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Manuel Obregón Guanacaste Tour
Piano concerts, 6 p.m., Liberia Museum, Liberia, Guanacaste.

Little Theatre Group Open House
With auditions for “Glengarry Glen Ross” (May 21-June 13), directed by Tom Humes, seven male roles, March 1, 7:30 p.m., Laurence Olivier Theater, Av. 2, Ca. 28. Info: 8858-1446.

“Costa Rica Objetivo Pura Vida”
Photography exhibit by four Spanish photographers, through April 30, Botanical Garden, CATIE, Turrialba. Info: 2558-2643.

Tickets will go on sale on Tuesday at 12:28 p.m. for the April 7 Guns N' Roses concert in Costa Rica, the online concert ticket seller www.todoticketcr.com says.

The legendary band led by flamboyant front man Axl Rose will rock Costa Rica's Ricardo Saprissa Stadium as part of their “Chinese Democracy World Tour,” which includes a host of Latin American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Peru and Uruguay.

The ticket prices are expected to be announced on Monday.

The news of Guns N' Roses' arrival came as the rock calendar has already been heating up for the much-awaited show by Metallica on Sunday, March 7. Tickets for Metallica sold out in a matter of hours and the Roses' tickets likely will follow suit.

Music fans relished to the tunes of steaming blues on Saturday, dancing the day and night away at Club Cubano in Guachipelín, west of San José, as the Costa Rica Blues Fest rocked on.

In its third year, the lineup and turnout were the best yet, according to festival organizer and blues musician Mauricio Ledezma. A U.S. and Costa Rican dual citizen, Ledezma gave a high-energy performance with his Blues Devils Band, cranking up the upbeat side of the genre with rocking guitar and vocals and Ledezma's swinging harmonica playing.

Local and international bands traded sets between an indoor and outdoor stage, while heaps of barbeque-style food was served and beer kept flowing. The venue was a Cuban social club but the crowd was a mixture mostly of North Americans and Costa Ricans.

The biggest draw at the event was a soulful 81-year-old singer and guitarist, Texas Johnny Brown, the headliner of the festival, along with his Quality Blues Band.

Ledezma said that while living in Texas he used to go see Brown perform and fell in love with the music. After a long wait for Brown's nighttime act, the crowd quickly learned what there was to love. The music had a richness and range that at times visited funk, soul and even reggae, and at other times brought it back to straight up blues.

“Now I do it my way, and I feel pretty free to do it the way I want to do it,” Brown told The Tico Times in an interview before his set, describing what its like to be a front man after years of accompanying others. The blues veteran's career started in 1948.

“(Things) may not be the same way they were back in those days, but melancholy is melancholy. It remains the same,” he said. “So I try to do my blues where I make everybody understand, the young and the old,”

Check back for photos and video of the Costa Rica Blues Fest.

Friday morning found more than one hundred dark-suited men and women in a windowless meeting room of the Intercontinental Hotel, plotting how to remove Costa Rica from the international list of tax havens.

It's been nearly a year since Costa Rica was identified as a so-called tax haven due to outdated legislation that makes exchange of information on suspected tax evaders complicated and time-consuming. The Central American country was hit with another slap in mid-February when France announced it would levy high sanctions on interest and dividends earned in the country.

“Costa Rica is recognized in the world as a haven for peace, a haven for ecological tourism, a haven for the respect of human rights; but under no circumstance, can we or do we want to run the risk that Costa Rica is perceived as a tax haven,” said Rodrigo Arias, minister of the presidency, at the Friday morning forum.

The worldwide recession has motivated developed countries to clamp down on suspected tax evaders, looking for additional income for cash-strapped budgets. With the participation of countries around the world, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD ) drafted an international standard for the exchange of tax information and got dozens of countries to sign on to it.

"We've made more progress in 10 months than we have in 10 years," said Pascal Saint-Amans, head of the international cooperation and tax competition division of OECD. “The standard for the exchange of tax information is now almost universally accepted.... There are no more safe places to hide money to avoid paying taxes.”

Costa Rica has dragged its feet in the process of subscribing to international tax standards, but Finance Minister Jenny Phillips has pledged her commitment to meet OECD demands. In order to make it off the list of havens, Costa Rica must sign information sharing agreements with 12 countries (it has one now and nine pending) and adopt new national legislation.

Phillips said the legislation has been drafted and is now before the Legislative Assembly. Though she said she will push for legislators to pass it before they leave office in May, she also recognizes the tight timeframe.  

“Two months is very short in order to pass a reform like this one,” she said. “But after hearing what was said today(Costa Rica could face more sanctions), … Today it's France, tomorrow it could be another country... and some of the sanctions could come from international organizations such as the World Bank.”

See the March 5 print or digital edition of The Tico Times for more on this story.