Thank goodness SLU’s cable package includes BBC America, because there is a new Doctor.

“Doctor Who,” the British science fiction television show, revolves around a character named the Doctor. He’s a time-and-space-traveling alien whose spaceship looks like an old-fashioned police call box (it’s bigger on the inside), and whose only weapon is a sonic screwdriver. Also, he can regenerate. This means that, whenever he is mortally wounded or about to die, his body undergoes a transformation and renews itself.

This is the key to “Doctor Who”’s long-running popularity. It’s no problem for a TV show to exist for 50 years (as Doctor Who has) when the main character can be recast every few seasons.

The eighth season of “Doctor Who” premiered on August 23, with its first episodes since Christmas 2013. This season is the first to star the 12th Doctor, played by Scottish actor Peter Capaldi.

There’s always excitement when a new Doctor takes to the screen, and there are few reasons that this newest incarnation is particularly exciting.

Just a glance at the four men who have played the role of the Doctor since the show’s reboot in 2005 brings attention to Capaldi. The previous three actors have been Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and Matt Smith: all attractive men, each one younger than the next.

Bring on Capaldi, a man in his mid-fifties, immediately invites a comment on the difference in age. At 55, he ties the original Doctor, William Hartnell, for the oldest man to take the role. Compare this with Matt Smith, who was the youngest, at the age of 26.

This shift in age could reflect the show’s attempt to regain some of the maturity it was slowly losing in the last couple seasons. Recent plot developments have left viewers feeling that the show is relying on cool special effects and sci-fi gimmicks rather than good writing and emotional depth.

That may not have changed completely. The initial episode of season eight did, after all, include a dinosaur.

Capaldi has had two episodes so far to convince “Doctor Who” fans, both enthusiastic and jaded, that he can refresh the series and bring the show back to its emotionally complex roots.

His performance of the Doctor so far has been a bit harsh, although not without its humor. This 12th Doctor already has some blood on his hands, and he’s made it clear that he is not here to be a sappy love interest, or a silly time-traveling clown. He’s an angry, confused character with some major problems to sort through.

Of course, his harsh manner of speaking is also affected by his Scottish accent. (It’s worth noting that Tennant, also Scottish, had to put on a standard English accent for the show, whereas Capaldi is doing no such thing.)

Two episodes is not enough to judge a Doctor, or a season, and it will be interesting to see how Capaldi’s performance and viewers’ reactions to him alter the direction of the show.

“Doctor Who” shows on BBC America on Saturday evenings at 8 p.m. CST.

Image courtesy of ‘The Fault in Our Stars’

On Jan. 9, 2012, I waited in a bookstore until midnight for the first moment I could possibly purchase a copy of “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green. I went home, read until early in the morning, slept a little bit, woke up and read some more, finishing it less than 24 hours after I had bought it.

The book did everything a book should do. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me think about “big life questions.” It made me want to sit down with John Green and talk about life. As Holden Caulfield says in “The Catcher in the Rye”, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” I wanted to phone up John Green.

Instead, I talked to my friends about the book. I recommended it to everyone I knew. I found the book coming up in conversation everywhere: in my theology class, in the halls of my dorm, with family. The book quickly became famous.

Now, more than two years later, “The Fault in Our Stars” has been adapted to the big screen, and the film will come to theatres on June 6.

For someone who first discovered John Green as a nerdy Youtube personality, seeing pictures of him on the red carpet at the MTV Movie Awards was something to get used to. His celebrity has no doubt been heightened by the success of his latest book and his first foray into Hollywood – last week he was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.

The movie stars Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort as the star-crossed lovers who meet in a support group for kids with cancer. Woodley has recently starred in the films “The Spectacular Now” and “Divergent,” an adaptation of Veronica Roth’s dystopian young adult novel.

The dedicated following around “The Fault in Our Stars” has meant a lot of hype leading up to the film’s release. The trailer has more than 16 million views on Youtube since its release three months ago.

In the month before its release, 20th Century Fox is sending Woodley, Elgort, Green and Nat Wolff (Isaac in the movie) on a tour to promote the film. Fans voted on tumblr for the locations of the tour stops, and the winning states were announced earlier this week: Florida, Ohio, Texas and Tennessee.

The interactive nature of the movie promotion shows that those in marketing understand the fan base. The fans are on tumblr, they’re watching John Green and his brother on Youtube, they’re making fan art and writing songs inspired by Hazel and Augustus, the main characters of the book and movie.

Meanwhile, the official movie website is hosted on tumblr, complete with a headline that fits right into tumblr’s vocabulary: “Bring on the feels.” There’s a place to submit fan art, to become an ambassador for the movie or to tweet about the movie. These people get their fans.

