By Michael Gallucci
Scene
Laura Paglin conceived of The Nightowls of Coventry (which opens Friday at the Cedar Lee Theatre) in the late '80s, when its 1973 setting wasn't so distant. "When I first moved here, I picked an apartment at random in Coventry," says the director, who's originally from Portland, Oregon. "I started talking to people who were part of the counterculture scene in the '70s. They were very relaxed, but also very cynical..."
By Donald Rosenberg
Plain Dealer Music Critic
To musicians, Dennis Eberhard was Cleveland’s composer laureate. To Russian concertgoers, he was an extraordinary artist whose music communicated profound compassion.
To his younger brother, Bruce, he was a hero who faced physical disability and financial hardship with tremendous courage. To kids in the Collinwood neighborhood where he grew up, he was “Sticks,” a little guy with a big smile who walked with crutches...
Film shines light on journey of disabled Cleveland composer
By Donald Rosenberg
Plain Dealer Music Critic
Two tragedies inspired Cleveland composer Dennis Eberhard while he was writing the piano concerto he would call "Shadow of the Swan." One was the deaths of Russian sailors in the submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea in 2000; the other was the 1986 disaster of the space shuttle Challenger, its white smoke famously and horrifically evoking the image of an enormous swan...
By Donald Rosenberg
Plain Dealer Music Critic
The sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in the Barents Sea in August 2000 jolted Cleveland composer Dennis Eberhard. Already at work on a piano concerto for Russian-born Cleveland pianist Halida Dinova, he decided to pay tribute to the deceased sailors in an expansive work eventually titled "Shadow of the Swan"...
By W. Fred Crow
Cineblog
'NightOwls' is a storied treat. Take a cutting-corners cafe owner who underpays his staff, short changes his customers, and hides from bills and food inspectors. Then throw in a crotchety group of older men who sit in that cafe every night, each wanting to focus the conversation on their own thoughts...
By Alison Williams
CINEQUEST Circle & Print
Locked away for hours in a concrete cell, miserable from the repetitive nature of bars, clefs and staffs, led Laura Paglin to break out and escape for a relaxing pastrami on rye and a hot cup of joe. The year was 1985...
By Richard von Busack
Metro (Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper)
American Splendor's Harvey Pekar gives the endorsement to this film about his old neighborhood in Cleveland Heights. Laura C. Paglin's well-acted, small-time comedy concerns the denizens of Marv's, a roachy all-night deli/cafe...
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Sometimes, success hurts. Tickets for tonight's Cleveland International Film Festival premiere of "Nightowls of Coventry" were in such demand that the movie's writer-director Laura Paglin had to scramble to get standby tickets for herself, her cast and crew...
By Margi Herwald
Staff Reporter, Cleveland Jewish News
When Susan (Donna Casey), a college freshman, leaves the safety of her small town for the big city of Cleveland in 1973, she has no idea what she's getting into...
By Donald Rosenberg
Plain Dealer Music Critic
Every piece of music is a journey of some kind.
Dennis Eberhard's "Shadow of the Swan" travels well beyond mere tonal regions to pay tribute to real-life expeditions that ended in tragedy. The Cleveland composer created his three-movement work for piano and orchestra in response to the 1986 Challenger space-shuttle disaster and the 2000 Kursk catastrophe...