But for a play with enough blood, love and rhetoric to do Shakespeare proud, Lulu is an oddly tedious exercise. By the time James Finley (as Jack) bursts from a back room fully nude and covered head to toe in blood, what should be an electrifying moment just has the audience stealing surreptitious glances at their watches.

WSC's production employs a huge cast of more than two dozen actors, some of whom must still pull double and triple duty to portray the multitudes that are inexorably drawn to the irresistible Lulu. Barker does what she can with a character possessing rather inscrutable motivations apart from the basic lust for wealth and security. As sexual as she is outwardly, one suspects this is little more than a front to get her what she really desires. She can talk about living for carnal delights all she wants, but her response to the simple question posed by a Countess is far more revealing. "Do you never indulge?" she is asked after turning down a cigarette. "Not for pleasure," she responds.

The play is filled with lines like this, double entendres and buried meanings. The word play provides much of the pleasure for the audience, but there's just not enough to carry a show that suffers from both too much plot and not enough variety. Lulu's character needs to draw us in just as hypnotically as she does her many suitors. Instead, we find ourselves waiting for her to finally join her husbands on the couch.

Lulu runs through December 13 at Washington Shakespeare Company. Tickets are available online.

>> Pianist Bob Boguslaw's regular gig is playing for the U.S. Marine Corp's President's Own ceremonial band. On Saturday, he'll be leading a jazz group on the Millennium Stage. 6 p.m. Free

>> Three Stars alum Thad Wilson leads his quartet at HR-57 on Saturday. 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. $12

>> Saxophonist Bruce Swaim, a regular at Twins Jazz, will return to the club on Sunday. Call 202-234-0072 for set time and cover information.

>> In 1960, the great Duke Ellington re-arranged Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite for his big band. Catch this charming adaptation of a holiday classic on Tuesday at the Millennium Stage, where the U.S. Army Blues will perform it in its entirety. 6 p.m. Free

>> Alan Baylock is the lead arranger for the Airmen of Note, the U.S. Air Force's premiere jazz ensemble. Additionally, he is an in-demand composer and educator who has worked with many a jazz great. Baylock will lead his own big band on Tuesday for 8 and 10 p.m. sets at Blues Alley, in a program titled Baylock, Beatles & Bells. Tickets are $20 + $12.50 minimum/surcharge.

>> Veteran local drummer and Three Stars alum Tony Martucci leads a trio next Tuesday at U-topia. The band will feature two other D.C. regulars, saxophonist Lyle Link and bassist Gavin Fallow. 9 p.m. No cover

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet

Prolific documentarian Frederick Wiseman's latest film is a sprawling, 2 hour and 40 minute immersion in the Paris Ballet. Wiseman's signature style, which seeks to drop the viewer into a foreign situation and have the same experience he did while he was there, without narration or explanation, makes for something like cinéma vérité, only Wiseman fully admits to influencing the proceedings by the presence of his crew. Much of the film is devoted to rehearsals and performance footage, as Wiseman watches the ballet prepare and present seven different works, making it both an excellent primer for ballet novices, and a visual feast for aficionados.

View the trailer.
Opens Friday for only five days at the AFI. If you miss their run, The Avalon is picking it up on December 4.

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Some Like It Hot

For a director as consistently accessible and brilliant as Billy Wilder, it's hard to pick a favorite film (though I usually default to The Apartment). Some Like It Hot is always a top contender for that title, and was named the number one comedy in the history of film by the AFI in 2000. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play a pair of musicians on the run from the mob after witnessing a murder. But the only job they can find open outside of Chicago is with an all girl traveling band fronted by Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), so the two get all dolled up for the trip, and both fall hard for Sugar. Hilarity, as one would expect, ensues. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film, the AFI is screening a brand new 35mm print.

View the trailer.
Opens today at the AFI and runs until Sunday.

Feel like something a little more bloody for the Thanksgiving holiday? The AFI is also screening a brand new print of this writer's favorite scary movie, Stanley Kubrick's epic adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining. Elevators of blood and Jack Nicholson await, starting today for one week.

