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By Diana Nollen AMANA — Iowa Theatre Artists Company is wrapping up its first season in its new home with a big bright bow. And some laughter, stories, music and a singalong.  “All Wrapped Up For Christmas!” has all the trappings for a delightful romp through traditions with a bluegrass twist. It opened Thursday afternoon at the performing arts center in the former Barn restaurant in Amana and continues through Dec. 13. Thomas P. Johnson, the company’s co-founder and co-producer, has written and ...

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By Diana Nollen One star reached out and another one was born. A fortuitous phone call nearly 30 years ago helped point Richard Marx down his golden career path. It wasn’t just any caller on the line. It was Lionel Richie in Los Angeles, offering the 17-year-old songwriter some advice. “I remember how kind he was to me and how encouraging he was,” Marx, now 46, says by phone from a recent concert stop in Nashville. “He heard the first four or five songs ...

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By Diana Nollen FAIRFIELD — The face is the same, but the voice might even be better. It can’t be easy to be a Beatles baby. How are you supposed to carve your musical niche when you look and sound so much like your dad? Shave your head, for starters. Even without hair, James McCartney is still the spitting image of his famous father. It’s those eyes. And those glorious tenor pipes. The younger McCartney, 32, made his U.S. concert debut Saturday night, playing back-to-back ...

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By Diana Nollen CEDAR RAPIDS — When a heart of gold melts a heart of cold, both get a new deal for Christmas. Little Orphan Annie is back, working her charms on stodgy bachelor billionaire Oliver Warbucks through Theatre Cedar Rapids. The spunky holiday musical opens Friday and plays through Dec. 6 at TCR Lindale, 4444 First Ave. NE. It’s the third time the community theater troupe has staged the show, after mounting it in 1984 at the Paramount Theatre and in 1990 ...

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By Diana Nollen RIVERSIDE — Herb Alpert and Lani Hall make beautiful music together. The legendary trumpeter and his lovely wife of nearly 36 years, the one-time voice of Brasil 66, were perfectly in sync Friday night in a Hancher concert presented at the Riverside Casino Event Center. An estimated audience of 700 to 750 people were treated to a casual chic evening of Great American Songbook standards wrapped around Latin beats from a top-notch trio of piano, bass and percussion. The amalgam ...

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By Diana Nollen A quiet fire burns through Keri Noble’s self-titled third CD, occasionally flaring to great heights before dying back to a smolder. It’s like someone poured a little Alanis Morissette onto Norah Jones to watch the sparks fly. Or like Noble poured a little of her Detroit roots onto her more mellow Minneapolis home- and workscape. Nearly all of the songs spin around a theme of breaking free and finding your own voice. And nearly all are empowering — except the heartbreaking “Remember ...

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By Diana Nollen Herb Alpert doesn’t live in the past when it comes to his own music. But his first CD collaboration with his wife, Lani Hall, puts a Latin spin on some fascinating rhythms from the Great American Songbook. Cole Porter’s bouncy “Anything Goes” takes on a dreamy feel with Hall’s sultry vocals wrapped around a languid tempo, while Alpert’s crisp, clean trumpet gleams with an up-tempo, jazzy version of the 1933 tune, “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” The audience can expect ...

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By Diana Nollen The Trans-Siberian Orchestra has exceeded its goal of emulating over-the-top music and production values with “Night Castle.” This new CD, to be showcased in the group’s annual November-December tour stopping in Moline, Ill., and Des Moines, is not a feel-good Christmas rock extravaganza. Instead, it’s a dark and epic two-disc set that crashes a concept album into the rock opera realm. It employs vocal soloists and a Greek chorus to tell the story of a 7-year-old girl who sneaks down ...

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By Diana Nollen The season’s new, the artistic director is new, but the face is familiar to Old Creamery Theatre patrons in Amana and beyond. Resident funnyman Sean McCall, 43, of Marengo, is taking on a new role at the professional theater, where he’s been employed for 17 years. Audiences have laughed at his rubber-faced antics in such recent shows as “Nuncrackers,” “The Odd Couple” and the current “Shady Business,” but he’s been working behind the scenes for most of the past decade ...

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It’s a good thing I know Joan Rivers has a kind and generous heart, because those weren’t kind and generous words hopping out of her mouth Friday night at the Diamond Jo Casino in Dubuque. F-bombs were flying before she even stepped into the spotlight, and continued pelting the crowd during the first of two shows in the casino’s elegant Mississippi Moon Bar. Elegant and outrageous made for a curiously palatable mix throughout the 90-minute show, which included opening comedian Brad Upton ...

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FAIRFIELD -- Rocker musician James McCartney will play his debut U.S. concert Nov. 14 at Maharishi University in Fairfield -- a little more than 40 years after his Beatles father, Paul, traveled to Rishikesh, India, to study Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The global buzz created by that historic India visit helped to spread meditation to an entire generation of young people — and helped inspire the founding of Maharishi U in the early 1970s. The  concert will begin at 9:15 ...

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By Diana Nollen A fine Cajun stew is brewing on BeauSoleil’s latest CD. Its title is “Alligator Purse,” but “Jambalaya” seems more apropos for this spicy blend of French, Western and Caribbean traditions, with a hint of country, swing and New Orleans jazz. The first cut even sounds a little Celtic, even though it’s “Reel Cajun.” Fiery fiddles dance over a steady beat that just naturally transfers to your feet. Michael Doucet, the voice of the group and keeper of his ancestral flame, brings ...

