Mr. Mac, working in drag but not in drag clichés, has the ease and bantering skills of a veteran stand-up comic, yet he can shift effortlessly to a more somber tone when he wants to drive home a message. His mastery in this one-man show is all the more impressive when you know that he is alternating “Be(a)st” with “The Young Ladies of …,” an equally demanding solo work inspired by letters his father received when stationed in Vietnam.

Dan Wakin, the classical music reporter for The New York Times, is in Italy covering the Festival of Two Worlds, the counterpart to Charleston’s Spoleto Festival USA. He writes that the two festivals are considering sharing an orchestra next year, at a cost that was smaller than first thought. As for an opera, which was the big news during this year’s American festival, that’s off the table.

Mr. [Giorgio] Ferrara [director of the Festival of Two Worlds] estimated that the total cost would be roughly $300,000 to maintain the orchestra. “The numbers aren’t so stratospheric,” he said. That is something of a turnabout from the festivals’ initial announcement of plans to cooperate, in April, when he suggested that bringing the American orchestra here would be too expensive. At the time, talk was of sharing an opera production, but that is off the table for the immediate future [italics mine]. Perhaps a Charleston production from next summer could be brought here, Mr. Ferrara said, or vice versa.

In Charleston this year, news of the so-called “reunification” of the two festivals had many in a tizzy, including The Post and Courier’s Dottie Ashley. Problem is, Ashley took language couched in ambiguity to be the language of certainty. When Nigel Redden, director of the American festival, discussed “exploring” options, he was hedging his bets, as he ought to when talking to the media.

If an opera is off the table, what then is the significance of “reunification” beyond the symbolic? Sharing an opera was the cornerstone of the festivals’ partnership before Gian Carlo Menotti left in a huff in 1993. It was what gave the American festival a certain swagger, a glamorous sense of international cosmopolitanism. But now, with this latest news from Italy — that an opera is off the table for the time being — calls into question the whole notion of “reunification.”

It also underscores the absence of a kind of journalistic skepticism when it comes to reporting about the arts. As I note in this post prior to the start of this year’s festival, the press release announcing the alleged reunification does not say they will share operas.

It says that they “agreed to explore” the idea. It doesn’t say that the American festival will reunite with its Italian sister. The press release says that they “announced plans for the structure of a partnership [italics mine] between the two festivals.”

There’s a difference between a partnership and the structure of a partnership.

Nigel Redden, director of Spoleto Festival USA, was equally cagey in an interview yesterday with City Paper: “We are going to announce some kind of plan, if that’s the word, some kind of framework, for collaboration in the 2009 festival.”

So it seems a bit of caution is to be used until we know for sure what this news means. Bottomline: They will not share money, organizational structure, and many other resources. The “reunification” still appears to be largely symbolic, something, to be sure, that has value unto itself, but something that shouldn’t be over- or understated.

Of course, there’s more to Charleston than Spoleto and Piccolo Spoleto. Much more.

That’s why I invite you to switch tracks with me, as I resume writing for Unscripted, City Paper’s blog about the arts, culture, ideas, and news about the arts in Charleston and beyond.

We’ll be talking, among many other things, a lot in the coming months about the city’s major venue problem — more artists making art than there are venue for them to make it. So please join us.

The final tally is $2.86 million in sales.

A total of 73,157 tickets were sold this year, down from 73,390 last year.

This year 70,257 tickets were in single ticket sales while 2,900 were in group sales.

In 2007, single tickets amounted to 69,690 while group sales added up to 3,700.

There’s not much difference between this year and last, so fears of the recession affecting tourism and the festival may have been overestimated. Still, one can surmise that tourists and travelers made their Spoleto plans far in advance, during a time before gas began flirting with $4 per gallon. There’s cause for worry in future festivals if we can’t find an alternative to fossil fuels.

Along with other ebbs and flows of arts financing, Spoleto Festival USA officials predict that the organization will be in the red by the end of the fiscal year. It could be more, but for now they say the deficit will be about $292,000. It will be the first time Spoleto has run a deficit in more than a decade.

It’s finally over.

Last night at Middleton Place was a terrific cap to this year’s Spoleto Festival.

We’ve seen a lot this year. Some expected, some unexpected, a lot of it memorable, all of it worth doing all over again.

But not for another year.

Meanwhile, it’s time to see what we’ve accomplished.

Here’s the breakdown of what we’ve done, says our resident web genius Josh Curry (who also took the above photo; he’s our resident photog genius, too).

