Reviewing the Drama: Broadway, Off-Broadway, Ballet, Movies, and TV Reviews

Grammy Nominations Grammy Award nominations were announced this week. You can view the full list of nominees on the Grammy website . Herein, some nominees of interest: Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album — Josh Groban , Stages ; Seth MacFarlane , No One Ever Tells You ; Tony Bennett and Bill Charlap , The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern ; Bob Dylan , Shadows in the Night ; and Barry Manilow , My Dream Duets Best Musical Theater Album — An American in Paris , Fun Home , Hamilton , The King and I , and Something Rotten Foo Fighters —Best Rock Performance, " Something from Nothing "; and Best Music Film, Sonic Highways Best Spoken Word Album —nominees include Dick Cavett , Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic Moments, and Assorted Hijinks ; Jimmy Carter , A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety ; and Amy Poehler , Yes Pelase Best Comedy Album —nominees include Wyatt Cenac , Brooklyn and Louis C.K. , Live at Madison Square Garden Best Score Soundtrack for Visu...

"Theatricalizing the personal narrative" is written on the chalkboard. It's something Sherie Rene Scott  and Dick Scanlan  have done successfully (see Everyday Rapture ), and something, mostly on a lark, they ended up teaching to a group of incarcerated men. In Whorl Inside a Loop  (the title refers to your fingerprint), an actress volunteers at a men's prison, and teaches the men, all of whom have been convicted of murder, to express themselves, rehabilitating them through the arts. (Though Scott and Scanlan did teach in a prison, and many of the stories come from actual prisoners, the play is, ultimately, a true work of fiction.) In doing so, the men express that they are not the worst thing they've done. Indeed, these men—all people, in fact—can be the perfect peacock eye whorl, so much good and so much bad in one person. (As a guard says of Sunnyside (a cunningly charismatic Derrick Baskin ), "He's committed the most violent, most unforgivable ...