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Fantastic Mr. Fox

In making his first animated children's film, Wes Anderson has been no less idiosyncratic than is his habit. He wrote much of the script (with Noah Baumbach) from the same office on the Dahl estate in which Roald Dahl wrote the original book. That book serves as the middle third of the film, as Anderson and Baumbach expanded the brief tale into a story about a fox who gives up his dangerous days of raiding farms in favor of a more family-friendly life as a newspaper man before being tempted back into a life of crime; his actions prompt retaliation by the farmers that threatens the entire animal community. Once production started, Anderson continued doing things rather differently, recording the actors' voices on location at a farm in Connecticut rather than a studio, insisting on old fashioned animation techniques that would draw attention to the animation itself, and acting out scenes from his offices in Paris to send to the animators in England. His cinematographer, Tristan Oliver, famously made disparaging comments about his director's leadership by video conference in a hatchet-job article in the L.A. Times last month, including claiming the director to be a "little bit of a sociopath." Ouch. Since then they've publicly ironed things out, but Anderson may get the last laugh in any case: he might have directed from a different country, but Fox is garnering him some of the best reviews he's received since Rushmore.

View the trailer.
Opens today at theaters all over the area.

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The Road

The big question mark for this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's tough and tender tale of a father and son traveling through a post-apocalyptic America is whether or not the Weinsteins let director John Hillcoat make the best film possible. HIllcoat, director of the bleak and brilliant Aussie western The Proposition, is the perfect choice to direct this film, and while his go-to star Guy Pearce might have cut a more effectively gaunt figure as a starving man, I can't really argue with Viggo Mortenson in his place. But puzzlingly, the trailers make it look like Mad Max & son, and it seems odd for the producers to cut the trailer to make it look like an action movie, when the source material was an Oprah-backed mega-bestseller in McCarthy's dark and pander-free original form. Hopefully the film itself will retain the author's somber tone, which is what one would expect from Hillcoat. But with the Weinstein name on the opening credits, you should still brace yourself for the potential editing room ambush, and hope for the best.

View the trailer.
Opens today at a handful of area theaters.

Showboat benefits from brisk pacing. The show has been heavily streamlined to come in at that reasonable running time, and the cuts aren't missed. But it is the consistent performances dealt out by an able cast, from the jovial Captain Andy (a devil-may-care Harry A. Winter) to a bottled up Will Gartshore (who brings an edge to his irresponsible leading man, Ravenal) that keep it rolling along.

Showboat runs through Jan. 17 at Signature Theatre. Tickets are available online.

>> Also at the Hotel, experimental hip-hop duo Themselves helm a strong like-minded lineup, with eyedea & abilities and EDUCATED CONSUMERS. $12, show at 9 p.m.

>> Remember Matisyahu? Hasidic rap may not have caught on as a larger trend, but he's still around offering his hip-hop reggae stylings at the Sixth & I Synagogue. Sold out, doors at 7 p.m.

>> Philadelphia's Free Energy are about as happy go-lucky as you can find your way to with an electric guitar. With D.C.'s own Radio Fatale at DC9. $8/$10, 9 p.m. We're hard pressed to remember the last time two bands that were so completely and entirely incompatible shared a bill, but hey, sometimes these things work out.

THURSDAY
>> Play flag football, eat yourself sick, get a good spot on the couch and enjoy the company of your family, because there isn't a whole lot of music happening tonight. Happy Thanksgiving!

FRIDAY
>> The Mountain Goats and Final Fantasy might be the perfect lineup to summarize the '00s, musically. On the one hand, lo-fi, literary folk rock. On the other, experimental violin jams that bring indie rock songs to a different place. 8 p.m., $20.

>> Locals Loose Lips offer a softer side of new wave. Think Interpol with a Fischer Price keyboard. They're headlining a fun night of D.C. bands, featuring the poppy folk sounds of typefighter and something a little darker from The Maeda Vale. At the Rock and Roll Hotel, $10, 9 p.m.

