For me, ABBA was never a guilty pleasure. It was usually a pleasure, period. Most of the group’s hits were great little soap operas sung in Berlitz lesson English to irresistible melodies with unassailable arrangements. It was pure pop for now people in the ’70s. ABBA was never as big in benighted America as elsewhere, but that began to change with the 1999 Broadway debut of one of the most lucrative musicals ever, Mamma Mia! The plot, loosely strung together through a sequence of ABBA songs, concerns a fatherless 20-year-old girl about to be married. Reading her mother’s diary, Sophie gathers that mom was never certain of who fathered her.

Life overtook art in January with the death of Heath Ledger, the Joker in The Dark Knight. Ledger was one of Hollywood’s rising actors and his role as the supervillain in the much-anticipated sequel to Batman Begins would cinch his stardom. Dead or alive, Ledger was destined to dominate The Dark Knight. An unspoken rule is in effect: The bad guys tend to get the best lines in Hollywood; they are usually more flamboyant than their opponents, more intriguing and mysterious. Poor Christian Bale never has a chance. As Batman (or “the Batman” as he’s often called in a nod to the earliest comic strips), he is left to brood . . .

There are few musicians in today’s indie scene as enigmatic as M. Ward. His latest album, 2006’s critically acclaimed Post-War, came across like a series of bulletins from a long-gone era, with Ward’s voice often sounding like it was channeling the highs and lows of American history. The result was a record that had something of an otherworldly feel to it. Post-War was clearly rooted in the past, but there was something about Ward’s delivery that made the record feel incredibly relevant . . .

   At 53, Earle has seen and experienced most everything, from drug addiction to jail time. It’s reflected in his fiery brand of rock, country, folk, bluegrass and now techno, courtesy of a DJ who joined him for part of his intense, t...

Oslo must be a dull place, not only because the protagonists of Reprise dream of escaping it, but also because the city nurtured them. We meet Phillip and Erik, a pair of wannabe novelists, at a postal box, slipping their manuscript envelopes into the chute. After Phillip’s novel is accepted, he is anointed as Norway’s young literary lion, only to suffer an emotional breakdown. Erik’s is at first rejected, but he rebounds and embraces the acclaim that Phillip was unable to handle.

Genghis Khan’s birthright was to captain a small, nomadic tribe across the grassy sea of Mongolia. He grew up and made a bid for the whole world. He conquered as far as his eyes could see: Central Asia, portions of China, Persia and Russia. His name became synonymous in the West with cruel tyranny, but his conquests were no bloodier than most campaigns of his era and his empire was more tolerant, more wisely governed, than many states in our time.

When an artist is successful, the assembled whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When a curator is successful, the whole is not necessarily greater, but creates tension and visual dialogue among artists seeing the same formal element in different ways. At Katie Gingrass Gallery, pastel artist Jody dePew McLeane and wood sculptor Joel Hunnicutt use the classical corpulence of the empty vessel—perhaps the world's oldest and most universally functional art form—to create “Relative Spaces.”

In March, the fledgling Spiral Theatre hosted one of the theater season’s most pleasant surprises with its production of the 1969 Leonard Gershe play Butterflies Are Free. Spiral managed to take a dated and tiresome romantic comedy and stage it as an exceedingly entertaining love story with subtle shades of accomplished acting. Ruth Arnell starred as a young pseudo-hippie who falls in love with a blind musician . . .

In less than half a year, Milwaukee’s Atlatl has transformed itself from virtual unknowns to one of the city’s most likeable bands. Of course, they’ve had some help. Radio Milwaukee 88.9 has all but adopted the band, giving their day-dreamy single “Hey Man” the kind of airplay the station usually reserves for Atmosphere and Curtis Mayfield. The song deserves the exposure: Sweet and effortlessly hooky, it evokes one of Modest Mouse’s long drives with nothing to think about.