CHLOE WYMA ON THE ART OF AGNES PELTON

AGNES PELTON was fifty years old when she left New York for the village of Cathedral City, six miles southeast of Palm Springs in the California desert. By 1932, a conspiracy of sun, sand, and settler-colonial ideology had made the state a mecca for visionaries and seekers, attracted by landscapes seemingly unspoiled by human intervention, temporalities seemingly unburdened by the past. In Peltons 1941 painting Future, obscure shadows part to reveal two stone towers. Suggestive of those that marked the towns entrance, they float just above the horizon and flank a distant lavender hill. Overhead, four little portals arranged in a cruciform pattern perforate the bleached sky. Pelton wrote that the work represented a kind of Pilgrims Progress. Through darkness + oppression, across a stony desert and through a symbolic arch is seen a mountain of vision, above which open by degrees, windows of illumination.

The first solo show devoted to Pelton in about a quarter century, Desert Transcendentalist opened last year at the Phoenix Art Museum (where it was organized by chief curator Gilbert Vicario) and on March 13 travels to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (where it will be overseen by curator Barbara Haskell). Its arrival in Manhattan has been prepared by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museums record-busting 201819 retrospective of Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint, to whom Pelton will likely be compared. Both artists put their academic training to work in accomplished yet conventional landscapes, reserving abstraction to convey their vision of a reality beyond the material world. They also drew on overlapping occult sources and shared a decentered view of their authorial agency, seeing themselves as conduits for spiritual forces rather than as autonomous creators. Their contemporary reception has coincided with a surge of institutional interest in underknown women artists and with a broader cultural mainstreaming of astrology, witchcraft, and alternative spirituality (a phenomenon not overlooked at the Guggenheim gift shop, which stocked Ouija boards, tarot cards, and other esoterica during the run of the af Klint show). That said, Peltons organic language of evolutionary processes differs from the diagrammatic tendency of much of af Klints work, and each artist deserves to be considered on her own terms (one shudders at the prospect of cringey epithets like the Coachella Hilma af Klint). The comparison is nonetheless instructive. While af Klint and Pelton were steeped in the heady arcana of their historical moment, their contemporary reception is very much a symptom of our own, speaking to an exhaustion with the art-historical canon and a hunger for meaning outside the domain of empirical data and official institutions.

Born in 1881 to American parents in Stuttgart, Germany, Pelton moved with her family to Brooklyn when she was seven. Timorous, shy, and plagued by neurasthenic episodes and mysterious ailments, she grew up in the long shadow of the nineteenth centurys most notorious sex scandal. In 1872, free-love advocate, spiritualist, and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhullrunning on the Equal Rights Party ticket with Frederick Douglassrevealed that renowned pastor and social reformer Henry Ward Beecher was living in concubinage with Agness grandmother Elizabeth Tilton, who was married to a prominent newspaper editor and abolitionist. The ensuing adultery trial rocked progressive Brooklyn and ruined the Tilton family. Agness mother, Florence, was sent away to Germany, where she married William Pelton, the expatriate failson of a Louisiana plantation owner. He died when Agnes was nine, and Florence gave music lessons and took in boarders to make ends meet. From the time of puberty, Pelton recalled, I was much inclined to melancholy and tears, which was probably aggravated by being the only child in a household of deeply religious and perhaps unnecessarily serious people.

Pelton began her formal study of art in 1895 at the Pratt Institute. Among her instructors was painter and educator Arthur Wesley Dow, who espoused the Japanese value of notan (the harmonious contrast of dark and light) and encouraged intuitive expression over mimetic verisimilitude. In the 1910s, his students Georgia OKeeffe and Max Weber would radicalize his ideas in adventurous abstractions, while Peltons output from this timecrepuscular idylls of willowy maidens adrift in grottoes and wooded landscapesclung to the late-Symbolist manner of Louis Michel Eilshemius, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Arthur B. Davies. These Imaginative Paintings, as the artist called them, were congenial to the tentative modernism then emerging in New York. They were exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, among other venues, and attracted patrons including Greenwich Village salon-nire Mabel Dodge Luhan, who would expose Pelton to the desert when she invited her to stay at her estate in Taos, New Mexico, in 1919.

A few months prior to this trip, Pelton wrote in her journal that her Imaginative Paintings were beginning to feel insincere, not real. She wanted her art to reflect perfect consciousness and Divine Reality. As art historian Erika Doss points out in her contribution to the Desert Transcendentalist catalogue, these words were lifted from the writing of spiritual leader Helena Blavatsky. Famed cofounder of the ancestral New Age faith theosophy, Blavatsky held that the worlds many belief systems were based on an atavistic religion organized around a single, metaphysical Absolute. Synthesizing elements of Neoplatonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and other traditions, theosophy aimed to elevate and enlighten humanity by retrieving this forgotten universal knowledge. Like af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and other moderns, Pelton was drawn to the creeds idealist teleology of human perfectibility, finding in it an exotic alternative to scientism, materialism, and mainstream Christianity.

