Author Archives: Patrick Sharbaugh
Italian Festival Dumps Chip, Tells Friends She’d Get Into Bed With Charleston
Just because we’ve so far been unable to loosen any lips on next festival’s program doesn’t mean there’s no news to report. The other side of the pond has a Spoleto Festival, too, you’ll recall – the original one in Spoleto, Italy, begun in 1958 and known as the Festival of Two Worlds. Last spring, [...]
Only 24 Shopping Days Until Spoleto ‘08 Program Is Announced
It’s the middle of December, and, as if you haven’t been reminded of it every day since Thanksgiving, the number of days remaining until you’ve blown your chance to make up for the Christmas-themed underwear you gave somebody last year are ticking down at roughly the same rate your waistline is expanding. The very last [...]
Spoleto’s box office a gnat’s hair short of 2006
Blame it on medEia — or Faustus, or any of the other challenging, nontraditional fare Spoleto packed into in a season more stuffed than usual with programming whose ability to put butts in seats was hardly guaranteed. The final box numbers are in for the 2007 festival, and it looks like Spoleto’s four-years-running record-busting streak [...]
Wigging out on post-Spoleto wraps
Spoleto 2007 is an historical artifact at this point, but that hasn’t stopped commentators and critics from picking through the bones and offering up big picture post facto overviews. At The State, arts reporter Jeffrey Day’s wrap landed last Wednesday — the same day as my own postmortem hit the streets — but I just [...]
Spoleto Festival Orchestra: let’s talk about sax
On Saturday, sandwiched between my postcast conversation with P&C critic Joshua Rosenblum and a noontime encounter with Charleston Ballet Theatre’s final Brown Bag & Ballet performance, I ran into one of the Spoleto Festival Orchestra’s 113 amazing young musicians. Eliot Gattegno is a first-year saxophonist with the SFO who was hanging out at Kudu Coffee [...]
Reporting from the other side
Is it over?
For the first time in three weeks, a day in my Google Calendar is completely, utterly empty. There’s nothing there but the date – June 11 – and a blank expanse of white space. My brain is fried, my innards are pickled, my back is killing me, and my culture tank is fully [...]
The end is near
This would seem to be it.
Yesterday’s Piccolo Finale was a sweat-soaked circus of blanketed picnickers who tried bravely to ignore the heat, but they may as well have tried to ignore the pull of gravity. Ninety-six degrees hung over Hampton Park like Hell’s own furnace turned on us, and in the end even the lure [...]
Buzzcast central
On Friday, the Lowbrow slipped away from morning coffee for a duck into the ersatz podcasting booth at The Post and Courier, where he and fellow CP blogger Jonathan Sanchez became one with an entourage of that paper’s present and former Spoleto reporters and bloggers. Listen to the resulting “bloggers summit” podcast here.
After the big [...]
Buzzcast: Aurélia Thierrée
After seeing Aurélia Thierrée’s dreamlike Oratorio at Emmett Robinson Thursday evening, I was delighted to be able to sit down with the performer and co-creator of the remarkable work (with her mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin) for a conversation about it, fitting into a chest of drawers with two other people, and being a granddaughter of [...]
Getting forensic on Spoleto 2007
The 31st Spoleto Festival USA is officially in the past tense. It’s now time to get forensic on the thing. But that’s less easy than it sounds. Part of the difficulty in summing up the festival after the fact lies in its nature; as Mayor Riley noted during the mid-festival tribute to founder Gian Carlo [...]