And, as fans, we hope that they get the story. John Green has been nothing but praiseworthy of the team making the film. Still, anyone that’s ever been a fan of a book that’s been turned into a movie knows that high expectations very often lead to a broken heart. Hopefully this will not be the case, and I truly hope that they do this story justice; but for now – it’s more fun to get lost in the excitement of the movie than to spend my time worrying.

Image courtesy of Blue Man Group’s Facebook

This weekend, St. Louis is going to have some interesting characters taking the stage at the Peabody Opera House.

Blue Man Group is an indescribable show starring three actor-musicians, who are, of course, all in blue. This includes a bald cap and full body make-up.

The difficultly in describing the show to someone who’s never seen it is reflected on the organization’s own website FAQ. In answer to the question, “What exactly is Blue Man Group about?” they write: “Blue Man group cannot be explained; it can only be experienced.”

Blue Man Group is a mix of music, comedy and multimedia (among other, less describable elements), creating a theater performance different from anything else that’s graced the stages of St. Louis.

A band provides music, a key element to the show, live on stage to accompany the “blue men.”

Terry Tungjunyatham, a musician currently touring with the group, remarks that with such an untraditional show, one of the main goals for him as a performer was to give the audience an entertaining experience – to have fun. There’s a rough plot stringing the show together, but enough leeway so that the performers can feed off the audience each night and react differently to different crowds.

Tungjunyatham, who also hails from St. Louis, plays strings for the show, including not just guitar or bass but also zither and the Chapman Stick. The opportunity to play such unusual instruments is one of the appeals of playing with Blue Man Group, he says.

Blue Man Group was created by Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton and Chris Wink in New York in the late ‘80s. It began as humbly and as sincerely as it could have: the three of them would become bald and blue and walked around the city, doing anything to surprise those around them and make them think. They would go into bars, drum and throw and catch objects with their mouths.

Today, Blue Man Group had become a cultural phenomenon that has shows in New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Orlando and Boston — not counting shows on tour in Europe and even on the cruise ship Norwegian Epic.

These different shows have given Blue Man Group the opportunity to evolve over the years. Goldman, Stanton and Wink created this show because of their love of creativity and innovation, and the show reflects those values in the way that it adapts and tries new things with every new performance. This also makes a more engaging experience for an audience member who can look forward to seeing the show in St. Louis next weekend, knowing that it will not be the same show one might have seen during the last tour.

Blue Man Group will be performing at the Peabody Opera House from April 25-27 with both matinee and evening performances on Saturday and Sunday. Tickets begin at $27 and can be purchased online at www.peabodyoperahouse.com or at the box office.

A small, talented cast of four take the stage this month in the Stray Dog Theatre’s production of “The Little Dog Laughed.”

The show focuses on the unconventional relationship between a movie star (Mitchell, played by Bradley Behrmann) and a younger man he initially meets as a prostitute (Alex, played by Paul Cereghino). Both characters struggle with their identities, not willing to fully embrace themselves or their relationship.

Image courtesy of The Stray Dog Theater’s Facebook

The women in the show consist of Diane (played by Sarajane Alverson), Mitchell’s aggressive agent who publicly plays the part of his lover to keep his reputation straight, and Ellen (played by Paige Hackworth), Alex’s sort-of-girlfriend-sort-of-not. It’s complicated.

And it gets more complicated as the two plot lines, which initially seem separate, catch up to each other and intersect, forcing all of the characters to make some heavy decisions.

Alverson and Hackworth deliver some strong, witty monologues to the audience. They verge on over-the-top, but it’s a comedy and the audience was laughing. Luckily, the women aren’t stuck doing comic relief and both women prove themselves versatile actors as the scenes get more serious near the close of the play.

As the story progresses, the relationship between Mitchell and Alex miraculously turns from questionable to adorable. Somehow Behrmann and Cereghino pull off what seems impossible from the moment the two characters met: they get the audience to root for them. It’s an impressive feat achieved by the combination of writing by Douglas Carter Beane and the actors present on stage, convincing the audience through their vulnerability and sincerity.

At its best, comedy is used as a mirror to make the audience recognize and laugh at problems in our society. That is exactly what this play is doing.

The show confronts stereotypes about gay relationships and celebrity. It calls attention to the public sensitivity to gay relationships when it forces the audience to intimately experience the ups and downs of the relationship between Mitchell and Alex.

This show gives insight into the world of Hollywood and celebrity. The conversations between Mitchell, his agent and others in the industry are laughable to those in the audience but not entirely relatable. With jabs at aspects of the entertainment industry, this show is no doubt funniest to those already familiar with the world of Hollywood. Still, the relationships and the emotions that come from them keep this story from being completely foreign.