When her mother died in 1921, Pelton, now forty, moved to the abandoned Hayground Windmill near Water Mill, Long Island. There she painted The Ray Serene, 1925, a gestural, Kandinsky-esque churn of psychedelic vapors and whiplash curves, designating it My First Abstraction on the back of the canvas. Two works from the following year cathect on the form of a luminous sphere, enveloped in a tornado of gesture in Being and embubbled by nacreous globules in The Fountains. In the latter work, the multiplying rondures and the yellow solar disk overhead suggest Blavatskys successor Annie Besants description of the cosmos as a mighty solar system, the sun representing the LOGOS and, coming outwards, orb after orb, each orb representing a plane of the universe. Cowritten with self-styled clairvoyant Charles Webster Leadbeater, Besants 1901 treatise Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation provided Pelton with a symbology of colors and shapes believed to possess transhistorical meanings. As scholar Nancy Strow Sheley noted in her dissertation on Pelton, her 1928 painting Ecstasy features the symbol of the curving hook, identified by Besant and Leadbeater with selfishness and greed. The artist explains in an accompanying poem that the cluster of yellow tendrils represents a blooming flower harassed by the ugly hook of darkness, the scythe-like form lurking near the compositions bottom edge.

The same year she painted Ecstasy, Pelton traveled to California for eight months and became immersed in a South Pasadena spiritualist colony called the Glass Hive. She sketched lotuses, symbols of self-renunciation, at the Huntington Botanical Gardens. The flower would eventually mature into the golden inflorescence presiding over Ahmi in Egypt, 1931, a delirious nocturne replete with a white swan, strange conical mountains, and swirling celestial activity.

On her return to New York, Peltons style, which had gurgled with Heraclitean flux and painterly incident, became more serene, hard-edge, and resolved. Symmetry, horizon lines, and landscape elements returned to her compositions, which began to suggest illusionistic depths and expanses. In Star Gazer, 1929, a pale-green chalice shelters a purple ovate form that evokes a schematic standing figure or budding flower. High above in the evening sky, a tiny six-pointed star represents Venus, a planet of antipatriarchal and anticlerical significance in theosophical cosmology. According to Blavatsky, Venus, the sister planet of our Earth, was sacrificed to the ambition of our little globe to show the latter the chosen planet of the Lord. She became the scapegoat, the Azaziel of the starry dome, for the sins of the Earth, or rather for those of a certain class in the human familythe clergywho slandered the bright orb by associating it with satanism.

Pelton labored to reconstruct her interior visions on canvas, realizing numinous tissues and lapidary volumes through successive glazes over months or even years.

The allure of the arcane was central to the af Klint cult that flourished across Instagram feeds last year, but the Swedish artists recourse to extrinsic systems of meaning posed a problem for some critics and historians. Taking af Klint seriously as an artist, in my view, actually requires us to take some critical distance from the mysticism that might have enabled her to make such innovative work, Briony Fer wrote in the Guggenheim catalogue. To focus only on the occult symbolic meanings of her work leads to an interpretive dead end. Like af Klints abstractionswhich Guggenheim visitors could experience on psychic tours where they practice[d] receiving spirit messages through select paintingsPeltons court para-aesthetic modes of reading that might open up meaning for some and close it down for others. In an effort to explore a wide range of possible responses to the artists work, Sheley showed the painting Challenge, 1940, to an expert in occult imagery, who decrypted the picture sign by sign, identifying the star flower as an indication of good character, the milky, pod-like form as a symbol of maternity unrealized, and each inky stipple as a cipher for a decision influenced by men in [Peltons] life. Such literal iconographic correspondences are, of course, anathema to modernism, with its emphases on subjective expression, self-criticism, and hermeneutic indeterminacy. For Pelton, the final significance of her art ultimately lay neither in the sensuous matter of the paintings themselves nor in any hermetic doctrine encapsulated within them, but in telegraphing between the phenomenal world and an empyreal nonsite at the edges of representation and consciousness. I feel somewhat like the keeper of a little lighthouse, Pelton wrote, the beam of which goes farther than I know, and illumines for others more than I can see.

