Arts^Entertainment
Daily
Nebraskan
Thursday, 9aptambac 9,1993
Magic theater
offers different
brand of acting
By Bryce Glenn
Staff Reporter
Omaha’s Magic Theater has been called
many things, including: avant garde, experi
mental and new theater, but Artistic Director Jo
Ann Schmidman called it simply “great, ener
gizing fun.”
“It defies labels,” Schmidman said. “It en
gages your head and your silly bone and you
recognize it and you hate it and you love it.”
The theater, at 1417 Famam St., presents
works that are similar to performance art, as
there is a more intimate relationship between
the actors and the audience, Schmidman said.
She said she first experienced that type of
theater when she worked with the New York
based Open Theater in the 1960s.
When she returned to Omaha in 1968 she
opened the Magic Theater. For the past 25 years
she has worked to bring established performers
to the theater, and she has trained locals in her
style of acting, a style she still struggles to
describe.
“When people have no experience with this,
it’s hard to convey it,” she said. “The audience
is so involved in this energy because the whole
space is transformed.”
She likened the theater’s performances to
club concerts where a person is totally over
come by the music.
“Seldom are we able to experience that with
theater because of weird restrictions that are put
down from other places,” she said. “But there
are some of us who have felt it at one time or
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Although the Magic Theater has been in
Omaha for 25 years, Schmidman called it “Oma
ha’s best kept secret.”
It is a reference Schmidman could do with
out.
“We should get lots of students, but they
don’t know about us,” she said. “We can’t
afford neon signs or anything, so we pretty
much rely on word of mouth.”
Schmidman said she was especially anxious
to get the word out about the theater’s current
production.
Raymond J. Barry’s play “The Mother’s
Son” had its world premiere at the theater last
weekend. It will be performed again this Friday
and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 for
University of Nebraska-Lincoln students.
Barry said he had worked with Schmidman
and Magic Theaterplaywright Meggan Terry at •
the Open Theater in New York.
Barry has written and performed in several
plays since his days in the Open Theater, he
See MAGIC on 13
JuKa Mikolajrik/DN
Higher Ground owners Scott and Teri Colb and Mike Cramer show some of the products in their shop at 700
O St. The store opened last November.
Pot shots
Higher Ground gains fame with its hemp T-shirts
USHtBUamge • "
SSta/f Rtportor
It's not that kind of store.
That’s what Michael Cramer wants to tell
people who expect Higher Ground to be a
“head shop”—a store specializing in drug
paraphernalia.
What it is: One of the Haymarket’s latest
additions and a hip T-shirt store.
Under the viaduct at 700 O St., Higher
Ground offers clothing, bags and books, as
well as T-shirts for which they are rapidly
gaining a reputation.
Cramer, with his wife Ten and partner
Scott Kolb, started the store’s parent compa
ny, TeraWear Ltd., in their Lincoln base
ment in 1991. They printed T-shirts they
designed themselves to “make a little bit of
extra money,’’ he said.
The company rapidly expanded after the
partners peddled their shirts along the “Hemp
Tour,” a biannual tour of rallies across the
touniry"W promote the legalization of
marijuana.
They opened the store last November.
“This fall we all quit our jobs and went
into that full time,” Cramer said.
“Today we’re selling shirts all over the
country ami we’re about to start exporting to
Japan and Germany ”
Cramer attributes part of the company’s
success to its use of water-based inks and
non-bleached cotton shirts.
Both of these measures are eco-friendly,
but they tend to raise the price of the shirt, he
said.
Still, TeraWear boasts the “hottest sell
ing pot shirt in the country” Cramer said.
It’s the pot shirts and temp products the
store offers that lead to the expectation that
it’s a head shop.
However, Cramer said, temp is made
from the stalks, not the flowers, of the
marijuana plant.
Hemp is legal in this country, since it
contains noTHC. thc nrtnd^altcringoompo1' »<;
ncnt of marijuana.
The store aim offers marijuana-growing
manuals and drug culture magazines, items
that contribute to its counter-culture image,
he said.
TeraWear is without doubt the biggest
part of the business, with about 2,000 orders
a month, Cramer said.
“We can’t even keep inventory on hand,”
he said. “We didn’t foresee the market.”
But with a brand new catalog, and the
addition of a line of printed hemp clothing,
TeraWear hopes to totally capture that mar
ket —expanding beyond the bounds of the
storefront outlet, Cramer said.
Being self-employed is much harder than
working for “the man,” he said.
“You work all the time. Sometimes it
doesn’t work out to minimum wage.”
And there seems to be no end in sight.
“We’ve been growing about 1,000 per
cent a year, man, he said.
FiddlerKraussperformsfreebluegrassforfairgoers
By Jill O’Brien
Senior Reporter
Alison Krauss lives to fiddle
around, playing bluegrass at state fairs,
festivals and concerts.
“Bluegrass isn’t
a very lucrative
living for a musi
cian,” she said
during an inter
view. If you do it
for a living, you’re
doing it for the
music.”
And Krauss, a self-confessed blue
grass fanatic, definitely does it for the
music. She performs two free sets at
the Nebraska State Fair, tonight at 6
and 8 p.m., at the Pepsi Open Air
Auditorium.
Krauss said she was hooked on fast
fiddling at age 8. Three years of clas
sical violin lessons limbered her fin
gers while the music of Ricky Skaggs
limbered her mind, she said.
By the time she turned 13, Krauss
was a nationally recognized fiddler
and a year later, Rounder Records
released her first bluegrass album,
‘Too Late to Cry.”
Two months ago. Krauss, now 21,
became the first bluegrass artist in 19
years to be inducted into the Grand
Ole Opry.
“It was one of those things you
never figured was going to happen to
you,” she said.
It was the most nervous night of
her life.
“We had never imagined being on
the Opry, and then we got to be on and
we figured it was a one-time thing.
We were amazed.”
“We” is Krauss and Union Station,
a four-piece bluegrass band that has
backed her since 1985.
The current line-up includes bass
Bowman. Adam Steffey, who plays
mandolin, shares the vocal spotlight
with Krauss, while Ron Block pulls
triple duty as songwriter, guitarist and
banjo picker.
“Our favorite type of stuff is pretty
traditional bluegrass,” Krauss said,
“but, we do more of the new stufflhan
we do of the old stuff — because we
try to do our own thin$.”
“It’s more like original bluegrass
with traditional thrown in than tradi
tional with original,” she explained.
Although one ofher favorite songs,
“Cluck Old Hen,” is a traditional
bluegrass tune highlighted on her lat
est album, “Every Time You Say
Goodbye,” most of the album’s songs
are originals, written by Block or
former bandmember John Pennell,
Krauss said.
She said when she chooses a song
to play, she tries to avoid cliched
lyrics where the listener can guess the
next line. The same holds true for the
band’s performances, she said.
During a set, it’s not unusual for
her to slip in a contemporary cover by
Paul McCartney or Gregg Allman,
she said.
When she sings, she again defies
tradition. Krauss is a soprano who
shifts to baritone as easily as she shifts
from bluegrass to contemporary mu
sic.
Her voice has been compared to
Emmylou Harris, Jeannie Kendall and
Dolly Parton.
“It’s still kind of new to have wom
en fronting bands, but there happens
to be a good number of them now,”
Krauss said.
“There weren ’ t many women play
See KRAUSS on 13
AU„_ "TV . ~ " Photo CourtMV Rounder Record*
Falnonloht** ^ “ p*rtom' * **“ Nebraska State