SWAMPOODLE’D! Plus reviews of Keri Hilson at the 9:30 Club & The Moscows of Nantucket that I was too busy to link to last week.

Rachel Beauregard does not actually don boxing gloves in SWAMPOODLE that I can recall, but happily she does sing.

So, Swampoodle. A beautiful mess, is what it is. Bring your ear horn.

Also, I saw Keri Hilson play the 930 Club as the headliner of the WPGC Bithday Bash last Thursday night. The bill also included Lloyd and B.o.B., but my hopes for an all-star version of the Eastern Motors song were dashed.

Last Sunday, I saw The Moscows of Nantucket at Theater J. It’s good. More fun that that Fleet Foxes show, certainly.

A Four-Part Harmony in Search of a Song: Fleet Foxes at Constitution Hall

A perfectly cromulent lede except for being two years too late:

In a better world than this, Fleet Foxes is an all-female professional motorcycle racing team that dabbles in counterterrorism and sometimes unwinds by playing Runaways covers in their garage. In our imperfect realm? They’re Seattle dudes, vegans surely, at least half of whom have beards and wear stocking caps even when visiting Washington, DC in the summertime.

Here’s the review as it appeared in the Paper of Record.

Profiles in Courage: Cyrano and The Apple Cart, review’d

Eric Hissom is emotionally erect. (Carol Pratt/courtesy Folger)

By the power vested in him by nothing more than his wildly protruding ego, Cyrano de Bergerac runs a blowhard actor off the stage at rapier point. So begins the Folger Shakespeare Library’s sparkling and soulful new adaptation of the romantic classic, and of all the outlandish scenarios it demands that leading man Eric Hissom imagine, this might be the most farfetched: As Cyrano, the guardsman of uncommon cheek and uncanny beak, a genius almost as fast with a sword as he is with a quip, Hissom is so effortlessly charming and authoritative it seems impossible he could ever find himself staring down a hostile audience.

He’s so good, in fact, you almost can’t believe that this Cyrano’s inconveniently 3D schnoz would much impede him in romance. But of course, the pickle he finds himself in ultimately has nothing to do with the fleshy cucumber sticking out under his eyes. For Cyrano, the rub is his lack of confidence that he’ll persuade his second cousin Roxane to see beyond her—uh, his—nose, an eloquent and enduring metaphor for the self-doubt that can cripple even the most capable among us.