A small but strong cast combined with simple but versatile staging gives this comedy its power.

The Stray Dog Theatre is located less than a 10-minute drive south on Grand Avenue from SLU’s campus. Located in the Tower Grove Abbey, the theatre uses a non-traditional space filled with pews and stained glass to give a unique performance experience.

“The Little Dog Laughed” is running until Feb. 22 with performances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings. Tickets are $20 for adults and $18 for students and seniors.

I have seen “Frozen” four times. I won’t even try to count the number of times I have sung “Let it Go,” whether passionately singing along to Idina Menzel’s killer vocal skills or catching myself mumbling the words to myself while cooking dinner. I can’t stop thinking about the movie.
The animation is beautiful and the songs are catchy and the voice cast is phenomenal. Seriously, whoever decided to hire a bunch of Broadway stars: thank you.
But these aesthetic enjoyments are just the icing on the cake to me. What really makes my love for “Frozen” so strong is that its plot revolves around the love between two sisters.
This simple fact is worth our attention, because the weight of the history of Disney princesses is on the shoulders of this movie. Out of the current eleven Disney princesses, only two (Pocahontas and Tiana) are shown to have meaningful friendships with other female characters.
“Frozen” fights the stereotypes of competitive and catty girls. Instead, it celebrates girls fighting for each other and growing with each other. “Frozen” is helping to fix the imbalance of under-represented non-romantic relationships. It puts romance as a side dish for these newest princesses, rather than the main course.
This romantic side dish does not end in marriage, either — another small but important step for Disney. The ironic line “you can’t marry a man you just met” shows that Disney is interested in a different sort of romantic story, one that involves growth as a couple rather than immediate commitment.
Elsa, the first Disney princess to become a queen, does not engage in a romantic storyline at all. This makes her the second Disney princess to finish her movie without a male counterpart, after Merida from “Brave.”
“Frozen” continues another trend set forth in “Brave”- Disney princesses are in charge of their own fate. When Elsa accidentally freezes her sister Anna’s heart, “Frozen” plays with the clichéd idea of an act of true love saving her life. However, the plot completely turns the trope on its head.
Anna makes the choice to turn away from Kristoff, her romantic partner coming to save her life, in order to sacrifice herself for her sister. This is what unfreezes her heart: an act of true love performed by Anna herself, rather than an act performed upon her. As cheesy as it sounds, Disney is making a drastic turn away from its traditional stories of princes kissing helpless girls.
Speaking of princes kissing girls – at the end of the story, when Anna does end up with Kristoff, he asks her permission to kiss her. Disney shows consent to be not only a good thing for romantic relationships but also to be adorable.
Elsa’s plot in the movie is one that complicates the traditional Disney representation of a villain. Rather than the two-dimensional, pure evil antagonists Disney usually puts forth (“Tangled”’s Mother Gothel, “The Little Mermaid”’s Ursula, etc.), Elsa shows that villains are not as cut-and-dry as we’d always like them to be.
Elsa is born with powers of snow and ice, but her parents teach her to hide her “curse” from the world, alienating her from the entire outside world, including her sister. She does not learn to control her powers but instead to be ashamed of them. Her parents engrain this mindset into her to heavily that she continues this lifestyle after they have died.
As a metaphor for living with mental illness or repressing one’s sexuality, Elsa’s coming to terms with herself is inspiring and invigorating.
“Frozen” is not perfect. They switched the traditional fairy tale in which a young girl saves her male friend to a story in which a girl needs a man’s help to save her sister. Disney has not made any significant strides to increase representation of non-white characters since “The Princess and the Frog” in 2009. This is not okay.
But “Frozen” takes some strong steps forward and it’s paid off. I can’t wait to see what can happen when they go even further.

Image courtesy of “Six Eight” Facebook

The newest group on campus venturing into the world of a cappella is Six Eight, a group powered by their passion to combine faith and music.

Six Eight is a collaborative, co-ed effort of a group of dedicated singers that seek to fulfill a niche they found empty in the SLU community.

“It’s a niche of an a cappella group that didn’t exist,” said sophomore physical therapy major Theresa Schafer, one of the singers. “To be a successful a cappella group you need to be unique and have something about you that no other group has.”

Six Eight finds its humble roots in a Christmas caroling group formed last winter by friends in the Micah Program. After performing at a couple of events for Micah, some of the singers were eager to take their momentum and create something new. This momentum stood the test of a long summer break, and five of the singers returned for the fall semester ready to go.

