Arts | Baltimore magazine

The Samick spinet piano in Kayle Simon's front foyer in Columbia comes with the standard, wooden piano bench. When her 16-year-old son Ethan is visited by his classical piano teacher, the instructor pulls up a chair alongside the bench and cocks his head attentively, listening to see if the teenager's phrasing and timing on the Bach and Beethoven pieces are accurate.

Flicked Off

How the Maryland film industry went from bustling to bust and its chances for a revival.

"Gooood morning, BAAAL-ti-more!" burbles Tracy Turnblad, the zaftig heroine of Hairspray, as she skips down a Highlandtown block in the opening song-and-dance number of the 2007 movie-musical. The scene onscreen looks authentic, right down to the marble stoops attached to the Formstone row houses, but anyone with access to imdb.com (The Internet Movie Database) knows the truth. The scene wasn't filmed in Highlandtown. In fact, it wasn't even filmed in Baltimore—or Maryland, for that matter. It was filmed on a Toronto soundstage, just another in a recent string of major Hollywood productions that have flirted with shooting in Baltimore only to be seduced by competing cities and states offering larger tax incentives to filmmakers.

How did this happen? How did Baltimore, once voted by Moviemaker Magazine as one of the "Top 10 U.S. Cities" for filmmakers, lose its preferred status?

The Kings of Dru Hill

Baltimore's biggest R&B export stages a comeback.

The members of Dru Hill have gathered at the Belvedere Hotel's Owl Bar to discuss the logistics of a forthcoming tour to promote their reunion album, InDRUpendence Day, the quartet's first new music in eight years.

Spaghetti and Encores

A Little Italy restaurant turns an upstairs dining room into a popular cabaret.

It's a Sunday night up on the second floor at Germano's Trattoria, a Little Italy stalwart strung along the neighborhood's main drag. The pumpkin-colored walls are hung with vintage Art Nouveau posters, but all eyes are upon vocalist Sophie Louise Roland, a statuesque blonde in a diaphanous maroon dress.

The evening's entertainment, she says, is all about "sensuality." Patrons now have all the more reason to look up from their plates of braised beef shanks and red beet ravioli. "No one is going to die tonight," she adds with a grin.

From Poverty to Peabody

A Ukrainian youngster's unlikely odyssey includes homelessness, American benefactors, NPR, and piano study in Baltimore.

Dasha Bukhartseva vividly recalls the day she and her mother, Natasha, became homeless. It happened eight years ago, when Dasha was 10 years old. "They'd thrown away all our food and our stuff was in boxes," she says. "We slept on chairs in the lobby for that night, but we were hiding; we had nowhere to live."

Guitar Hero

Paul Reed Smith has joined the likes of Fender and Gibson in the pantheon of electric guitar makers.

"Guitars are almost like iPods," says Paul Reed Smith. "I've never seen anybody in a bad mood with an iPod in their ears. It's a mood adjuster. It's almost like really sophisticated, expensive OxyContin."

Smith is musing on the power of the six-string "mood adjusters" he's been creating for 35 years, the last 25 as the pioneer behind Paul Reed Smith (PRS) Guitars, now the third largest electric guitar manufacturer in the nation. (Iconic old lions Fender and Gibson are numbers one and two, respectively.)

Staging a Revival

An unlikely theater scene plays a major role in bringing the "new" North Avenue to life.

One night last summer, The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) tried to narrow the chasm between Big Culture and little culture by getting about 65 of its patrons to visit the Load of Fun Theatre (LOF/t), a new performance space inside Load of Fun Studios on North Avenue. There, three young leaders of the burgeoning, do-it-yourself arts scene—Dan Deacon, the nationally-renowned electronic musician; J.

We Are Family

Four Baltimore School for the Arts alums talk about how the school shaped their lives.

The Baltimore School for the Arts came into existence in 1979, and the school's phenomenal success has been pretty well-documented. Its first graduates are now in their late 30s and early 40s, and a list of former students—Project Runway winner Christian Siriano, actress Jada Pinkett-Smith, rapper Tupac Shakur, and Broadway's Tracie Thoms—reads like a star-studded role call.

Noah's Compass

An exclusive excerpt from Anne Tyler's latest novel.

Noah's Compass, Anne Tyler's 18th novel, features one of the most intriguing characters ever created by the celebrated Baltimore writer. In this exclusive excerpt from the book, we meet Liam Pennywell, who's recently lost his job teaching at a private school. A gentle, unsentimental man, Liam drifts toward isolation with a detached tidiness that's upended by events nudging him in the opposite direction. The disruptions prove to be messy and confounding, and Liam struggles with matters of the head and heart.

Hello, Camden!

The stakes are high for Baltimore's Charm City Devils as they team up with Mötley Crüe for a shot at rock 'n' roll glory.

Not even an unforgiving, scorching summer sun could convince the Charm City Devils to trade their weathered leather jackets and skin-tight black jeans for more sensible clothes. They are, after all, aspiring rock stars playing a much-hyped show at Camden, New Jersey's Susquehanna Bank Center, outside Philadelphia.