The Coen brothers new film about the early 1960s folk-music scene in New York City — Inside Llewyn Davis — doesn't open in Pittsburgh until Fri., Dec. 20. But you can catch a free sneak peek of it tonight at Regent Square Theater. The film which stars Oscar Davis, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman and Justin Timberlake has been well reviewed, including — spoiler alert — in the City Paper due out tomorrow.

Film starts at 7:30 p.m.; doors open at 6:30 p.m. The theater is at 1035 S. Braddock Ave., in Edgewood.

Nellie McKay fooled me. It happened during an interview prior to her Pittsburgh performance in 2010. While talking on the phone McKay casually mentioned that she hadn’t visited the Steel City since high school when she was in the All State Jazz Band, or some equivalent.

“When was that?” asked our intrepid reporter.

After thinking for a few moments, she replied, “1982.” she said. My mind quickly estimated the math, too polite and surprised to question her age. Later that evening, a quick check of AllMusic.com revealed the truth: McKay wasn’t born until two years after the year she threw out to me.

I mention all this because there were moments during last Thursday’s show at the Andy Warhol Museum where McKay had apparently made mistakes, for which she apologized later. She stopped a few lines into “Politan,” saying “I’ll come back to this one,” and leapt into the more challenging “Inner Peace.” She almost backed out of a “work in progress” with a spot-on Marlene Deitrich imitation, singing from a lyric sheet to a pre-recorded backing track (audience enthusiasm convinced her to persevere). Some sheet music also had to be retrieved by the sound man from her dressing room.

Despite all of these alleged mishaps, McKay pulled off the solo performance with such grace and clarity, it was hard to tell if she meant them to be part of act or they were truly accidents. If she was distracted, it didn’t show in the performance.

For this visit, McKay performed solo, accompanying herself on piano and ukulele. The evening got off to an impressive start with the classic torch ballad “Midnight Sun.” Its melody requires sharp attention to phrasing and McKay delivered, over quiet and gentle piano chords. She avoided lapsing into either overdone “jazz” phrasing or bedroom-voice sensuality, preferring the crisp precision normally heard in old school balladeers like Johnny Mathis. (She approved of the comparison.)

The 70-minute set consisted of a mix of a few more jazz classics and some witty McKay originals. “Mother of Pearl” again revealed the mischievous McKay. Strumming her uke, she sang the hot-button lyric “Feminists don’t have a sense of humor,” eliciting laughs from the audience. As the song continued, it became clear that she was really lampooning people who make that statement, especially when she finished by announcing, “I’m Michelle Bachman and I approve this message.” Other uke highlights including an “English medley” of “A World Without Love,” “Georgy Girl” and “I’m So Tired,” the latter complete with the pregnant pauses where drum fills normally appear.

McKay, dressed in a strapless red dress and pink go-go boots (“from Nancy Sinatra’s yard sale”), didn’t acknowledge the audience for the first few songs, but she warmed up as things proceeded. She dedicated “Long and Lazy River” to Tom Corbett, saying the governor has “a long and lazy river to his soul and he shouldn’t hydrofrack it.” A life size cut-out of the Warhol’s namesake stood onstage, as did a singing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer doll, who sat with her during one song. “C’mon Rudolph, let’s go kill a hunter,” she quipped at the climax.

The sold-out Warhol theater roared with approval, whether McKay was offering tongue-in-cheek support for gay marriage, casually mentioned gun control laws or singing “I Wanna Get Married.” It all seemed believable and strong.

There are three more days of performances for this unique local stage venture. More in Program Notes.

Playwrights’ company founder and artistic director Mark Clayton Southers created this festival a decade ago because he enivisioned — literally dreamed of, he says — an audience of both black and white patrons enjoying a show together.

Yes, that was a spectacle so rare in Pittsburgh that you might see it only in your dreams.

Unfortunately, with few exceptions, it still is. But one of those exceptions is the Black & White fest. Aside from stagings of August Wilson plays (another Playwrights specialty), this annual festival is one of the few theater events in town where you can reliably be part of an audience that’s racially mixed.