SATURDAY
>> Still need to get into the groove and work off some of that Thanksgiving weight? Good news: you don't have to worry about weather stretch pants will still zip up. Throw some on and head to The Red and the Black for Last Saturdays, their regular '80s dance night with DJ Doc Rok. No time or cost are listed, so we're assuming it's free.

>> CHOPTEETH! At the Black Cat! $15, 9 p.m. Because anytime is the right time for some afrofunk.

“The [D.C.] music community we were a part of was kind of split into punk and indie pop camps in the early ’90s—and Teenbeat had its own, much quirkier thing going, of course,” recalls Dugan. “All the scenes were so small that you couldn’t help knowing people in all of them…. Mark Robinson booked us for our first Fort Reno show, I believe. The folks from Chickfactor liked us a lot, and Velocity Girl asked us on tour with them and supported us massively. The punks from the Dischord circle were incredibly supportive.”

“John and I lived with a couple of people who were in the band Tuscadero,” Norborg said. “We played with them quite a bit at the beginning, especially… We also played with Fugazi a few times. But I think probably our comfort zone was the Make-Up,” Ian Svenonius’s post-Nation of Ulysses punk-funk garage gospel freakout. “Probably any [band] involving Ian, in particular, they had to headline. ... You couldn’t play after them because they were too over the top. Fugazi could get away with it, but it would be very difficult, and Chisel certainly couldn’t have gotten away with it.”

Dugan recalls the much-missed alternative rock-formatted WHFS being very kind to Chisel, giving the band a great deal of exposure. “We got a lot of play on Now Hear This and did a Dave’s Garage session, and they put us in front of 20,000 people at the Washington Monument with unplugged acoustic guitars and a tiny PA system, opening for the Cranberries. They also booked us with Radiohead at the Convention Center. No joke.”

In D.C., Chisel began to embrace a sharp tunefulness and live-wire energy informed by early British invasion acts and their antecedents. “By the time we reunited in D.C., we were all turning on to mod music, ’60s rock, things like that,” says Dugan. “That was cool by me—the Jam had been my favorite band in my teen years, but I had kind of forgotten about them. I had gotten into darker, moodier music, post-rock, etc. Where we might have been covering the Buzzcocks or Superchunk a few years earlier, we would be encoring with [the Small Faces’] ‘All or Nothing’ or ‘Start’ by the Jam in 1995.”

“Strangely enough,” Dugan noted, “it was Sooyoung Park of Seam who first called us a mod band, after we did some shows in Ohio with Seam in 1994. I think that was kind of a spark of inspiration for us, perhaps unconsciously, to explore that sound. It also brought in the harmonies, which really set us apart. At the time, math rock was kind of ‘in,’ and sometimes it felt like we were reacting against that clinical and heavy approach.”

Over the course of their too-short career, Chisel released a bunch of singles and 7"s, an EP (1995's Nothing New), and two LPs, 8 A.M. All Day and the 1997 swan song Set You Free. 8 A.M. All Day is their strongest offering, a roaring collection of tight-fitting and well-turned-out garage mod mayhem, bursting with memorable melodies and insistent riffs that manage to capture the cool essence of '60s and '70s rock-n-soul without sounding goofy or derivative.

Nearly every song here buzzes with raw pop power as the band pushes the limits of the three-piece setup. Leo's guitar playing is, as always, incredible: the sound he coaxes out of just six strings is consistently surprising, blending choppy, chunky chording with bursts of blazing fretwork. Throughout, Norborg and Dugan provide an unwavering foundation of pulsing bass runs and deft drum fills, the beats finely balanced to bob heads and shuffle dancing shoes while occasionally delving into reggae and dub-influenced rhythmic territory. "Hip Straights" blasts out of the blocks with violent strumming and soaring backing vocals, the skewed main riff bouncing off the rhythm section to excellent effect. "Your Star is Killing Me" swaggers through frantic distortion and troubled treble, while "Citizen of Venus" is almost impossibly catchy, built around a downbeat wavering between stomp and glide. The LP's title track is a taut, anxious anthem marked by one of the album's most vivid vocal hooks.

