher got addicted to spoken word when he attended the 2014 Brave New Voices contest in Philadelphia, which the D.C. Youth Slam Team won. I was hooked immediately, he said.

Youth Slam Team qualifying competitor Antonio Poetic Hardy, 17, eats donated pizza behind the front desk and PA system before the slam begins.

As he has progressed as a poet, Hesbacher said he has learned to take on social issues and promote change. For the longest time [poetry] was a way to get feelings out of myself, he said. As Ive gotten older, and Ive gotten better at dealing with my mental health, Im finding Im writing a lot more about things that I care about.

Trae Stocks, 19, took first place out of seven competitors at the qualifier with his poems Mans n Them and Tune. Mans n Them is a rendition of Rasheed Copelands work of the same name. Stocks was so inspired by Copelands piece that he asked permission to write his own version of the poem created by the 2015 second place Individual World Poetry slam winner and former D.C. Youth Slam Team member. Its about the ironies and struggles of growing up as a black man.

Stocks perceives poetry as a youth-led movement, because young people often instigate changes in poetic craft and delivery. Its youth-driven because most of the newer changes that happen come from the youth, he said. I do feel like we have our own style of poetry thats specific to my generation. I hear poems where they speak poetry for a certain amount of time, then they start rapping, then they sing, then they go back into the poem. They incorporate so many more styles into the poetry. I think a lot of the things my generation gets inspiration from is more free-flowing, the music, the fashion, theres no boundaries anymore.

Breaking down boundaries is why Anne MacNaughton created one of the first spoken word youth poetry teams in New Mexico in 1994. She was a Taos High School English teacher and cofounder of the World Heavyweight Champion Poetry Bout at the Taos Poetry Circus professional spoken word competition. When she saw students getting into trouble for cussing in the hallway during rap battles, she decided to give them a place to speak their minds without fear of punishment.

I went out and swept them into my room and closed the door, she said. I allowed them to continue to express themselves, and they really had a good time. Thats when I started [teaching them] poetry.

In the beginning, the poetry club met before and after school to learn and listen to each others work. MacNaughton said students who had problems with authority and troubled lives found an outlet that made them feel heard and appreciated.

About a year later, MacNaughton said the Taos youth poetry group hosted the first statewide youth spoken word competition in the nation. The event was based on the teachings of experienced slam poets, Juliette Torrez and Matthew John Conley. We ended up creating the first state championship poetry slam event. At that time it was all individuals. There werent teams, yet. As the state-wide event grew, we actually moved on to using teams.

Even the trash cans at Real Talk D.C.s FreeStyle Center are canvases for expression.

MacNaughton believes youth use poetry not only to speak out to adults, but also to build a generational relationship and break down boundaries between each other by sharing what theyre going through.

Its about verbal expression of internal growth that allows you to assess your situation in the world, she said. The kids are talking to each other in these poems.

As a junior in high school Yonas Araya, Split This Rock Ushindi Performance Troupe member, used the platform of poetry to talk about substance abuse at the White House, for Queen Silvia of Sweden and at the Kennedy Center.

The greatest part of the experience for the 16-year-old was seeing people in positions of power emotionally moved by a poem about his aunt who was addicted to heroin.

There were some people in the crowd that were crying, he said. At that moment it was the first time that I realized my words can have a big effect on, if nothing else, someones emotions. I think thats the core of everything, because if you can be moved emotionally by what someone says it can drive you to act on those emotions. People will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Lauren May, 16, also felt the powers of emotional poetry during a D.C. Slam Team trip to South Africa. The Split This Rock Ushindi Performance Troupe and former D.C. Youth Slam Team member wasnt speaking to high-ranking officials, but was still capable of promoting change. Her poem about rape culture had a large impact on a class of South African high school students.

May said rape is a serious and taboo issue in South Africa. One young woman connected with Mays poem so much that she stood before the class, thanked May for her bravery, and recited a personal poem, just written after Mays performance. Her brand new verses spoke of being shamed as a rape victim. The student received hugs from her classmates, and her poem sparked a group discussion on the rarely discussed subject.

Im like, oh my goodness, this girl in another country has the same kind of problems that I have, and that was the first time that I experienced something as huge as that, May said. What I say actually matters to people across the world. After that moment, I vowed to never stop [writing poetry].

