Thursday, May 23 Brown Hotel 335 W. Broadway • 873-4400 Free; 6:30 p.m. Celebrated author appearance: As part of Spalding University’s semi-annual Festival of Contemporary Writing, Tim O’Brien, author of the classic Vietnam War story collection “The Things They Carried,” will give a reading/signing at the 16th-floor gallery of the Brown Hotel. Sena Jeter Naslund [...]
Thursday, May 23 ZaZoo’s 102 Bauer Ave. $5; 9 p.m. Since achieving international fame in the mid and late ’90s, Danielle Howle has remained comfortably just beneath the radar of mainstream America. She has been regarded as “South Carolina’s best kept musical secret,” accompanied only by the powerful chords of her guitar and a strong, [...]
May 23-25 Bomhard Theater, Kentucky Center 501 W. Main St. • 584-7777 $45+; 8 p.m. Just like Rihanna, chains and whips excite me. So you would think I would have read E.L. James’ popular “Fifty Shades of Grey” series that made housewives horny from sea to shining sea. It’s on my summer reading list, so [...]
May 23-26 Kentucky Center 501 W. Main St. • 584-7777 kentuckycenter.org $11-$16; 8 p.m. (2 p.m. on May 26) Take six sexual deviants looking for a good time and place them in a laboratory for a secret sex study — that’s the basic premise of “Great American Sex Play,” a racy romp that will make [...]
May 23-27 Belvedere 500 W. Main St. • arotr.com $15-$120; various times Abbey Road on the River was founded in Cleveland, Ohio, with the simple hope of honoring The Beatles’ legacy: make the world a happier place. Throughout the past 13 years, the festival has hosted more than 250 tribute bands, each with equally diverse [...]
May 23-June 9 Vault 1031 1031 S. Sixth St. • 312-316-8158 lilliantix@gmail.com $15; 7:30 p.m. Who is Lillian Baxter? If you knew the answer to that, it would defeat the purpose. “An Evening with Lillian Baxter” is a one-man-as-one-woman show about the brief but vivid career of a fictional D-list actress in the early ’60s. [...]
Wednesday, May 22 Uncle Slayton’s 1017 E. Broadway uncleslaytons.com $10-$12; 8:30 p.m. Vandaveer is a band that’s from all over the place, with leader Mark Charles Heidinger being born in Ohio, raised in Kentucky, and settled for the time being in Washington, D.C. But for all its roaming and a revolving cast of characters — [...]
Through May 31 Flame Run Glass Studio 815 Market St. flamerun.com Glassblowing is a form of art not generally acknowledged, perhaps because it is widely regarded as some strange, illusionary act. There is liquid, and then there is glass — and somewhere in the middle, there is a long straw and a large furnace. It [...]
Through May 31 Weber Gallery 1151 S. Fourth St. • 736-0818 councilondd.org Weber Gallery has an unusual way of defining diversity; it’s not expressed by words but by using colorful stripes as a metaphor. They are used here to represent ages, cultures and races, including those of the 16 artists in the exhibition, such as [...]
Friday, May 17 Green Building 732 E. Market St. kftc.org Free; 4 p.m. The fifth annual Louisville Loves Mountains Festival, hosted by the now 30-year-old Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, takes place at the Green Building this year (due to rain). It provides Louisvillians with many of their favorite things all in one place: beer, food, [...]
Thursday, May 16 Zanzabar 2100 S. Preston St. zanzabarlouisville.ticketfly.com $10-$12; 9 p.m. With Transitions, the newest from Los Angeles’ El Ten Eleven, the band manages to create music both indebted to the complexity often found in instrumental indie music and unafraid to explore the lighter, breezier side of music. A duo comprised of Kristian Dunn [...]
Wednesday, May 15 Uncle Slayton’s 1017 E. Broadway uncleslaytons.com $8-$10; 8:30 p.m. Matthew Perryman Jones looked to the poets for his fourth album, last year’s luminous Land of the Living, summoning Federico García Lorca and Rumi as his muses. Artist Vincent van Gogh is there, too, his words to his brother found in the musing [...]
May 15-19 Actors Theatre & Galt House 583-3100 • festivaloffaiths.org Free-$100; various times This year marks the 18th annual Festival of Faiths, hosted by the Center for Interfaith Relations. Because this particular festival is being constructed to honor the Dalai Lama’s visit to the city (May 19-20), it has been aptly named “Sacred Silence: Pathway [...]
Through May 31 Day’s Espresso & Coffee 1420 Bardstown Road dayscoffee.com Day’s Espresso & Coffee welcomes another artist into their display with the pride of a fawning mother. Josh Johnson’s “In Regard to Falling” illustrates a wonderland of vignettes, complete with fairies and rabbits and balloons. It is his first solo art show since moving [...]
Through May 31 preservationlouisville.org louisville.edu/library May is National Preservation Month. In celebration, our local historic preservation agency Preservation Louisville is offering a number of events. They’re shining a bright light on NuLu because of its preservation-minded sensibility. Many of the neighborhood’s galleries, stores and restaurants are participating with discounts as well as the Progressive Preservation [...]
•Buy Local Fair Saturday, May 11 Louisville Water Tower 3005 River Road keeplouisvilleweird.com Free ($5 parking); 2-8 p.m. Louisville is lucky to have an impressive local arts scene and a thriving farm-fresh foods movement, two assets that will be celebrated Saturday at the fifth annual Buy Local Fair. Spearheaded by the Louisville Independent Business Association [...]
Friday, May 10 Uncle Slayton’s 1017 E. Broadway uncleslaytons.com $8; 9 p.m. Eric Brace and Peter Cooper have long earned their bread and butter as music journalists. But long before they turned to print, they were musicians, absorbing the sounds of classic country and folk. After teaming up to produce the Grammy-nominated tribute I Love: [...]
May 9-12, 16-18 The Bard’s Town 1801 Bardstown Road • 749-5275 thebardstown.com $15 ($12 students/seniors); 7:30 p.m. This weekend and next, The Bard’s Town Theatre is putting on Jonathan Marc Sherman’s “Things We Want,” which debuted off-Broadway in 2007 and was directed by Ethan Hawke. Sherman is best known for writing the play “Women and [...]