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 By Diana Nollen Broken Lizard just keeps regenerating. The brains and brawns behind the movies “Super Troopers,” “Beerfest” and “The Dukes of Hazzard” remake are digging back to their standup comedy roots. They’ll plant their feet on the Englert Theatre stage in downtown Iowa City on Saturday night, for a mix of group sketches, individual shtick, songs, storytelling and film clips. “It’s like a good, old-fashioned cavalcade of humor show, with audience participation and characters from our previous movies doing bits with the ...

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So you think you can dance? You may think again after seeing the ballroom pros in action. Champions of the Dance will be spinning onto the Englert Theatre stage in downtown Iowa City at 8 p.m. Friday. You’ll see the fancy footwork of dancers featured in ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars,” the BBC’s “Strictly Come Dancing” and “The American Ballroom Challenge.” Among those luminaries are Andrey Motyl and Inna Brayer from “Dancing with the Stars”; national champions Hugo Villanueva and Jessica McMorrow; German ...

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By Diana Nollen Filmmakers are knocking on Larry Baker’s door again. His third novel, “A Good Man,” is barely off the presses and already Blue Heron International Pictures is in preproduction for a documentary film involving Baker, 62, of Iowa City. He will write the screenplay and help direct “A Good Man: Fact and Fiction.” Emmy-winning actor and Grinnell College graduate Peter Coyote has signed on to narrate. Most of the action in the novel takes place in St. Augustine, Fla., where Baker ...

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By Diana Nollen Nora James hooked me up with “A Good Man,” for which I’m ever so grateful. She is the first character who intrigued me in Larry Baker’s third novel, released Sept. 17 through Ice Cube Press in North Liberty. James is that mysterious woman everybody knows, nobody sees and anybody can hear by tuning into her cooking show on the little radio station in St. Augustine, Fla. She’s a complete mystery you want to solve right away, but Baker wisely ...

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By Diana Nollen “Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece — all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up.” — “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” CEDAR RAPIDS — The Friends of the Cedar Rapids Public Library are hoping to see at least that much money pile up from the sale of a rare, limited centennial edition of “The Adventures ...

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By Diana Nollen Don’t let her sharp tongue fool you. Joan Rivers is a softy at heart. “I think everybody is,” she says by phone from her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “... The people who don’t appreciate the good are idiots. Maybe it’s because of my age, but you look around and say, ‘Stop complaining. You’re so lucky. We’re so lucky. You go to China or you go to Nepal, you come back and say, ‘Excuse me, what are you ...

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CEDAR RAPIDS -- In honor of "Election Day," admission is free from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today (Nov. 3) at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. Stop in and see Norman Rockwell's "Election Day" in the galleries and get a $5 "Election Day" poster in the Museum Store. In 2007, the citizens of Cedar Rapids rallied to purchase a series of watercolors destined for the auction block in New York. These five watercolors, by 20th century American artist Norman Rockwell, depicted scenes associated with an election ...

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Tickets go on sale at noon Friday, Nov. 6, for Papa Roach, Shinedown and Halestorm in concert at 7 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 12, at the U.S. Cellular Center, 370 First Ave. NE, Cedar Rapids. The show is open to all ages and seating is general admission. Tickets are $29.50 in advance and $32 day of show, through the U.S. Cellular Center Box Office, 1-(800) 745-3000,  www.ticketmaster.com or  www.jadepresents.com

Here are excerpts from Diana Nollen’s Oct. 9 interview with Joan Rivers, via phone from her home office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Rivers will be performing at 7 and 10 p.m. Nov. 6 in the Diamond Jo Casino’s Mississippi Moon Bar in Dubuque. Tickets are $50 and $75 at the Mississippi Moon Bar Box Office and www.diamondjo.com Admission restricted to ages 21 and over. DIANA: It’s such a pleasure to speak with you. I’ve been a fan of yours forever. JOAN: Well ...

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“Cedar Rapids” apparently will not be filmed in Cedar Rapids. AnnArbor.com is reporting that the movie, starring Ed Helms of “The Office” and the summer hit film “The Hangover,” has recently started preproduction in Ann Arbor, Mich. Shooting is expected to begin in November, according to Kay Seaser of the Ann Arbor Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. The report blames the move on the Iowa film tax-credit suspension. “Cedar Rapids” director Miguel Arteta also directed “Youth in Revolt,” which was filmed in downtown Ann ...

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Kent Stock, who has hit plenty of career home runs, is rounding the bases with another venture. The man who led the storied Norway, Iowa, baseball team to its 20th state championship in its final season, later chronicled on the silver screen, has now put his life story into words. “Heading for Home: My Journey from Little League to Hollywood!” tells Stock’s tale from his childhood in Ankeny and dreams of playing big league baseball, through a zigzagging career path of teaching, ...

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By Diana Nollen AMANA — Even though “From the Homefront” is set in World War II, its theme is universal.  When troops are in harm’s way during any war, family and friends back home anxiously hold their breath while trying to soldier on, day by day. Thomas P. Johnson, co-founder of the Iowa Theatre Artists Company, has written a fine play that captures a slice of life for parents who have three sons serving in the Pacific and the neighbors whose 16-year-old son ...

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By Diana Nollen CEDAR RAPIDS — Amazing how everything old is new again. Maria Muldaur and her Garden of Joy jug band played two hours of music from the 1920s and ’30s on Wednesday night with lyrics that resonate today. The CSPS stage that also hearkens back to an earlier age was the perfect venue to showcase the talents of Muldaur and her band, four young men accomplished on everything from banjo, mandolin, guitar and bass to kazoos, tomato cans, silverware, a suitcase, ...

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