Seeing people come together is how Green measures success at Split This Rock Youth Program. Through all of the slams he has supported, the most beneficial outcome from the youth poetry movement he witnessed was on the D.C. Metro: I ran into a group of young people that consisted of folks from D.C. and Virginia [who] I didnt know knew each other, Green said. Id worked at both of these schools. Id seen them meet each other at the Louder Than A Bomb festival, but I didnt know that theyd kept in touch to the point where they were just hanging out.

The multiracial group of students was simply spending time together the simple product of what organizations like Split This Rock hope to deliver; a movement of acceptance and community. Green reflects: That is a real-life, tangible product of allowing young people a space where they are safe, and where they can begin to create connections that will hopefully if the connection itself does not last a lifetime will teach them to take chances with people who live outside of where they come from.

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Young Artists Lead Through Emotional Expression, Powerful Voices and a Conviction for Social Justice - Youth Today

Salman Rushdie, the writer marked for death by the Ayatollah of Iran for writing The Satanic Verses, is working on a new novel set in contemporary America.

His new book, The Golden House, is a thriller set against the backdrop of modern-day American culture. It covers the eight-year Obama presidency and incorporates the cultural zeitgeist. It includes the rise of the conservative Tea Party movement, 2014s GamerGate hashtag campaign, social media, identity politics, and the ongoing culture war against political correctness.

In other words, its the modern world through the lens of Salman Rushdie, an author who received numerous death threats and even attempts on his life after he penned a novel critical of Islam.

Many stores refused to carry the book following its publication in 1988, and those that did were targeted by terrorists with firebombs and explosives.

The Iranian government put out a hit on Rushdie, which lasted until 1998, calling on jihadists and their allies to take the authors life.

In more recent years, Rushdie has called for the defense of freedom of speech. As the target of assassination attempts over his ideas and writing, the Booker Prize-winning author is uniquely intimate with the subject.

During the election last year, Rushdie spoke out against the furor over the pro-Trump chalk slogans in Emory University in what became known as #TheChalkening. Campuses that saw the rising incidences of chalk messages banned the calcium carbonate writing tool.

Rushdie called the dust-up silly and said there was no reason for art to be politically correct.

When people say, I believe in free speech but , then they dont believe in free speech, he said. The whole point about free speech is that it upsets people.

Its very easy to defend the right of people whom you agree with or that you are indifferent to, Rushdie said. The defense [of free speech] begins when someone says something that you dont like.

There are no safe spaces against offensive ideas, said Rushdie.

Rushdie has come to lose his confidence in the progressive leftincluding those who once defended his controversial book. Speaking in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Rushdie expressed dismay at the leftist protests that followed the PEN writers association to honor the fallen artists and writers.

Speaking to French magazine LExpress, Rushdie said that people learned the wrong lessons from the threats he faced in the 80s and 90s.

Instead of realizing that we need to oppose these attacks on freedom of expression, we thought that we need to placate them with compromise and renunciation.

Ive since had the feeling that, if the attacks against The Satanic Verses had taken place today, these people would not have defended me, and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority, said Rushdie. We are living in the darkest time I have ever known.

In Rushdies new book, the main villain is described as a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and colored hair. Make what you will of that.

The books publishing director at Jonathan Cape, Michal Shavit, describes The Golden House as being about identity, truth, terror, and lies for a new world order of alternate truths. Its out this September.

Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken mediacritic. You can reach him through social media at@stillgray on Twitterand onFacebook.

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Salman Rushdie's New Novel is About Political Correctness and the Culture Wars - Heat Street

Wall Street Journal

What to Watch at the Grammys Wall Street Journal But Grammy voters have a habit of favoring traditional songcraft (Adele) over pop-music zeitgeist (Beyonc). Last year, Taylor Swift's ... At the end, a black screen reads: Freedom of movement should be this easy for all legal immigrants. Not just the ... and more »

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What to Watch at the Grammys - Wall Street Journal

Just a day after Amazon Video Prime announced that it would unroll some of its original content, already available in other territories worldwide, Netflix has hit back with its ambitious plans to solidify itself as the worlds favourite channel.

After already debuting Santa Clarita Diet and A Series of Unfortunate Events this year, a Netflix even held in New York yesterday offered a sneak peak into whats to come over the next few months. It all amounts to more than 1,000 hours of new content across a wide variety of television genres, as Netflix looks to cultivate taste communities fond of a few hours of binging.