Pelton labored to reconstruct her interior visions on canvas, realizing numinous tissues and lapidary volumes through successive glazes over months or even years. She eschewed improvisation and seriality. With the exception of her last work, Light Center, a luminous egg form veiled in a purple penumbra (painted first in 194748, then again in 196061), she never repeated a composition. She did, however, draw on a consistent body of images that included orbs, urns, mountains, and, perhaps most important, fire.

In 1930, Pelton befriended composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar (n Daniel Chennevire), who became her spiritual guide and sympathetic critic. Steeped in Bergsonian vitalism and Jungian analysis as well as theosophy, Rudhyar was a principal theorist of what he called humanistic astrology, which strove to reconcile star divinations deterministic conception of human agency with depth psychology. It was likely through him that Pelton, who had been fascinated by the eruption of the volcano Klauea when visiting Hawaii in 1924, became a devotee of Agni Yoga, a neo-theosophical discipline devoted to the cosmic, purifying energy of fire. In two works from 1930, she imagines its essence as incandescent heat, manifested as an acanthus of flames in The Voice and as a shaft of Promethean radiance in the formidably minimal White Fire. Fires in Space, 1938, one of her most visceral compositions, scatters twelve conflagrations across a field of unstructured darkness, flickers of illumination in the abyss.

If Peltons fantasias at times seem as much in dialogue with Disney as with Kandinsky, its not disparaging her to say so, any more than its disparaging Kandinsky or af Klint to note their engagements with occultism.

When Peltons landlord sold the Hayground Windmill in 1932, she headed for California. Two years earlier, writes Doss, Time magazine was already reporting a flourishing of cults, of religious novelties, and new fashions in faiths in the state. Initially planning on a brief trip, Pelton stayed for the rest of her life, seeking painterly forms through modes of heightened consciousness like trance, prayer, and meditation. In Messengers, 1932, her first Cathedral City abstraction, a blue moon rises over a desert horizon and progenerates a shimmering urn crowned by stylized palms, evoking the thatched structures of the areas indigenous Cahuilla people. Like the glassy vessel of Star Gazer, this central motif appears to levitate from the bottom of the canvasa transcendent motion Rudhyar described as upward rush or upward aspiration.

Peltons asceticism, spiritual intensity, and isolation from mainstream centers of cultural production might tempt one to romanticize her as a hermit. In fact, she made lasting friendships with her neighbors, hosted studio visits and art exhibitions, and continued to show her work in New York and other US cities. Through Rudhyar, she began a correspondence in 1933 with Raymond Jonson, cofounder of the Transcendental Painting Group, a circle of southwestern artists committed to carry[ing] painting beyond the appearance of the physical world. The same year, she lent fourteen paintings to an exhibition Jonson arranged at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. Also included was the work of OKeeffe, to whom Pelton was often and unsurprisingly compared. Pelton, likely aware that their overlapping social networks, shared inspiration in nature, and midlife relocations to the western desert might invite conflation, teased out the differences between them in her journal: [Her] source is not the [same] source as AP [Agnes Pelton] . . . they are not seen primarily inside, in the realm of Ether (as I call it). . . . The joy [of OKeeffes work] is her own subjective reaction, the joy of spreading its rebound over the canvas for her external eye.

Whereas OKeeffes biomorphic forms were overdetermined by the sexualized framing (one that the artist unequivocally rejected) imposed on them by her partner Alfred Stieglitz, Peltons work seems less available to carnal interpretations. She never married; her sexuality remains a matter of speculation, and her squeamishness on the subject reflected the Victorian attitudes with which she was raised. The physicality and violent thrust (per her description) of Seeds of Date, 1935, one in a series of commercial painting she made for a fruit farm in California, caused her some retroactive distress. Pelton resolved to avoid sexual imagery in her abstractions. When a form appears to have a phallic resemblance, she wrote, use the force it represents without the form. (For the most part, her sublimations were successful, with the exception of the conspicuously erectile Ascent [aka Liberation], 1946.)

Even in Cathedral City, one could not live on divine inspiration alone. When the death of an uncle, who for years had helped her out with regular checks, left her in precarious financial straits, Pelton began painting plein air desert scenes for the tourist trade. Letters to her friends speak of chronic illness, money problems, and creative frustrations, particularly the strain of balancing her commercial production with her abstractions. In 1932, she painted two mountain pictures, San Gorgonio in the Spring, a picturesque view of flowering cacti and a distant snowcapped massif, and Mount of Flame, a hieratic peak scaled by little tongues of flame, its summit erupting in a spray of white mist: a symbol of the transformation of heat into Light. To return to such abstractions after her landscapes, she once wrote, was like painting with a moths wing and with music instead of paint.