Chisel tapped Velocity Girl’s Archie Moore to record 8 A.M. All Day, working at Moore’s home studio in Oxon Hill. “I was friends with John and Chris beforehand,” says Moore. “Chris and I played in a band called the Heartworms, and we recorded an album in my basement. Chisel decided to do three or four demos there. That was the first time I met Ted. I had heard exactly one Chisel song, which they had done with Jim Spellman from Velocity Girl. Shortly after we did the demos, they told me they liked the demos enough to use for an album, and wanted to track the rest of an album at my place. I think lack of recording budget figured largely in their decision-making.”

“We recorded everything live,” recalls Norborg. “We were always kind of chasing daylight. We’d get there and record, or mix, and it was pretty quick. There were some random snippets of goofing around, even on the record, of just playing piano and goofing around. If you’re going to make a great record, I think it helps just to have a lot of time to hang around in the studio, and have a lot of taped stuff that ends up not being heard. But it was great fun. It really felt like we were going out in the country, to the middle of nowhere.”

“It was a loose, laid-back vibe,” said Dugan, “Archie was great, lots of fun, and funny, too. He was open to all kinds of ideas. I played a trashcan on ‘Red Haired Mary,’ and I think he suggested recording my improvised piano interludes. Chris and Ted were really on fire with their writing and performing; they liked to do things fast in the studio. We were having so much fun, we started recording songs we hadn’t really played before: ‘Breaking Up with Myself’ and ‘Looking Down at the Great Wall of China.’”

"Everything was done with a minimum of fuss," said Moore. "They played together, in the laundry room. Only a few takes per song. A few overdubs: vocals, guitar solos, a little percussion. It was very exciting to hear them play the basic tracks, but then hearing Ted do his vocals and solos was just ridiculously cool…. I think they would've made a fantastic album no matter where they did it, so I feel quite lucky to have participated.”

8 A.M. All Day's high-voltage production suits the tenor and tone of the songs perfectly, amping up the tension and sharpening every hook. Says Norborg, “Sometimes, if I listen with a severely critical ear, I’m bothered by the thin sound, and I do blame that a little on the medium,” referencing the digital equipment used to record the LP. “But at the end of the day, if I try to imagine it being recorded in the most polished way possible, and then I imagine how that would sound in my head, I don’t like that as much.”

“It has a raw, trebly sound that’s a result of the cheap equipment, our relative inexperience, and of course the band's energy,” observes Moore. “It has a bit of that teeth-gnashing amphetamine sound that reminds me of the early Who or the Creation.”

A decade-plus down the road, 8 A.M. All Day sounds as quick-witted and spit-shined as it did the day it was released. Looking back, Dugan sees 8 A.M. All Day as a group highpoint. “The Chisel material took a huge leap forward in 1995—we knew something was happening,” he said. “I think that Ted’s songwriting really matured with 8 A.M. I feel like there’s a theme of arriving in a new place and being somewhat unimpressed, even a bit angry, with what was available socially, but ultimately it’s also a really explosive, energetic album.”

Says Norborg, “I think we performed the songs on Set You Free better, but I think, overall, 8 A.M. All Day was a better album.”

Repeated attempts to reach Leo for this piece were unsuccessful.

"I'm stepping into a different world that I'd never stepped into before," said the Grammy nominee. "I want to accomplish everything I have not done before."

Gilberto is featured regularly with Thievery Corporation, so we couldn't help but ask whether their might be some surprise guests at tonight's show. While there were no definite plans at the time of the interview, Gilberto did acknowledge that she would welcome the opportunity to have musicians from Thievery sit in with her band. Regardless, she noted that she was looking forward to returning to where she had one of her most memorable performances.

"I was on a triple bill with Manu Chao and Thievery. That was really special," recalled Gilberto. "With my whole history with Rob [Garza] and Eric [Hilton], I saw the beginning of Eighteenth Street Lounge, I couldn't be more happy to play in D.C."

Bebel Gilberto performs tonight at the 9:30 Club, located at 815 V Street, NW. 6 p.m. doors. $35