On Stage: Updated Uptown! set to reopen, Friday night

By Denny Dyroff, Entertainment Editor, The Times Uptown! Knauer Performing Arts Center It’s time for West Chester to start rocking again. Uptown! Knauer Performing Arts Center, a chic, 300-plus seat music and entertainment venue located in the heart of West Chester (226 North High Street, West Chester, uptownwestchester.org) is ready to reopen its doors after a shutdown caused by the pandemic. The...

On Stage: Rockin’ Christmas puts local stars in spotlight

By Denny Dyroff, Entertainment Editor, The Times Tantric’s singer Hugo Ferreira could ask the band’s live audience if he could sing a fado song for them. Having no idea what he was taking about, they would probably respond – “forget that…just rock out, dude.” Ferreira is an Portuguese-American singer, songwriter and musician who has been the front man of the hard rock band Tantric since...

On Stage: Female rock pioneers team up

By Denny Dyroff, Entertainment Editor, The Times Cherie Currie and Brie Howard-Darling In the 1980s, there were many all-female rock bands that wrote music, sang the songs and played their own instruments – acts such as the Bangles, the Go-Go’s, L7 and the Lunachicks. The groundwork for their success and acceptance was laid a decade earlier by two bands who made huge inroads into the male-donated...

On Stage: One degree of separation from Beissel to music’s greats

By Denny Dyroff, Entertainment Editor, The Times Danny Beissel “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” is a parlor game based on the “six degrees of separation” concept, which posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart. If you look at rock vocalist Danny Beissel’s long and varied resume, you’ll quickly notice that there is just “one degree of separation”...