When area blues-rock vocalist Alan Sweet, aided by numerous musician friends, prepared to launch the tribute project All Sweat Productions – performing a beloved album, in its entirety, in a live concert – he knew exactly which band, and which specific release, he wanted to honor first.

“Abbey Road is probably on the top of my list of albums I’ve listened to more than any other music,” says Sweet, who has served as lead vocalist for the Candymakers for the past four years. “It’s my favorite Beatles album. It’s easily on my top five of favorite albums ever. And when I decided that that was the one I wanted to do as a live show, there was this outcry of people wanting to play on it. Everybody I got a hold of was just like, ‘Yes. Yes!’”

But while one of Sweet’s stated goals with All Sweat is to “re-create the live-show sound,” he and his musical collaborators immediately realized, as every Beatles fan knows, that there was a catch to their playing Abbey Road in concert the way its creators did.

“The Beatles weren’t performing live then,” says Sweet, referencing the 1969 release of Abbey Road. “When Bret [Dale] and I were first talking about how to play songs from the album, we were like, ‘Well, we’ll just see how the Beatles played it and do it like that. And then we’d remember: ‘They never played this song live! We’re screwed!’”

Music

Miles Nielsen & the Rusted Hearts

Codfish Hollow Barn

Saturday, May 7, 7 p.m.

Growing up in Rockford, Illinois, Miles Nielsen played guitar and wrote songs from a very young age. His father was a frequently touring rock star. Guests at family dinners included Steven Tyler, Todd Rundgren, and the members of Guns N’ Roses. Given all that, it should be no surprise to learn that Miles Nielsen would grow up to be ... a pharmacist.

Just kidding. He’s a musician, too. That was just a cheap trick.

And speaking of Cheap Trick ... !

At the very end of Anton Chekhov’s 1897 tragicomedy Uncle Vanya, two of the play’s principal characters – Vanya and his niece Sonya – sit quietly at a table at their Russian estate, each lamenting the departure of their recent house guests. They’ve endured all manner of emotional hardships over the stage hours prior, and as they prepare to face more in the lonely years ahead, Sonya delivers one of theatre’s most famous closing monologues, climaxing her speech by telling Vanya not to fear – God will show pity on them. “We shall rest,” she says, gently, just before the curtain falls. “We shall rest.”

Hopefully, for Vanya and Sonya, 119 years constitutes a long-enough rest. Because thanks to a playwright’s imagination and a rather inconvenient (and fictitious) wormhole, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya characters are continuing their sagas in author Lee Blessing’s debuting comedy Uncle, a world-premiere production by Davenport’s New Ground Theatre running at the Village Theatre from April 29 through May 8.

“Sometimes you just don’t know where things come from,” says Blessing, with a laugh, regarding his sci-fi-comedy continuation of Chekhov’s masterpiece. “I’d seen a modern update of Vanya not that long ago in Los Angeles, and around the same time I said to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to write a play about a guy who suddenly has a cosmic wormhole open up in his backyard, but doesn’t want it? Doesn’t want the things that come out of it?’ And so, for some odd reason, I put those things together."

THE JUNGLE BOOK

Nearly all action movies, even those in which the action is determinedly family-friendly, live or die by their villains, and director Jon Favreau’s remake of Disney’s The Jungle Book has a phenomenal one: the Bengal tiger Shere Khan, voiced by Idris Elba. Scarred from a murderous tussle with a human and left with only one functional eye, this creature – created, as all the film’s animals and landscapes are, via the magic of CGI – prowls his kingdom with lithe, dangerous authority, and manages to one-up even Jeremy Irons’ Lion King meanie in terms of fierceness and frightening malevolence. Yet Shere Khan’s visage and movements aren’t half as scary as Elba’s maliciously insinuating vocals that fall somewhere between a purr and a growl, and while listening to these deliciously evil readings, I had a perhaps heretical thought regarding this movie and its reported $175-million budget: Wouldn’t all this have worked much better as a radio play?