Sex, food, Death and Tarantulas Sex, food, Death and Tarantulas is the new EP from Robyn Hitchcock, the auteur of the highly-acclaimed album Ol ! Tarantula. It contains six live unreleased tracks including the Soft Boys classic “Give It to the Soft Boys,” Hitchcock solo gems like “Sometimes a Blonde,” and the Venus 3’s “(A Man’s Got to Know His Limitations) Briggs.” Also included are two videos for “Adventure Rocket Ship” from Ol ! Tarantula–one live-action video and a wistful stop-motion animation rendering. In addition to the these extras overflowing from the Ol ! Tarantula sessions and tour, keep an eye out for a documentary profiling the psych-popster to air on the Sundance channel which will debut at the SXSW film festival.

-

Bea Arthur on Broadway - Just Between Friends More comedy monologue than musical performance, Bea Arthur’s one-woman show Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends collects memories from the silver-haired star’s life on Broadway (Fiddler on the Roof, Mame, The Threepenny Opera) and television (Maude, The Golden Girls).

“I wanted to see if I had the guts to just come and be myself,” Arthur says in this performance recorded in front of a live audience in December 2001. Alongside co-creator and pianist Billy Goldenberg, she offers wry and often funny anecdotes about her career and the people she’s worked with (Angela Lansbury, Pia Zadora). When she does sing … well, even decades ago Arthur didn’t have a beautiful voice, but she’s well-suited to the comedy songs. And her versions of Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny” and Goldenberg’s own “Fifty Percent”–while they won’t make anyone forget Lotte Lenya or Dorothy Loudon–are effective in their own right. Bea Arthur on Broadway is definitely more Bea than Broadway, but it’s a career well worth remembering. –David Horiuchi

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2007 at 1:00 am and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.