An estimated 5,000-6,000 people read Spoleto Buzz

The tally for Spoleto Buzz, Eargasms, and Spoleto Party Blog:
— 388 posts (including archives) were read
— 18,388 times
— 980 views per day on average

A comparative tally for all of City Paper’s blogs since May 23:

In 2007: 308,967 hits from 16,768 visits

In 2008: 742,000 hits from 58,396 visits

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Created by London theater company 1927, Devil is a melange of 20th-century styles — silent film, pantomime, Gothic horror, stop-action animation — that is wholly of our time. It draws from the absurdist tradition of Beckett and Ionesco and the surreal frights of Kubrick (they love The Shining) and Lynch (They love Eraserhead, too; in fact, animator Paul Barritt thinks it’s hilarious). Most of all it feels new — the settings, the sensibilities, the ironies. And it’s funny. That is, until it’s not anymore, which is when the depth of Devil takes on a whole new unpredictable dimension. It’s easily my top choice as best of the festival. 1927’s run was far too short. I hope the group returns in Spoleto seasons to come.

the break/s
Another too-short run was Joseph’s the break/s. It’s innovation was putting hip-hop into a theatrical setting. A DJ, MC, and drum kit accompanied Joseph’s touching monologue about his search for a singular identity amid forces that aim to choose identity for him. Joseph taps into the intellectual tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois while coming to terms with the righteous anger of Chuck D. the break/s also featured video footage of interviews on themes Joseph discusses.

Sadly, video weakened the show. It detracted from Joseph’s fine dancing. His strength is his poetry and psychological sophistication: He’s able to evoke empathy without evoking pity. He never casts himself in the light of a victim, making his dream of finding himself feel like a heroic aspiration. When he solves problems of integrating video into his show, Joseph will achieve a new level of synthesis — a portrayal of a uniquely American experience (i.e., Du Bois’ “double consciousness“) without succumbing to the fatalism of a uniquely American tragedy (i.e., slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacy, et al.)

The Cody Rivers Show
This was a Piccolo Fringe production, a return engagement from last year. Those who saw the show at Theatre 99 probably have had a hard time explaining what it is — or what it’s about. It’s not improv. It’s not sketch comedy. Comedy comes first and foremost. The ultimate goal for Mike Mathieu and Andrew Connor is to make you laugh. How we get to that goal, though, is where the innovation is.

You might call it comic theater of sweat. “Comic,” because it’s about comedy. “Theater,” because it uses those conventions: setting, character, time, motivation, narrative arc. The settings are vignettes, ambiguous and smart. The characters are more like caricatures. Simple but emotional motivations. These bleed into a narrative arc. One situation spills into another until they come full circle.

I say “sweat” because the show is physical. Mathieu and Connor sweat a lot. Movement and the comic opportunities that stem from movement are integral to The Cody Rivers Show. Mathieu and Connor each have backgrounds in dance. Connor told that he and Mathieu think in terms of movement — the concepts they conjure up, the directions they go in, and the conclusions they come to are often inspired by the kinds of movement they choose to exploit.

For instance, their “Face-to-Face Theater” bit. The movement is running, but it looks like it’s in slow-motion. They contrast the slow movement with soft squeaky voices, as if being fast-forwarded on a cassette tape. Combine this with a question mark and exclamation point painted on their faces, and you have an ambiguous setting that keep the audience off balance — a great opportunity for comedy.

In “Face-to-Face Theater,” they are theatricals believing they have pioneered a whole new kind of theater. They pick an audience member — you were screwed if you were in the front row — and give that person all of their attention: the movement, the earnest faces, the questions and exclamations. It’s so socially awkward that you’re compelled to laugh. It’s so damned goofy, you’re compelled to laugh.

Like the rest of the show, it makes no sense. They’re not trying to make sense. It’s absurd (though it’s never creepy and scary like Devil). And that’s partly why it’s funny. We in the audience rush to fill in the spaces that make no sense. Then at some point down the line, it starts to make (a kind of) absurd sense. In the meantime, we give up control of our imaginations to these brilliant comic innovators.

The Great War
At one point in Hotel Modern’s puppet theater production, calamities ensue on a huge scale. Mass death raised the tension so high I wasn’t aware of it. Mustard gas was spilling over the trenches in No Man’s Land and killing French soldiers by the legion. They could wear gas masks to protect themselves, but the Germans had mixed another chemical in with the mustard gas that made their targets vomit. They’d puke into their masks and asphyxiate. Then there’s the narration of a letter by a French soldier named Prospere. Such terror in his voice. The tension was high, that is, until I saw a huge human hand.

