Nathan Weinbender

Combine supernatural romance with the breezy period musicals “Hairspray” and “Grease,” soundtrack it to the tunes of Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach and Motown, and put it through spin cycle for a couple of hours, and you’d come out with something resembling “Suds.” The irreverent musical comedy, which premieres Friday at Spokane Civic Theatre, gleefully sends up the straight-faced theatricality of many ’60s radio hits.

Throughout his stand-up career, Brian Regan has established an unshakeable reputation as a “clean comedian.” It’s mentioned in just about any feature written about him, as if that’s the genre he works in: clean. That kind of classification carries some unfair baggage: Not only does it incorrectly suggest that comedy is inherently unclean and that Regan is deliberately subverting it, but it also implies that his material lacks edge or that he’s playing it safe.

Combine supernatural romance with the breezy period musicals “Hairspray” and “Grease,” soundtrack it to the tunes of Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach and Motown, and put it through spin cycle for a couple of hours, and you’d come out with something resembling “Suds.” The irreverent musical comedy, which premieres Friday at Spokane Civic Theatre, gleefully sends up the straight-faced theatricality of many ’60s radio hits.

Before taking off on an extensive international tour, renowned Japanese violinist Sayaka Shoji has scheduled just two concert stops in the U.S. One was in Washington D.C. The other will be in Spokane. Shoji, one of Japan’s premier young classical musicians, will join the Spokane Symphony and conductor Morihiko Nakahara this weekend, where she will be performing Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

Since its inception in 1975, the Spokane Jazz Orchestra has become one of the most reliable sources for lively jazz in the Inland Northwest. This weekend they’ll offer up a versatile mixture of tunes from the past and present, featuring pianist and composer Brent Edstrom, an SJO veteran and a professor of music at Whitworth University. Edstrom will be performing with the aptly named Brent Edstrom Trio, which is rounded out by bassist Eugene Jablonsky and drummer Rick Westrick, and they’ll be joined by the full orchestra for pieces both old and new.

The commercials for tonight’s Academy Award ceremony have labeled this year’s Oscar race the most competitive in recent years, and for once there’s truth in advertising. Normally, your friendly neighborhood Oscar prognosticator would study the numbers, figure the odds and determine who’s most likely to win which award, but this year the acclaim has been all over the place. The marketplace was simply too crowded with good movies and performances, many of which were completely shut out by the Academy. For three years now, Dan Webster and I have offered up our dual predictions in the main Oscar categories: actor and actress (lead and supporting), as well as best picture and director. In 2011 and 2012, our individual guesses were all the same; in terms of accuracy, we guessed five of six right in ’12, and four of six in ’13.

Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap” remains the longest-running play in the history of London’s West End for one big reason: Its ending is top secret. Since its 1952 premiere (which included Richard Attenborough among its cast), the play has been performed more than 25,000 times, and every single audience has been urged to remain tightlipped once the show is over. The inherent curiosity factor is built right into the premise. Much like Alfred Hitchcock concealing the final twist in “Psycho” (while making a to-do out of the very fact that he was concealing it), audiences are desperate to discover the ending for no other reason than they’re not supposed to know what it is.

At the height of his career, John Barrymore was one of the most popular figures of the stage and screen. He was one of the few actors who made a seamless transition from silent films to talkies, he could play light comedy as effortlessly as tragedy, and his interpretations of Richard III and Hamlet would forever change the way those characters were portrayed. By the early 1940s, though, Barrymore was a has-been: He was no longer a box office draw, he began to have trouble memorizing lines and his crippling alcoholism was devastating to his health and his personal life (he was married and divorced four times). He died at 60, suffering from pneumonia that was exacerbated by cirrhosis.

Although they got their start in the L.A. music scene of the early ’90s, the music of Celtic rock band the Young Dubliners has roots as far back as 19th century Ireland. When the group started out, it was primarily a two-piece acoustic act featuring Keith Robert and Paul O’Toole, who would cover Irish standards and give them a modern rock twist. “The covers we were doing were nothing that anyone here would have heard of,” Roberts said in a recent phone interview. “They were rocked-up versions of hundred-year-old ballads, very much our fathers’ music.”

The last two times I saw the Thermals were wildly different experiences. In 2010, I watched them headline a late summer show at the Seaside Bar (remember that place?), which couldn’t have held more than a couple hundred PBR-swilling concertgoers. A year later, the Seaside gig a distant memory, I caught them in Seattle opening for Weezer, performing a nearly identical set list for a couple thousand people. I bring this up for no other reason than to illustrate the virtuosity of the Thermals: They’re as comfortable on a shadowy dive bar stage as they are under bright stadium lights. They’re back in Spokane tonight for the first time since ’10, on the last leg of the tour for their most recent album, 2013’s “Desperate Ground.”

Although they got their start in the L.A. music scene of the early ’90s, the music of Celtic rock band the Young Dubliners has roots as far back as 19th century Ireland. When the group started out, it was primarily a two-piece acoustic act featuring Keith Robert and Paul O’Toole, who would cover Irish standards and give them a modern rock twist. “The covers we were doing were nothing that anyone here would have heard of,” Roberts said in a recent phone interview. “They were rocked-up versions of hundred-year-old ballads, very much our fathers’ music.”

Earlier this month, Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his New York apartment of a reported heroin overdose, and the acting world lost one of its most compelling and powerful figures. His untimely death inspired remembrances of his life, his career and his craft, and those of us who truly valued his work revisited our favorite Hoffman performances in tribute (mine is his inspired interpretation of irascible rock critic Lester Bangs in “Almost Famous”). Since the early ‘90s, Hoffman delivered towering performances in one memorable and challenging film after another – “Happiness,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Magnolia,” “Capote,” “Synecdoche, New York,” “The Savages,” “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” “The Master.” With such an impressive filmography, it’s sort of disheartening that only eight of his movies are currently available for streaming on Netflix (and one of those is the lame documentary “Salinger,” in which he’s merely an interview subject).

Pianist Jeremy Denk says he never plays a composition the same way twice. “A conductor I worked with in San Francisco asked me how I played a particular passage when we were playing Mozart last fall,” Denk said from his home in New York. “And I played it for him, then played it again and again. And he said, ‘Do you realize that you just played that three times, and each time it was different?’ ”

After the breezy romps of “Lend Me a Tenor,” “SantaLand Diaries” and “Little Women,” Coeur d’Alene’s Lake City Playhouse is getting considerably more introspective with its newest production, Margaret Edson’s drama “Wit.” Directed by Troy Nickerson, the play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1999, is the intimate study of a stern, independent woman coming to terms with her own place in the world during the final moments of her life.

It’s no secret that stand-up comedy is a male-dominated field. Female comedians are still stereotyped and marginalized, and a number of unfair, reductive “women aren’t funny” generalizations have been thrown around by people like Jerry Lewis and Christopher Hitchens. (According to Forbes, last year’s top earning comedians were all men.)

Jerry Dicker has invested in a lot of downtown Spokane real estate, but it’s the Bing Crosby Theater that he calls his “labor of love.” Since acquiring the Bing in February 2012, Dicker estimates that he’s put at least $400,000 of his own money into renovating and updating the theater, and that figure will no doubt swell as the structural and artistic improvements continue. Dicker, a California businessman who owns GVD Commercial Properties, knew the Bing wasn’t going to be a moneymaker when he took it on, but he believes that the venue’s increased activity can only encourage prosperity in Spokane’s art scene.