Category Archives: Previous Festivals
Piccolo Spoleto: Cloud Tectonics
With Piccolo Spoleto starting next week, PURE Theatre is getting ready to revive their successful show from last year, Cloud Tectonics. That’s right. Getting ready. The play doesn’t open until June 3 but still, shouldn’t PURE be well into rehearsals by now?
Sure, PURE is a highly professional theatre company with some fine actors on its [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Starred Book review
There’s finally a review of Philip Glass’ new work Book of Longing from its Friday night world premiere at Toronto’s Luminato Arts Festival. Writing for the Toronto Star, columnist Greg Quill seems to have mixed feelings about the work, which had Leonard Cohen in attendance for its opening. Cohen’s new book of poetry and drawings, [...]
Music man
Thursday morning’s tribute concert to Gian Carlo Menotti played to a Sottile Theatre that was stuffed to the exit signs with memorializers and, let’s be frank, those who didn’t care much about Menotti one way or the other but were only too happy to take in a free concert by the SFO. I’d wager 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 [...]