Here are the five big takeaways from yesterdays event...

Release dates for some of Netflixs most popular shows new seasons were announced, with Orange is the New Black set for an explosive return on June 7th. Love, starring Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust, was renewed for a third season, before its second one even starts to stream on March 10th, and The OAs unanswered questions may get some answers as the show gets a second season.

Release dates and teaser trailers dropped for a host of new original shows, including the Britt Robertson-starring Girlboss, streaming from April 21st. The show, based on the memoirs of eBay-retailer-turned-CEO Sophia Amoruso, promises to explore entrepreneurialism and flawed female characters.

Also coming on May 12th is Anne, a reworking of the classic Canadian childrens book series Anne of Green Gables, with Irish-Canadian actress Amybeth McNulty taking on the lead as the flighty redhead. Written by the Emmy-winning screenwriter of Breaking Bad, the series promises to bring Lucy Maud Montgomerys literary heroine to a new global audience - and proves she's got a smack in her to rivalIron Fist.

According toBloomberg, Netflix is looking to cash in on the lucrative merchandising side of the entertainment business, and will look to license its content for books, comics, gaming toys, collectables, soundtrack, and apparel. Having recently conducted a successful trial with the US retailer Hot Topic selling Stranger Things merchandise,

Netflix is reportedly looking to ape Disneys model to promote our titles so they become part of the zeitgeist for longer periods of time.

Perhaps its unsurprising that in the 2017 media climate, the announcement of a Netflix show based on a pre-existing feature film has already seen calls for a boycott.

When the 34-second trailer for Dear White People, a social satire about African-American students on an Ivy League university campus debuted, the hashtag #NoNetflix started popping on Twitter, amid calls that the show is anti-white. Since being uploaded yesterday morning, the trailer has been given more than 81,000 thumbs down and just 4,000 up on YouTube, and attempts to start a protest movement of people cancelling their Netflix accounts have seen swift online retribution...

Across all genre of television, scripted and unscripted, Netflix is launching an attempted coup to provide all of the programming a family could want. From parents to kids, with plenty of stunt casting to merge the two (Julie Andrewss show Julies Greenroom will feature guests stars like Alec Baldwin, Carol Burnett, Ellie Kemper, Titus Burgess, Idina Menzel, while Bill Nye Saves the World will see the science presenter work with Karlie Kloss, Zach Braff, Donald Faison, Rachel Bloom, and Joel McHale).

Even fans of the 1980s computer game Castlevania are covered, with an animated series set to be written by British novelist Warren Ellis.

The rest is here:

Five things to know from Netflix's 2017 launch - Newstalk 106-108 fm

Your fridge is full of courgetti, your kitchen cupboards are stocked with almond butter and your wardrobe is kitted out with sustainable fashion.

Now, its time to turn to your attention to your bathroom shelf because while clean eating and conscious fashion were the buzz phrases of last year, its the clean beauty movement thats causing a stir.

Remember when eco-brands were a bit of a joke, derided for their New-Age formulas and clumpy hemp packaging? Today, enticingly Instagrammable and eco-conscious labels such as This Works, Vanderohe, Bjrk & Berries, Pai and Romilly Wilde which forgo synthetic ingredients in favour of naturally occuring botanical sources and not only smell divine but also come in packaging that would make Coco Chanel purr are being taken very seriously indeed.

Eat Beautiful, by Wendy Rowe (20; wendyrowe.com)

According to trend forecasters The Future Laboratory, the UK natural cosmetics market is currently worth just over 54m, and is set to reach 34bn globally by 2019. Natural beauty stores are flourishing: in the US, new chain Credo, akin to Sephora and selling brands that use safe, sustainable, and ethically sourced ingredients already has popular branches in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. Here in London, chic natural tinctures can be picked up in Content Beauty on Marylebone High Street, while Holland & Barrett around the capital is becoming the new destination to buy your tinted lip balms thanks to a trendy image makeover. Online, the Beauty Counter is a modern Avon for those after natural skincare.

And much like the makeover that healthy eating underwent thanks to the Hemsley sisters, Amelia Freer and Deliciously Ella, the clean-beauty movement has a new cast of soign ambassadors, too. Burberry make-up artist Wendy Rowe has written a guide on how to use your diet to nourish your skin called Eat Beautiful, while Londoners Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic, who mix up their own organic face oils and sell them for 35 a bottle via their website, have just published their first book, Clean Beauty.

