Music

Leon Russell

The Redstone Room

Friday, March 20, 7:30 p.m.

Leon Russell will soon be taking the stage at Davenport's Redstone Room, and calling the 72-year-old singer, songwriter, session musician, producer, pianist, guitarist, and recording-company owner a musical icon is practically an understatement.

He's worked professionally, and consistently, since 1956. He's mastered the genres of rock, country, pop, blues, jazz, gospel, and even surf music. He's enjoyed a chart-topping duet with Willie Nelson. He's performed and collaborated with artists as disparate as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, and Doris Day. And in 2014, 44 years after the release of his self-titled solo debut, he delivered a new album of classic favorites titled Life Journey. So why don't we take an abbreviated look at Russell's?

In recent years, 36-year-old actor Dana Moss-Peterson has been asked to play several characters far younger than himself.

During flashback scenes in the Richmond Hill Barn Theatre's 2013 Death of a Salesman, Moss-Peterson played Biff Loman when he was a high-school senior and local football hero. For more than half of 2011's Leaving Iowa at the Playcrafters Barn Theatre, his Don Browning was a younger teen enduring an excruciating family vacation. In New Ground Theatre's 2012 Mr. Marmalade, the actor - not in flashback - portrayed Larry, a comically morose, suicidal five-year-old. (It's that kind of play.)

Consequently, it makes a sort of sense when Moss-Peterson says his interest in theatre began when he was even younger than Larry.

FOCUS

With Will Smith playing its polished and professional master of larceny, and Margot Robbie playing the fledgling grifter who becomes Smith's mentee and lover, Focus is so contrived, so ridiculous, and so phenomenally entertaining that while watching it, you'd almost think a new genre was being invented right before your eyes.

MCFARLAND USA

God, I hate Disney. Not all the time, of course, and in any case, "hate" is probably a strong word. But why does the studio have to keep releasing live-action movies that are inseparable from cartoons, with all of the potentially legitimate conflict inevitably dulled down and scrubbed squeaky-clean? And why does its succession of inspirational sports dramas never feature any actual coaching beyond bland and clichéd motivational speeches? And why do these damned things keep making me weep like a baby?