Category Archives: Audiences
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 [...]
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 [...]
Throwing stones in Glass houses
Ninety-six degrees out there and rising. If we didn’t have calendars, that number alone would tell us the festival is drawing to a close and throwing open the door to the dog days of summer. There’s just about 28 hours left in Spoleto Festival 2007 – which means it’s not over yet for this Spoleto [...]
A dream within a dream
It’s hot out there. Welcome to summer.
Plenty of tickets left for State Ballet of Georgia’s Swan Lake, apparently, as the Big Festival seems to have set itself an uphill battle filling the Gaillard’s 2,700 seats for five performances of a 2-hour, 130-year-old classical ballet, ravishing as it may be. And word has it plenty of [...]
The poster boy finally gets his day
Composer Philip Glass has just enough of a mix of pop culture caché and serious classical cred to make the premiere of his Book of Longing last night one of the ’07 festival’s top must-be-seen-at events. After all, the man’s face is plastered on every available surface across the peninsula; he’s more recognizable than Bono [...]
Human behavior
It’s something of an understament to say that a lot of people have been looking forward to seeing newly minted MTV celebs and Comedy Festival/Piccolo alumns Human Giant in Theatre 99’s Piccolo Fringe this week. The comedy trio’s overnight success hasn’t landded them on the cover of Rolling Stone yet, but it’s not out of [...]
That was a lotta Latin
It looks like there may be another booming storm cooking up out there, preparing to punctuate the tail end of a fine day. As with last week, Monday and Tuesday have been low on rollouts for the Big Festival, as it recuperates from a second crazy weekend and gathers itself for the last mad rush [...]
A little mud never hurt anyone
“I’m from Asheville, which people say is kind of a hippy, hikey, granola-y, feminist, patchouli-smelling kind of place, where people have drum circles and probably trip on acid, too.” So joked chanteuse Christine Kane at Charleston Ballet Theatre on Sunday by way of introduction. Kane was performing a set of folksy music that was [...]
This Wei and that Wei
Despite gale-force winds, sideways rain, and the very real threat of becoming an impromptu flying projectile, I ventured out to see Shen Wei Dance Arts’ “Connect Transfer” at the Gaillard Saturday night. Outside, there was a chaos of thunder and lightening; inside, Shen Wei and his dancers delivered an work of abstract, sublime beauty that [...]
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 [...]