The Normal News

All this week, Rocks Off is previewing Saturday and Sunday's Westheimer Block Party by asking WBP performers to fill out a list from Lisa Nola's Music Listography book we're so fond of.

With 2009 sun has about three more months of life, The Bronx has much to say about itself musically.

PINK A recent injury may mean a toning down of the singer's high wire antics in her circus-themed show, but hopefully Pink's voice is still in three-ring shape.

How do you tell a "real" Ben Folds song from a "fake" one? That question lingered around the snarky piano-man's music well before he punked fans and pirates alike last year by "leaking" sham tracks of 2008's Way To Normal .

Is rock music finally becoming the force on Broadway that it's been in the rest of popular culture for the last 50 years? Two of the four new musicals scheduled thus far for the 2009-10 season will have scores by prominent rockers, with U2's Bono and the Edge writing the songs for "Spider-Man," while Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan is doing the ...

Started by a synth obsessive in the late 70s, Mute became home to post-punk and electro-pop pioneers.

Broadway calls them sung-through musicals, but in essence they're operas: "Caroline, or Change," "Spring Awakening" and now "Next to Normal." Regardless of what you call them, these "operas" appear to have better legs than new works commissioned and/or presented by the San Francisco, L.A. and Metropolitan Opera companies -- such works as "Grendel," ...

Set designer Mark Wendland and lighting designer Kevin Adams on the Broadway production of Next to Normal Photos Joan Marcus 'The story of Next To Normal takes you to all of the rooms in a suburban home, a couple of doctors' offices, the daughter's school, her boyfriend's house, several locations in a hospital, and a lot of the action takes the ...