If there’s one thing Birmingham has proven it knows how to do well these days, it’s vote. I’m not talking about the various elections that keep rearing their heads, turn-out is still woefully low for those occasions. I am, of course, referring to our uncanny ability to vote in winners of reality talent competitions on television.

When you’re an aspiring actor trying to make it in New York, any role is a good role. After countless hours waiting in line for cattle-call auditions, only to be told you aren’t going to be seen after all, you would take anything, any “Third Moron from the Left”, space-filler of a role.

It was late in the afternoon on the last Friday in April, and Reed Lochamy and his brother Will were hanging out in the basement of Reed’s house, in Bluff Park. The basement’s shelves were lined with various musical instruments; on one wall there was a poster for a Velvet Underground album that prominently features Andy Warhol’s depiction of a banana. An ancient TV displayed a golf tournament, its sound muted. Reed fiddled with the settings on a digital audio recorder to his right. “Brethren,” a song by Birmingham songwriter Wes McDonald, started playing softly from a pair of headphones on a table between the two brothers.

Christopher Davis doesn’t ascribe to that old actor’s adage, “Never work with animals or children.” During the day, Davis is a graphic designer for Southern Progress. At night, the 38-year-old Birming

Last summer I wrote a story about the CenterStage production of the 1998 sexually charged revival of Cabaret. At the time, it seemed a lot of people wondered if Birmingham was ready for such a show -

There was a time when the coolest of the cool wore tuxes, sang, danced, drank and told off-color jokes, usually all in the same performance. The men forever known as "The Rat Pack" - Frank Sinatra, Sa