To judge the relative importance of a performing arts festival, one must ask the questions: “How are the arts furthered?” and “How are the artists being pushed?” Challenges come in all shapes and sizes. Though “classic” in form, the Miami City Ballet is a relatively young company that boasts some terrific soloists from America’s two […]
From Charleston, SC, opening day for 2018 Spoleto Festival USA
Charleston ravishes the senses. The unique aromas of this town hit you on your first step onto its streets. Confederate jasmine and magnolia mix with the smell of salty pluff mud at low tide. That in turn folds in the smell of carriage horses tirelessly transporting tourists up and down its historical corridors. If it’s […]
Ada/Ava, chamber music and a coda for Spoleto Festival USA 2016
Sometimes the best of the “best in art” sneaks up on you. So it was with Spoleto Festival USA’s 2016 season. Maybe this year it had to do with the fanfare around the Festival’s “made-for-Charleston” production of Porgy and Bess. Or perhaps the contemporary opera with silhouette puppets of Helmut Lachenmann’s The Little Match Girl […]
Spoleto’s Alyson Cambridge on playing Bess
Soprano Alyson Cambridge, who began her career here in Washington, DC and has gone on to perform on some of the major opera stages of the world including Washington National Opera. She is making her debut performance as Bess in Porgy and Bess at the Spoleto Festival USA and talks here about the role and the issues of […]
Spoleto makes a gorgeous Porgy and Bess for Charleston (review)
This year’s big fortieth anniversary event at Spoleto Festival USA was the long-anticipated new production of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, as a celebration of the city that gave birth to the original story.
Spoleto Festival USA 2016 celebrates its 40th anniversary (review)
Last time I was here in 2013 I was swept into the flurry of opening celebrations, including the noontime grandstand with mayoral speeches and brass band and the late night garden party for sponsors, complete with celebrity gawking and southern finery sightings.
The Little Match Girl (review) at Spoleto Festival USA
Have you ever sat beside a lake at night and listened to the sounds? Or stood on an urban street corner in inky blackness or more exactly in a snowstorm where the world becomes unfamiliar in the swirling blur and the sounds become mysterious slushes and whooshes?
War Horse director Tom Morris on his latest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Tom Morris is best known for being the director of War Horse, a show that stampeded its way to critical and popular glory on Broadway. He has just returned to this side of the Atlantic with his company, the Bristol Old Vic, to make their US debut with a new production of A Midsummer Night’s […]