Clean Beauty co-founders Elsie Rutterford and Dominika Minarovic

The woman buying into it is already conscious about what she eats: skincare and make-up are the natural next steps, explains New York-based make-up artist Kirsten Kjr Weis, founder of the eponymous Kjr Weis, a line of organic cosmetics housed in refillable silver trinkets. Disappointed by the lack of high-performance natural brands in her kit, she developed her own 95 per cent organic pigments (meaning the ingredients come from organic farms and are grown in organic soil untouched by chemicals for at least three years) using minerals such as the light-reflective micas group which add shine.

But this isnt just about feeling healthy and virtuous. We live in a society where we want everything, says Kathy Phillips, ex-Vogue beauty director and founder of This Works, which uses natural and organic ingredients. We want to say we are natural but also look half our age. Nothing drives sales like results and the natural ingredients used in some of these clean beauty players are as potent as many synthetics. The sustainably sourced Cacay oil that youll find in Oilixias Amazonian Oil (48; thisisbeautymart.com) for example, contains an amount of retinol (about the only clinically recognised anti-ageing ingredient that reduces wrinkles via cell renewal) comparable with any non-natural retinol product on the market.

Natural can be scientific, agrees Susie Willis, who founded plant-based brand Romilly Wilde last year. She uses so-called bio-identicals that is, lab-grown ingredients comparable to those found in the wild to make her products more sustainable. The laboratory I work with takes one cell from the plant algae, for instance and instead of stripping the seabed for more, they stimulate the environment in the lab so the cell can be reproduced again and again.

@credo-beautys Instagram

Sustainability is not just a buzzword for these new brands. You need to think about the complete360-degree footprint of your brand and try to use each choice as a potential solution to a bigger problem, says Marcia Kilgore, the founder of Soaper Duper, which launched last year using largely natural ingredients and recycled plastics and is currently stocked in Liberty. We consider the net effect of the bottle or tube on plastic landfill, the net effect of the formulation on our groundwater resources, the net effect of the product on the person using it, and of course, the net effect of the personality of the brand on overall zeitgeist. This ethical stance is not the cheapest of life choices her bath soaps come in at around 7.50 but who said clean was cheap?

As with any prominent trend, copycat and less squeaky-clean brands will jump on the bandwagon. Its impossible to tell from the label on the bottle, for example, whether your face oil contains frankincense sourced sustainably from a fair-trade farmer or whether it has been harvested by an exploited worker. And for a brand to advertise itself as natural, it only needs a tiny percentage of the formula to be natural (unlike organic).

It can be a green maze, warns Willis. The trick? Do your research visit brands websites, as well as the Soil Association website, Paulas Choice and Ecocert, where you can learn about different ingredients.

Look for third-party authentication stamps that prove how natural it is. Also look at the ingredient listing: the blanket word fragrance is often a red flag for synthetics and if there are any unrecognisable words, google them.

With the right products, you can keep your conscience as clean as your complexion.

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The rise and rise of clean beauty - Evening Standard

An East Passyunk Crossingresident is directing a reveredRussian icons first full-length play.

Lane Savadove has long loved celebrating the merits of cerebral texts, contending that We should not apologize for our brains. Through his 26-year affiliation with EgoPo Classic Theater, he has looked to offer such powerful pages with zero pretension, with the entitys festival-heavy identity assisting in that venture. The 49-year-old has finally realized a decade-long pursuit by helming Seagull, a symbolist take on Anton Chekhovs The Seagull, the first full-length play in the beloved scribes canon.

Hes such a titan in the field, the East Passyunk Crossing resident said of the playwright whose 1895-penned piece is the second element of EgoPos Russian Masters Festival. No matter what setbacks we have, well always want to feel life on our skin again. Chekhov is great at helping us to do that because he writes so viscerally.

As the Center City-headquartered companys artistic director, Savadove cherishes choosing which works will encourage the firing of synapses among audiences. With Seagull, which is running through Feb. 19 at the Latvian Society Theater, he has called upon many brain cells to give kudos to Chekhovs vast awareness of humanitys depth.

I feel Ive put everything that I can into it, the overseer said of the project, to which he devoted one year of consideration to fulfill the aforementioned decades worth of desires to stage it. Its brought me to the point where I feel I could cover his work for the next four years and feel incredibly blessed and content to have those opportunities.

