Evil

It has become as familiar to us as the candlelight vigils at the crime scene. The modest house in a quiet neighborhood. The curtains drawn, the media camped out in the street. The neighbor's description of a family that kept to itself. And then the statement. The family is stunned. This is not the child they knew and loved. They are grieving, for that child as well as his victims. They apologize and offer prayers. Soon enough, the rest of this story will play out — again — for us. The child was troubled, and the family should have seen it. They should have seen the diary or the essays or the drawings or the website or the videos.

Pasadena Theatre Company has found an excellent venue at Abundant Life Church in Glen Burnie for its current production of the Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse musical adaptation of "Jekyll & Hyde" — the tale of good and evil created by Robert Louis Stevenson in his 1886 novella. PTC president and "Jekyll" executive producer Sharon Steele said Abundant Life Church has partnered with them to present the show in a space that provides multiple staging levels. Assisting Steele is ALC pastor Nate Drye, who serves as producer with his team of church musicians, actors and technicians.

It is a truism , born in Hollywood westerns, that the good guys wear white hats. Now from New York comes word that the bad guys prefer Yankee caps. In the last 10 years more than 100 suspects or persons of interest in connection with serious crimes in New York wore Yankee apparel at the time of their crimes, arrests or arraignment. This report comes from The New York Times, the newspaper of record in the Yankees' hometown, which stated that when it came to clothing favored by the accused, "no other sports team comes close.

When Joshua Grannell, 36, was growing up in Annapolis, he didn't realize how supportive his parents were when he was being "a little creative dictator. " Most wouldn't have encouraged his creation of extravagant haunted houses, much less dress up in costume and sell tickets (as his mother did) or pursue a little-girl actor with a chainsaw (as his father did, after removing the chain). Now they have the satisfaction of seeing Grannell's drag alter-ego, Peaches Christ, become a cultural hero in San Francisco and beyond.

Watching "Eichmann" on Holocaust Remembrance Day in the Baltimore Jewish Film Festival will remind viewers of the power movies can get from timing and circumstance. It's not a crackerjack film, but it's a strong conversation-starter. (Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin will be the guest speaker.) It centers on an Israeli police interrogator, Capt. Avner Less, who relentlessly questioned Adolph Eichmann, a prime engineer of Hitler's Final Solution, from May 29, 1960 (shortly after Eichmann's capture in a Buenos Aires suburb)

Colonial Players' current production of Bryony Lavery's "Frozen" might well prove a chilling experience for audiences as it sheds light on the ordinariness of a pedophile's acceptance of his serial murders. British dramatist Lavery's play premiered in London in 1998 and debuted in New York in 2004, challenging audiences with its juxtaposed themes: a mother clinging to hope for her abducted daughter, a forensic psychologist who looks for a scientific explanation for monstrous behavior and a killer who boasts about and bemoans the loss of his prized collection of child pornography.

I went to church in San Francisco on Sunday, the big stone church on Nob Hill, whose name is an old slang term for a rich person, where a gaggle of railroad tycoons built their palaces high above the squalid tenements of the poor back in the Gilded Age, and there with considerable pomp we baptized a dozen infants into the fellowship of faith and we renounced the evil powers of this world, which all in all is a good day's work. The term "evil powers" is one you hear only in the church, or in Marvel comic books, or Republican speeches, and it isn't something I renounce every day. I am a romantic Democrat, raised on William Saroyan and Pete Seeger and Preston Sturges, and we have faith in the decency of the little guy, and we believe you can depend on the kindness of strangers.

"Touch of Evil" opens with a mind-blowing traveling shot that starts at the level of a belt buckle and then swings left and right and up as a quicksilver figure sets a time bomb and places the device in the trunk of a car. Continuing in one unbroken movement as a blonde and a millionaire get into the car, the camera pulls away into a panoramic view of the border town of Los Robles, Mexico, then floats down to follow Mexican narcotics investigator Vargas...