The group now insists that they do not want to be exclusively Micah in either their membership or their audience. And they aren’t – their membership is now half and half, they say. The singers speak repeatedly about their desire to reach out to a larger community and they seek to assure others that their group is not only for Catholics or Christians.

“We’re an a cappella group that sings Christian songs, not a group of Christians who happen to sing,” said Beau Guedry, a sophomore biology major. Guedry continues to say that the group is really about singing music and having fun, and they want their music to reach out to everyone.

“Our group is pretty diverse already,” adds Schafer. “It brings an awesome dynamic when we’re choosing songs and a really powerful one when we’re performing.”

Schafer explains that the group experiences the music they’re performing not just as a performance, but also as a form of worship.

“One of the most concrete ways I connect with God is through song and through worship,” she said. “I think that music has a way of pulling together our thoughts and our emotions at the same time.”

“To me, singing Christian music is at once an act of ministry and worship,” Guedry said.

Their name reflects their dual identity with faith and music.

Schafer explained their name: “We were brainstorming ideas, and a friend came up with Six Eight, because of its musical significance – it’s a time signature – and because it’s the reference of a Bible verse which reflects our values as a group.”

The Bible verse it references is from the book of Micah: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

However, the group does not limit itself to songs that use explicitly Christian or religious lyrics.

“We’re doing everything from classical to Top 40,” said Guedry. The connecting factor of any songs they choose to sing is a sense of spirituality. He says they want songs that have a spiritual relevance, appeal to a Christian perspective, and “add to the relationship between God and human.”

Guedry and Schafer only hesitantly refer to themselves as co-leaders of the group that prides itself on its collaborative nature. Having only just begun the process of applying to be a Chartered Student Organization, the group does not yet have a clearly defined e-board.

Their ability to work together comes partly from the fact that “we’re all amateurs,” as Schafer puts it. “We’re starting blind, really. There’s no foundation for us to build off of.”

Despite that, the group has been working hard since its inception. As soon as they decided that they wanted to make their group official, they found out how often the other a cappella groups on campus rehearsed and followed suit. They immediately began meeting together for two hours, twice a week.

“We’ve had an awesome welcome from the other a cappella groups at SLU,” said Schafer. She tells of the times the group has reached out for help or advice; the other groups on campus responded enthusiastically.

Last semester, Astha, SLU’s co-ed fusion a cappella group, invited Six Eight to perform at their concert. The new group admits that they owe Astha a lot for providing them with their first public performance and the ability to get their name out on campus.

Six Eight’s plans for the spring semester include working on a full set list for their own concert. They will also be singing at Habitat for Humanity’s benefit concert on Feb. 7.

On Friday, April 26, the McNamee Gallery at the Samuel Cupples House kicked off the second Saint Louis University’s Student Exhibition.
The student exhibition displays work by students from all areas of studio art, including ceramics, computer art, graphic design, painting and more.
Students enrolled in courses in the Studio Art Program are eligible to be in a show at the end of each semester, with the spring show being more selective than the fall. The spring show is also geared toward highlighting the work of senior students who will be graduating, whereas the fall show focuses on the work of 200-level courses.

Amy Bautz, a professor of studio art, emphasizes the importance of displaying work for art students.

“Exhibiting is an integral part of the art-making process, and this opportunity is a vital part of the studio art curriculum,” she said.
One senior whose work is displayed at the exhibition is Fallon Lott.

“To be accepted into the show is a real honor,” she said. “To have my hard work out there on display where everyone can see it… Well it’s an addiction, to be honest.”

However, she says that the most rewarding part of SLU’s student shows is the community.

“The best part of school shows is seeing what my peers have infested their time into,” Lott said. “We all have such different styles, yet everything is so well done.”

“It’s really nice,” senior Debra Reilly, a double major in English and studio art, agrees. “You get to share the work you’ve created in class with a larger community.”

Reilly had three pieces displayed in the show this semester, one of which was a painting of her twin sister Diane Reilly entitled “Livane.” “It’s great to get to share my artwork with my twin,” she added.

Bautz adds that the exhibition is important even for those students not involved in studio art at SLU.

“We hope that other Saint Louis University students who come to the student exhibit have their horizons expanded in a few different ways,” Bautz said. “Our students have a broad range of ideas and opinions, which are reflected in their engaging artwork.”

Studio art professor Sharron Pollack adds that “Students might see work that will challenge or intrigue them and the work may expose them to different ways of seeing the world.”

The McNamee Gallery is located in the lower level of the Samuel Cupples House and is open Wednesday-Friday from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturday from 1 p.m.-4 p.m. The show will be running until May 10 and is free of charge.