Was the boundary between picturing the material world and her inner vision as hard as Pelton imagined? Not so in Winter, 1933, a bizarre, almost clumsy sublation of abstraction and figure painting, with its poshlost doves foregrounding an astronomical pink corolla blossoming from the sea. The work epitomizes the alluring wrongness of Peltons paintings, which look like modern art but also like design, advertising, and pop culture. There is something distinctly Moderne in her line, her bulbous yet tensile contours, while her curlicues and fronds and wings are reminiscent of interwar textiles and wallpaper. The glowing ovoid form in Light Center could be a sconce on a bathroom wall; the swan in Ahmi in Egypt could have been cut out of a magazine. Her polychrome hazes suggest neon on a rainy night. To a contemporary eye, works like Idyll, 1952a desert landscape brightly detourned by two translucent parabolic forms that refuse to quite make sense either as objects in pictorial space or as gestural marksmight register as virtuosic exemplars of good bad painting, but the elements of badness dont collapse into kitsch, at least not entirely, nor do they make her pictures any less compelling as explorations of inner worlds and esoteric visions.

If Peltons fantasias at times seem as much in dialogue with Disney as with Kandinsky, its not disparaging her to say so, any more than its disparaging Kandinsky or af Klint to note their engagements with occultism. Theosophy is one of modernisms limit concepts; so is kitsch. (And these two limits might not themselves be cleanly distinct. With its baroque eclecticism and spiritualist trappings, theosophy, one might say, was already kitsch.) Peltons paintings are gorgeously weird explorations of these limitsperhaps none more gorgeous, weird, even destructive than Day, 1935, painted after her exposure to the geometric work of Jonson and the Transcendental Painting Group. A vertical rectangle, scandalously Euclidean and infilled with a cool blue fade, establishes itself on a misty starlit mountain, canceling its illusionism. Although this is the closest she would come to true geometric abstraction, writes the late Michael Zakian, who curated Peltons first retrospective in 1995, the central rectangle is not a pure, autonomous form. A flow of pearly, Peltonian fluid bursts from its side, concluding in plumes of filmy opalescence. The artist called the shape the fountain with the open door. Its negative metaphysics is an invitation inside, to the realm of Ether.

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, March 13June 28.

Chloe Wyma is an associate editor atArtforum.

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CHLOE WYMA ON THE ART OF AGNES PELTON - Artforum

Oakland Universitys School of Music, Theatre and Dance presented Facing Our Truth: 10-Minute Plays on Trayvon, Race, and Privilege from Dec 5-7 in the Varner Lab Theatre in Varner Hall. The collection of plays included works by Dan OBrien, Winter Miller, Dominique Morisseau, Mona Mansour and Tala Manassah, Marcus Gardley, and A. Rey Pamatmat. I selected Facing Our Truth because I was struck by the raw honesty and complexity of the writing by such a beautifully diverse collection of accomplished playwrights, said Director Kelli Crump, a lecturer at Oakland University. I think our students can relate to a subject matter that was relevant to young people then as it is still relevant to young people today and they have a strong desire to be a part of this national conversation.

On Dec. 15, several of SMTD faculty members, including Alta Dantzler, Amanda Blaikie, and Amanda Sabelhaus joined alum Alexander Walker, director of the Dakota High School Varsity Choir, to perform in Joy To You at Trinity Lutheran Church in Utica.

On Jan. 12, OU College of Arts and Sciences faculty discussed the historical, social, and musical circumstances surrounding Francis Poulencs opera Dialogues of the Carmelites, which was performed from Jan. 16-19 in Varner Recital Hall. Participants included: David Kidger, associate professor of musicology; Victoria Shively, special lecturer in music history and theory; Ashley Voeks, visiting assistant professor of French; Sara Chapman Williams, associate professor of history. The story (of Dialogues of the Carmelites) follows the arc of a fictionalized character, Blanche de la Force, though the other nuns portrayed in the play were real-life individuals, said Dr. Drake Dantzler, director and associate professor of music at OU. It is a meditation on faith, fear, death and redemption.

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The Michigan Music Conference, which was held Jan. 17-19 in Grand Rapids, featured a performance of David Maslanka's Concerto for Alto Saxophone by Jeffrey Heisler (saxophone) and I-Chen Yeh (piano) with the Ann Arbor Huron High School Symphony Band; as well as dance alumni/students performing with Eisenhower Dance Detroit during Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring with the Troy High School Symphonic Band (conductor Brian Nutting, an OU music Ph.D. student). The conference also included sessions and panel discussions, presented by music faculty members Lauri Hogle and Mike Mitchell (2020 MMC Session Headliner); performances by Huron High School A Cappella Choir (alumnus Kent Wattleworth, conductor) and the Walled Lake Northern Chamber Singers (alumna Ashley Ward, conductor).

