Nathan Weinbender

Although singer-songwriter Cathie Ryan was born in Detroit, she’s a native of Ireland at heart. Ryan’s music blends traditional Irish songs with American folk sensibilities, and this weekend she and her backing band will be performing a selection of Irish songs both new and old with the Spokane Symphony. We spoke with Ryan from her home in New York about the musical influence of her Irish parents, her experiences performing in Ireland and why music that’s centuries old still speaks to listeners.

Although singer-songwriter Cathie Ryan was born in Detroit, she’s a native of Ireland at heart. Ryan’s music blends traditional Irish songs with American folk sensibilities, and this weekend she and her backing band will be performing a selection of Irish songs both new and old with the Spokane Symphony. We spoke with Ryan from her home in New York about the musical influence of her Irish parents, her experiences performing in Ireland and why music that’s centuries old still speaks to listeners.

While Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the most popular composers of his era, his contemporary Franz Schubert toiled in relative obscurity: Both men were equally prolific writers, but while Beethoven made a career through commissions and public performances, a majority of Schubert’s compositions went unpublished during his lifetime. This weekend, the Spokane Symphony pays tribute to these two great Austrian composers with pieces that were written when both men were in the earliest stages of their individual repertoires. Symphony conductor Eckart Preu says the compositions he’s chosen offer an interesting snapshot of two influential figures in flux.

“Memphis,” like “Hairspray” before it, is a crowd-pleaser that embraces the transformative powers of rock and roll, a story about the possibility of racial harmony through the unifying power of music. It’s perhaps too buoyant and facile in the face of serious, racially-charged subject matter – it is, after all, set in the South in the mid- to late ’50s – but it does work as a tribute to one of the greatest eras in pop music history and as a showcase for the talents of its cast. The show, now playing in town as part of the Best of Broadway series, begins as Huey Calhoun (Daniel S. Hines), a gee-whiz, illiterate white guy who loves R&B and soul music, wanders into a black nightclub with the cavalier ambition of getting so-called “race music” played on white radio stations. The bar’s owner Delray (Keith Patrick McCoy) is skeptical, especially when his beautiful sister Felicia (the revelatory Zuri Washington) catches Huey’s eye.

You can’t have a decent farce without a love triangle, a mistaken identity or two, and some old-fashioned bad manners, and Larry Shue’s comedy “The Nerd,” which opens tonight at the Modern Theater Coeur d’Alene, has all of those things in spades. “It’s typically classified as a farce, and it is a really big, funny, slapstick comedy,” said Hannah Paton, the show’s director. “But it also does have these really lovable characters and human moments that sneak in.”

Sandra Hosking began work on her play “Creeps” in 2008, just a couple of years after Facebook became available for anyone with an email address and the first generation iPhone was unveiled to the public. Seven years and a handful of staged readings later, the show is finally getting a full production at Stage Left Theater beginning tonight. Hosking, Stage Left’s playwright-in- residence, hasn’t changed much of the play since ’08, but having it presented with actors on sets has given her the opportunity to tweak and add elements that she hadn’t before considered.

Country and rap are two of the most quintessentially American musical styles still popular today, and Tennessee-based artist Big Smo has combined them in an unexpected subgenre cleverly known as “hick-hop.” It was only natural that Smo, real name John Lee Smith, would synthesize the two styles of music he most enjoyed growing up, applying lyrics about big trucks, blue collar fatigue and backwoods parties to traditional hip-hop beats.

The day before its newest Classics concert, the Spokane Symphony will host one of its regular master classes, which allow a select group of music students to get advice from and interact with professional musicians. Today’s class, which is free and open to the public to observe, will feature visiting violinist Benjamin Beilman; pianist Valentina Lisista will host the next master class on April 17. We spoke to Janet Napoles, the symphony’s manager of education programs, about the process of choosing the participating students and the educational benefits of making the master classes available to them.

“Orphans” begins with a quiet scene of childlike glee and ends with a pained, howling, almost primal scream. Those moments bookend a character study that careens from one dramatic extreme to another: There are sudden bursts of violence, moments of humor and catharsis and a complicated power struggle between two men, both of them provisional parental figures with penchants for crime. This is a challenging, gritty, emotionally taxing piece of theater, expertly directed by Marianne McLaughlin, and it’s the best, most complex show of the Spokane Civic Theatre’s ongoing season. The play is set in a grubby Philadelphia row house, likely sometime in the 1980s, where two brothers live in relative squalor. The oldest brother is named Treat (Billy Hultquist), who has been raising his younger brother Phillip (Maxim Chumov) since their mother died and their father abandoned them at a young age. Treat is a petty thief, leaving the house every morning to pilfer jewelry from people he encounters on the streets. Phillip’s world doesn’t extend beyond the old swashbucklers he watches on TV and his view from the living room window – he’s been convinced by his older brother that he’s deathly allergic to outside air, so he never leaves the house.

Some of the most indelible, memorable and emotionally resonant moments in cinema are closely associated with music: There’s something about the perfect marriage between image and song that burns into our collective consciousness. Think of Judy Garland’s doe-eyed rendition of “Over the Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz,” or Humphrey Bogart meeting Ingrid Bergman’s gaze after hearing “As Time Goes By” in “Casablanca,” or a love-struck Gene Kelly gleefully splashing through puddles to the title tune in “Singin’ in the Rain.” The visuals are inextricably linked with the music.