That was certainly the case this past Friday, when I saw the festival’s Program A, whose five one-acts are complemented by the five one-acts in Program B. The fest’s racial boundary-crossing, in fact, starts with the production of the plays: Half the playwrights are white, and paired with black directors, and the black playwrights are teamed with white directors.

That setup actually primes the pump for audience diversity: For small theater companies like Playwrights, a high percentage of ticket-buyers tend to be people who know the playwrights, directors and cast members. By teaming up artists who wouldn’t normally get to work together, doing material they wouldn’t normally do, Southers creates a situation where audiences also end up mingling.

That’s a very good thing, especially when the work’s strong. And this year’s Program A, part of a holiday-themed fest, is among the more accomplished sets I’ve seen at any B&W fest since it began.

Marlon Erik Youngblood’s “Just Jesus” (directed by Kaitlin Mausser) wittily explores “realness” within the black community.

Andrew Ade’s “True Meaning” (directed by Rita Gregory) is an affectingly comic take on “family values” at the holidays.

Lissa Brennan’s “And To All A Good Night” (directed by Cheryl El-Walker) is an uproarious and gleefully foul-mouthed comedy about interracial dating, coming out (as atheist) and the benefits of “medicinal mer-lott,” powered by an especially good ensemble cast. (Brennan is a CP contributor.)

Wali Jamal’s “St. Clair Xmas” (directed by Marcus Muzzoppapa) lovingly excavates one vanished Pittsburgh neighborhood’s lore before turning on a dime for a shock ending.

And Tammy Ryan’s “Cornucopia” (directed by Ashley Southers) is a classic Christmas Eve story, set in a dollar store, that doubles as a prayer for America’s beaten-up working class.

The themed-fest idea seems to work pretty well. Maybe it can be a template for future B&W fests, to supplement the open calls for scripts that have held sway in the past.

And here’s a review of both Program A and Program B by CP’s Michelle Pilecki.

The Theater Festival in Black & White continues with performances this afternoon through Tuesday night. Program A is on at 2 p.m. today and 7 p.m. Tuesday, and Program B at 7 p.m. tonight and 7 p.m. Monday.

The theater is located on the third floor of 937 Liberty Ave., Downtown.

Tickets are $20-25. Tickets, and more on the plays, is here.

The arc of the country's moral universe is bending toward equality for LGBT people, so the narrative goes. Gay marriage is inevitable. And laws that allow for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and identity are the last vestiges of our intolerance.

But publicly funded LGBT research might have a long way to go, according to a study published online today in the American Journal of Public Health.

At the National Institutes of Health, the largest source of funding for medical research in the world, studies focusing on LGBT health are still rare, which "contributes to the perpetuation of health inequities," according to the study. Just one-tenth of one percent of NIH funded studies between 1989 and 2011 focused on LGBT health-related issues. (The number slides up to 0.5 percent if you count HIV/AIDS and research related to sexual health).

And even among the studies that did receive funding, the vast majority focused on sexual minority men (86.1 percent) and HIV/AIDS (79.1 percent).

Only 43 studies — out of 628 total LGBT-health studies — focused on transgender people.

"One of the major findings that surprised me was how great the proportion is related to HIV and sexual health,” says Robert Coulter, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student at Pitt's Center for LGBT Health Research, through the Graduate School of Public Health.

"We know that these health disparities exist with regard to tobacco use and homelessness," Coulter says, "so why haven’t intervention studies in these areas been funded yet?”

“It’s because the NIH doesn't care about LGBT health,” says Randall Sell, a public health professor at Drexel University who specializes in LGBT health. "The problem is that NIH is a huge ship and to turn it in another direction is a slow process,” he says.

One of Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's last acts as mayor may be leaving behind a multimillion-dollar pair of handcuffs for his successor and long-time rival, Mayor-elect Bill Peduto.

This afternoon, Ravenstahl voted -- by phone -- with a majority of the city'sComprehensive Municipal Trust Fund to approve an accounting change that could compel Peduto to increase the city's contributions to its pension funds by between $5 million and $10 million a year.

The accounting change is one that Ravenstahl himself has opposed as mayor, and that his own public-safety director still opposes today. It is also, however, the kind of change that Peduto has previously supported. Yet Kevin Acklin, Peduto's future chief-of-staff, denounced the vote, calling it "politics as usual," and warning it could "be a multi-million-dollar hole in the budget."