Savadove is guiding a South Philly-rich cast, including wife Melanie Julian, in what promotional material calls a moving portrait of the yearning for human connection. The tale finds the playwright Konstantin, embodied by Newbold resident Andrew Carroll, trying to enhance theaters possibilities by inventing a form and style quite unlike the tone found in traditional stage-based offerings. The writers reliance on symbolism, which works to address the tectonic plates of our psychic lives, using dreamlike, poetic language and movement to convey often existential themes, as opposed to direct narrative, endowed Savadove with the idea to mesh realities, as his interpretations patrons become the audience in Konstantins brainchild. That decision brings to the fore considerations of melodrama, Naturalism, and Expressionism and has helped the director to grow more fervently attached to Chekhovs output.

It was definitely among my dream plays, Savadove said of The Seagull, which, he added, offers an amazing introduction into the increasingly popular playwrights ability to incite a deeper experience of theater. Its an essential work in thinking about how we approach and appreciate art and also how we set out to make it. It sets the wheels turning and guarantees you a great mental workout.

In that respect and through EgoPos training regimen that instills in the performers robust vocal and physical styles of acting, Seagull stands as a perfect advertisement for the members allegiance to the belief that greater emotional truth will become evident courtesy of listening to the body and following its impulses. That satisfaction through sensory awareness certainly gives credence to Savadoves point about exhausting every means to capture the essence of the plot.

Theres still so much fun to have even if a text calls for you to be mindful of every component, he said. In fact, Id argue that responsibility makes it more enjoyable, and Im in awe because Im among people who likewise want to give everything to getting at the heart of how art sustains us.

The New Hope native has promoted the need for bold, director-driven work in Philadelphia since his 2005 arrival here. Forced to flee from New Orleans, where he had hoped for EgoPo to become a long-tenured contributor to the citys burgeoning theater scene, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he arrived wanting to evolve in his passion for promoting theater as an art form and has come to credit the metropolis for its creative fluidity and emotional integrity.

It can be easy to accept the estimation that were not a place thats bursting with deep thinkers because so many outsiders see us strictly as inhabitants of a blue collar city, the Haverford College and Columbia University, School of the Arts alumnus said. And, of course, thats complete nonsense. Its been my experience that theres plenty of brain power generated on a daily basis, and I think thats particularly evident when you look at theater companies and what theyre collectively trying to convey to us, namely, that its perfectly acceptable to seek answers and apply your findings for the good of so many.

EgoPo, whose name derives from the French for The Physical Self, has enabled Savadove to educate the masses across the country and abroad, with Indonesia and Croatia as international recipients of its quest to revitalize the great classics of theater and literature. Those stops have intensified what the seven-year South Philly resident deems the companys rich entrepreneurial identity and has coupled, since the 07-08 season when he and his peers staged a trio of homages to Tennessee Williams, with festival pieces to reinforce how innovative and provocative their line of work can be. Their aspirations have yielded lengthy discussions on what will comprise their slate, with this seasons selections, due to our political climate in the wake of last years general elections, proving quite apt.

We like to reflect on the zeitgeist to lead us to answers on what were going to do, and were usually dead right when determining what smells like its needed to receive treatment, Savadove said. Were hearing so much these days about Russia with respect to government matters, but when you move beyond that, its undeniable how amazingly influential its creative practitioners have been.

Indeed, the Seagull release tabs the European land in many ways, our closest cultural sibling. Savadove et al have relied on that relation to present a fall tribute to Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the current regard to Chekhov and will cap their veneration of vaunted writers in the spring through Anna, a nod to Leo Tolstoys Anna Karenina. As the artistic director and his contemporaries consider the future of EgoPo, with Savadove having proudly spoken of rising subscription tallies, he can also take delight in his full professor of theater designation at Rowan University, whose vigorous physical training program could certainly transform present students into future hires.

Were looking to grow by continuing to tour and simply being daring, Savadove said. You have to be all in if youre trying to make some ripples.

Seagull

Playing through Feb. 19 at The Latvian Society Theater, 531 N. Seventh St. Tickets: $25-$32 267-273-1414 egopo.org

You can reach Joseph Myers at jmyers@southphillyreview.com.

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Regal 'Seagull' - South Philly Review