Category Archives: City Paper Reviews
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 [...]
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 [...]
Dood! You rule!
Last night’s premiere of Dutch theatre group Dood Paard’s (it means “dead horse”) medEia is bound to provoke some griping from people who prefer their big-dollar theatre served up a la The Constant Wife – with lots of lavish costumes, a gorgeous set, witty repartee, bon mots aplenty, a pleasantly linear plot, and an unbreachable [...]
Our foreign correspondance
The New York Times’ James R. Oestreich continues to be the sole representative of the major U.S. news media in town for the festival. Ironically, the Toronto Globe and Mail seems to be the only other out-of-towner with a reporter, Paula Citron, on the streets of Charleston for some critical reportage – possibly because that [...]
Big Bang
Last night’s program was exactly the prescription needed to heal what’s been ailing this Spoleto Buzz blogger in the past eight days. Faustus and L’ile de Merlin both tousled festival audiences’ hair in their ways, but so far Spoleto 07’s been absent any real, knock-your-hat off-and-lick-you-up-and-down surprises. We got it Thursday evening with the Foundry [...]
Talking dirty: a defense of Closer
In today’s Post and Courier, Spoleto overview critic Joshua Rosenblum strokes his chin over a pair of festival plays that have infidelity as their common theme – Spoleto’s drawing room comedy The Constant Wife and Piccolo’s production of Closer, in the little festival’s Stelle di Domani series. In his smartly written argument, Josh observes that [...]
The little festival that could
The Big Festival’s opening premieres monopolized most of this Spoleto Buzz blogger’s attention and energy over the Memorial Day weekend, but I’ve not forgotten that there’s an entirely separate festival going on in Charleston right now. If the dissonant warbling in Faustus, the Last Night or nigh on three hours of Marxian, Teutonic spectacle in [...]
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 [...]