Category Archives: Critics
My favorites so far
Here’s my unscientific, completely irrational, and wholly subjective list of favorite performances (in the theater/opera/dance arena). They are ranked from highest number (I liked and respected it) to the lowest number (I loved and adored it, recommended it to everyone I saw and even those I didn’t).
Please argue with me all you want. That’s what [...]
The spectacle of Monkey
I’ve talked to a lot of people who love Chen Shi-Zheng’s Journey to the West, his collaboration with Britpop composer and singer Damon Albarn and Gorillaz illustrator Jamie Hewlett. What’s perhaps a little surprising to those who love it is how many people are on the fence about it.
No one seems to doubt Monkey’s moment [...]
Laurie Anderson is ‘multimedia-free’
Dan Wakin, the classical music reporter for The New York Times, observed that “already three productions consciously blur the line between moving images and real life.” In particular, he rightly praises the theater troupe 1927 for its stellar production of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: an “ingenious, macabre little charmer,” he writes. [...]
Tim Page covers Spoleto for the Post and Courier
For the intellectuals out there, this is exciting news. Tim Page, the award-winning critic for The Washington Post, is coming to Charleston to cover Spoleto for the Post and Courier.
I’ve regularly read Page’s work and consider him to be a model critic — even-toned, level-headed, hugely informed, and inexorably opinionated. That, and he’s a hell [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Liberté, fraternité, egalité
The Lowbrow’s heading into the lion’s den this morning. Earlier this week, I proposed a dual-podcast to my blogging compatriots at The Post and Courier, and Geoff, Dan, and Janet seemed to think it was a swell idea. I’d been struck by a post Dan wrote on Monday about blogging as a meta-narrative that has [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]