Hopkins hailed: The Walker-commissioned Must Don’t Whip ‘Um, Cynthia Hopkin’s newest performance piece and a highlight of this year’s Out There festival, opened at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York to acclaim. The New York Times, describing Hopkins’ voice as “delicate and emotionally forceful — part Natalie Merchant, part Madeline Peyroux,” hails the music-theater work as “a triumph of disciplined thinking, narrative fluidity and musical accomplishment.” (After the Walker show, Variety took a stab at describing Hopkins’ pipes: “Hopkins is gifted with an instrument of uncanny tone, almost angelic, and her phrasing at times clips her lyrics with acidic tinges that bring to mind Billie Holiday’s combination of aching passion and brains.”) See MDWU at St. Ann’s through Februrary 4.

Attacking the bearded lady: The Riot Group, from San Francisco, is racking up praise for this year’s final Out There piece, Pugilist Specialist (tonight and Saturday night only) which follows US military specialists as they plan an assassination attempt on an Arab despot referred to only as the “bearded lady.” Psychologically gripping yet hilarious, this piece, well-timed for an age of Abu Ghraib and the Global War on Terror, is “visceral and thoroughly engaging, even as it raises disturbing questions” (Star Tribune).

Free culture: For you, an mp3 of Seu Jorge performing “Rebel Rebel” and others at the sleepwalkers opening at MoMA, plus I Met the Walrus, a very short film animating a 1969 interview on war and peace conducted by 14-year-old Jerry Levitan. For more free mp3s and news on independent music, visit Spacelab.

Welcome to our first edition of Backstage, a periodic offering of sneak peeks, news and notes on music, theater, and performance contributed by members of the Walker Performing Arts department.

About that subtitle: If the traditional-sounding title throws you, let this review of this weekend’s performances at the Walker of Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven (“a show about white people in love”) be your guide. Ranked #10 on New York magazine’s “Best in Theater 2006,” the blurb reads: “Considering it begins with a close-up video of the playwright being slapped in the face–repeatedly, for several minutes, hard enough to draw tears–it says something for Young Jean Lee that she still manages to save her play’s weirdest, funniest stroke for near the end. In unison, four Asian-American actresses deliver a speech in the author’s voice that rampages through race and gender sensitivities, mocking patriarchal white men, hypocritical white women, angry minorities, and Lee herself. ‘People think of me as this empowered Asian female, but really I’m just a fucking white guy,’ they announce.”

The live arts: In an interview, Performing Arts curator Phillip Bither tells mnartists.org how Out There performers are selected each year and why Americans are so reluctant to produce experimental performance: “I think it has something to do with the fact that the live arts have always been tied to commercial interests in this country. There has been very little distinction between entertainment and live art or art that runs in real time. This is not to say that experimental theatre can’t be entertaining or wildly inventive.”

SXSW bands named: Austinist lists all 240 confirmed bands for this year’s South By Southwest festival, from AM to Zach Galifianakis. The amps turn on March 9.

Jazz blues: The jazz world lost two greats recently: Alice Coltrane, who in the 40 years since her husband’s death has made music with his band, passed on. A child prodigy who trained in classical music, Coltrane was known for injecting Eastern sounds and harp music into jazz; listen to this amazing NPR story, rebroadcast on the occasion of her death last week at age 69. Jazz saxophonist Michael Brecker succumbed to leukemia brought on by myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a rare form of bone cancer that attacked his bone marrow. He played on more than 900 records and won 11 Grammys. Susan Brecker, who wrote an open letter before her husband’s death seeking bone marrow donors, asks friends to commemorate her husband by donating to The Marrow Foundation’s “Time is of the Essence” Fund or lobbying for stem-cell research. Brecker was 57. Our condolences to the Brecker and Coltrane families.