AboutEnnis grew up in Cincinnati, the sixth of ten children. In his first life he was an actor and singer; embarking on his second, he completed his BA at Empire State College, where he was a Richard Porter Leach Fellow.
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Contrary to what the cynics among us might think, revivals of plays and musicals exist not only to bring in theatergoers desperate for the tried and true. Successful ones rely on a confluence of factors: a director (Ivo van Hove, who, evidenced by this current theater season, should now be allowed to direct everything—everyone else,…
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Musicals, when they work, are the holy grail of catharsis. A good one creates a kind of dream that’s a bit like falling in love. It just…works. A world unfolds with a kind of inevitability that defy questions or puzzlement. No one feels manipulated. When you’re watching the right one, it’s like a pilgrimage to…
Continue readingI am Trying to Break Your Heart I am hoping to hang your head on my wall in shame— the slightest taxidermy thrills me. Fish forever leaping on the living-room wall— paperweights made from skulls of small animals. I want to wear your smile on my sleeve & break…
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Back in the day he’d been on the edge of my consciousness, what with music for Purple Rain and Batman (that soundtrack’s “The Arms of Orion” duet with Sheena Easton is, note for note, a delectably romantic morsel of pop craftsmanship); aside from those, I owned approximately one other Prince album (Lovesexy), but I still…
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There’s a lot of new ground being broken in what we used to call country music. Lately I’ve been listening to Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell mine that primal place where voice and longing collide. I’m impressed they’ve found something fresh and contemporary in the form; it’s no longer necessary to be a hillbilly (or a…
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Fill yourself up with the forsythias and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too with your blood and happiness and wretchedness, the dark ground that seems to come with you. Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome. And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows, then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you into June, when…
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It’s been almost 13 years since luck brought me back to my Cincinnati hometown the exact weekend that Zaha Hadid’s new Contemporary Arts Center (or for those who are sticklers for naming rights, the Rosenthal Center) opened. In a downtown poised to transition from near dilapidation, Hadid’s striking building was a harbinger of what the…
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For us union performers, the names Ken Howard and Patty Duke were synonymous with leadership; both served as president of the Screen Actors Guild at pivotal transition times. Duke famously took over the reins from William Schallert, a case of TV-bred nepotism (Schallert played Duke’s character’s father and uncle). More recently Howard shepherded the merger…
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Want to know what it’s like to live inside a dream? The installation art of Do Ho Suh provides a lovely metaphor for the ways we carry our notions of home and hearth, and how a place, or even a country, imprints until it becomes part of us. Suh recreates these totems most strikingly in…
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For an art model, time bends, saunters, crawls, or stealthily expands, but it rarely flies. Twenty minutes can feel like infinity if the pose is difficult—and each is difficult in its own way. Tonight is my first full-figure gig, which means I’m struggling to maintain the position of various body parts as my mind manages…
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