It was that of Herman Helle, a co-founder of Hotel Modern. He was changing the scene in his miniature tableau of the Western Front during World War I. As he did, the image of his hand and the scene he was manipulating was projected onto a large movie screen in front of the audience. I was surprised by how intense the feeling of relief was. Seeing his hand, seeing the architect of his artifice, was a welcomed reminder that what I was watching wasn’t real. That is was once real, but is not any longer.

Relief then turned to a flash of despair. On the movie screen, the audience could see Helle taking his puppets — really, green and gray plastic toy soldiers of the kind any boy would play with — and laying them down in the mud. The hand poured a green slime over them. The hand pushed them further into the muck. Then the hand left them there and they lingered between the frames of the big screen. It was as if we were witnessing these faceless, nameless bodies decomposing in time.

There was nothing we could do. Such is the power of puppet theater. It was dramatic reminder of how chaotic the world was for these young men. Why have hope? When the hand of God is as work, what is there to do? When the hand of God instructs you to die, you die. There’s no way to capture what these troglodytes felt like, but Hotel Modern provided an affecting facsimile.

The entire effect of The Great War was tension — between the artifice and the creation of the artifice, between scales large and small, between the fact that these were toys, really, and the fact that they had the feeling of experiencing something horrible.

I was told later that war is still a very personal thing to the Dutch. They experienced war as soldiers or civilians. They passed down stories to their children and grandchildren. War and its collateral damage is no mere abstraction. It’s intimate, which is abundantly evident in this innovative theater production.

1. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

2. Low Tide Hotel (yes, this is a Piccolo Spoleto performance)

3. The Great War by Hotel Modern

4. Amistad

5. Monkey: Journey to the West

6. Donna Uchizono Company (dance)

7. the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Joseph

8. The Cody Rivers Show (Piccolo)

9. The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac

10. The Burial at Thebes by the Nottingham Playhouse

11. Heddy Maalem’s The Rite of Spring

12. Shantala Shivalingappa

13. Cloud Tectonics (Piccolo)

14. La Cenerentola

15. Ballet Du Grand Theatre De Geneve

16. Boston Ballet

17. Laurie Anderson’s Homeland

Turns out she didn’t. Thanks to a combination of staffing issues, time crunch, and ignorance on her part, Moryl booked Wayang Modern “against her better judgment,” she said, for Piccolo’s family-friendly Spotlight series at the New Tabernacle Fourth Baptist Church on Elizabeth Street. If she had it to do all over again, she would have made it a special event with a later showtime and of course made it clear that this may look like happy stuff for kids, but it’s really not, no, it’s really not at all.

I’m sure there are some pissed off parents out there as well as others angered by this violation of truth in advertising, but there is a bright side. Moryl told me that she takes complete responsibility for the debacle. She could have deflected blame — toward staff (her director of operations quit amid bookings for this year’s Piccolo), to Cormier (and it looks like the puppeteer was a little bit on the oblique side of things when it came to explaining what Wayang Modern was all about).

But she didn’t.

“It’s ultimately my responsibility,” Moryl said.

From my perspective, from that of an arts journalist accustomed to people in positions of civic leadership avoiding the burdens of civic leadership — that is, accountability — that counts as a bright side. She blew it this time, but don’t we all sometimes? She’s giving us reason to trust her to take our concerns seriously.

The year will mark Wadsworth’s 80th birthday and the 50th consecutive season in which he has curated chamber music, beginning with Gian Carlo Menotti’s Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.

“We will miss Charles and look forward to celebrating his birthday and his tremendous artistic contributions,” said Paula Edwards, a spokesperson for the American festival, who contacted City Paper this morning.

Dottie Ashley wrote about it for this morning’s issue of the daily paper.

The announcement comes amid an array of signals during this festival that suggested that Wadsworth was preparing to step down.

The first was the appointment of Geoff Nuttall, violinist for the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Spoleto’s ensemble in residence for many years, as associate artistic director of the chamber series. Wadsworth had never required an associate director in all his years of programming the series.

Then came a quote in The Post and Courier in which Wadsworth said that Nuttall was a suitable candidate to continue the mission of the chamber music series. In noting this, Wadsworth suggested that he’d been considering retirement.

An email to a Spoleto spokesperson asking if Nuttall will be appointed the new director of the chamber music series has not been returned yet. If that’s the case, then Nuttall will have some big and very fashionable shoes to fill. More importantly, he will face the challenge of Wadsworth’s cult of personality.