"To do this in a transition period, the week before Christmas -- it doesn't smell right," Acklin told reporters after the vote was taken.

This post is going to be about pensions, I'm afraid, so you may find it even more boring and long-winded than you've come to expect from pieces on city-government finances. (Can I entice you to read further by promising to mention the battle for City Council president down below?) But here we go:

The locally produced, award-winning documentary Blood Brother, about a young Pittsburgh man who finds purpose working at an Indian orphanage for kids with HIV/AIDS, extends its run.

Friday, Dec. 13, it moves to the Harris Theater, Downtown, where it will play through Thu., Dec. 19 (except Mon., Dec. 16).

It's a basic story of life, death and the human spirit that is a good antidote to the consumer-driven madness of the holiday season.

The off-the-charts high-energy production of this new comedy at Point Park has six more performances this week. A review in Program Notes.

If you’re looking for something truly madcap to cap the year, this wonderfully entertaining short-run show by the Point Park Conservatory Theatre Company should do the trick.

It’s a veeery loose adapatation and update of a 1610 Ben Jonson satire on greed and folly, written and directed by Gab Cody in collaboration with some two dozen Point Park theater students.

Basically, it’s about three con artists who run a retirement home as a front for a scam to sell a fake wonder drug called “The Madness” to gullible college students. But that doesn’t begin to capture this show’s wild farcical energy.

Somehow, Cody and the talented cast manage to jam every theatrical technique they could think of into a single frenetic plot and keep it from flying apart at the seams.

The play is stuffed with caricatures — stoned hippy, sexpot nurse, foulmouthed old woman, jock, nerd, cheerleader, repressed Christian youth, shape-shifting charlatan. Set it on spin, and watch the performers go to work with slapstick — tons of slapstick — plus commedia dell'arte masks, fourth-wall-smashing, a live band, an improvised song, an extended tap-dance sequence, a video-game parody, several cheerleading routines, shameless puns, a raccoon hand puppet, the machine-gun patter of screwball comedies, a bit of circus … you get the idea. And the cross-dressing includes a young man playing an old woman who in turn portrays a drag queen.

What’s it all mean? Cody’s a very clever writer whose other theatrical credits include lead writer on Bricolage’s STRATA , an immersive take on self-improvement seminars. She was her also playwright and co-star of 2011’s Fat Beckett (at Quantum Theatre), which satirizes consumerism. Alchemists’ Lab complements those critiques of our obsession with having it all, preferably in pill form.

But Alchemists’ Lab is also simply about the astonishing amount of fun that theater can be. Although you’ve seen every trick in this show before, Cody’s sharp direction and the cast’s boundless verve make it all feel new. The 100-minute, intermissionless work flies by with not more than a brief lull or two.

My only qualm concerns representation. Of the four African-American males on stage, one plays a character who can’t talk and two play women. And yes, this is a student production, it’s farce, and there’s a long history of theatrical cross-dressing; and for all I know, in this co-devised work, some performers invented or developed their own roles. But in a theater landscape still short of roles for black men, this remains a concern.

Otherwise, I recommend The Alchemists’ Lab heartily. The show (which opened Tuesday) has six more performances at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, tonight through Sunday. Tickets are $9-20 and are available here.

If there’s a book or two that helped define your understanding of the world of work, the Department wants to hear about it.

To commemorate its 100th anniversary, the Department (in partnership with the Library of Congress) is starting a “national work-focused book club.” The initiative is called the Books That Shaped Work in America.

The web-based project “aims to engage the public about the Labor Department’s mission and America’s history as a nation of workers as portrayed through published works.”

The project has already asked a couple dozen prominent folks — many of them Department of Labor types — to name some titles.

Current labor secretary Thomas E. Perez, for instance, named books including To Kill a Mockingbird and (local shout-out) August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle of plays. Latifa Lyles, acting director of the department’s Women’s Bureau, named books including Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. And former Labor Sec Robert Reich tipped titles like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.

It looks like “work” is defined pretty broadly here — see for yourself.

And there’s a simple online form to make your own sugestions right here.