Anthony Guest, associate professor of theatre and chair of the Department of Theatre, performed with Special Lecturer Beth Guest and students Stanley Misevich, Madison Wiley and Sam Sommer at the New Works Festival, held Jan. 17-19 at the Flint Repertory Theatre. They performed a stage reading of the new musical, "Talk To Me," which Anthony Guest directed.

A Chinese version of Teaching for Musical Understanding, a book by Distinguished Professor Emerita of Music Jackie Wiggins, was recently published. The book, which explains current research-based theories of how students learn in order to show prospective and practicing music teachers how to teach effectively, is used by music educators around the world.

SMTD Director Amy Hardison Tully discussed the new renovations to Varner Hall during the first-ever Alumni Town Hall and Reception on Jan. 24. The event was followed by a performance by Tony Award nominated Broadway star Josh Young, an assistant professor in Oakland Universitys School of Music, Theatre and Dance, who performed show tunes from the catalog of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Young will also be performing the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on April 14-15.

The Gryphon Trio, one of the worlds preeminent piano trios, returned to Oakland University with an all-Beethoven program on Jan. 26 in Varner Recital Hall on the OU campus. The program was presented in partnership with the Chamber Music Society of Detroit as part of its Beethoven 250th Anniversary celebration, which will continue on March 15 as the Chamber Music Society of Detroit presents the multi award-winning young Vera Quartet with pianist Meng-Chieh Liu. The program will include one of Beethovens early string quartets, the Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4; String Quartet No. 4 (Silent Temple) by University of Michigan composer Bright Sheng; and Csar Francks Piano Quintet in F minor.

Carly Uhrig, a music lecturer and marketing manager for Oakland Universitys School of Music, Theatre and Dance, has been selected to serve as a judge for the theme song contest during the I See You Awards, an annual celebration of low-budget independent filmmakers. The program was created by Terri Lee Chandler, film critic for WWJ Newsradio 950. We are looking for a song that will play during our highly-anticipated awards ceremony, Chandler said. But were not just looking for any song. Were looking for one that will help represent and grow our brand; one that is unique and grabs the listeners attention. The contest is open through May 15 and those who would like to submit an entry may do so on FilmFreeway.

The Oakland Area Saxophone Ensemble (OASE) performed on the Grosse Pointe Chamber Music Series at the War Memorial in Grosse Pointe on Feb. 1, while the quartet purple (Alex Sellers, Brant Ford, James Besaw, and Paige Grider) performed there on Feb. 16. Sellers has also been invited to perform at the NASA (North American Saxophone Alliance) National Conference, which will take place March 6-9 at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

Lynnae Lehfeldt, an associate professor of theatre at OU, performed in Blithe Spirit, which ran through Feb. 2 at Meadow Brook Theatre. The production received rave reviews, with Encore Michigan noting, Lynnae Lehfeldt is delightful as the over-the-top, down-to-earth medium, Madame Arcati; she is as proud of her craft as any skilled tradesman and twice as loud and Carole Azizian of The Oakland Press wrote that Lehfeldt gives an over-the-top performance as Madame Arcati. She waves her arms and dances around the Codomines perfectly appointed living room to throw herself into a trance, telling everyone that she experienced her first ectoplasmic manifestation when she was 5 years old.

Maggie Hinckley (BFA 17) played the role of Mary Jane in the Michigan premiere of Amy Herzogs Mary Jane, which ran Feb. 1, 2, 6-8 at the Actors Theatre Grand Rapids. Next, shell be in Macbeth with the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company.

The Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity of Oakland University was excited to welcome the newly formed Sigma Alpha Iota Colony of OU to share the stage as they presented An American Music Recital on Feb. 2. The student-led performance included individual and duet performances by members of each organization. SAI sang two choral pieces as an ensemble, as did PMA. The program closed with two choral pieces, combining sisters of SAI and brothers of PMA. Kevin Cornwell II, Erin Kurtz, and Blake Rosser conducted and Dr. Lauri Hogle, faculty advisor for the new SAI Colony, served as accompanist. Sigma Alpha Iota, a professional music fraternity for women, was officially accepted as a colony in December, by the National Executive Board of SAI. Angela Bonello serves as the colonys president.

The Department of Theatre presented William Shakespeares Macbeth a cautionary tale about the trappings of power and what happens when vaulting ambition takes priority over the people one is expected to govern in a sold-out run from Feb. 6-9, 13-16 in the Varner Studio Theatre on the OU campus. Blurring the line between the psychological and the supernatural, Macbeth traces the downfall of a respected soldier who, in collusion with his industrious wife, employs extreme measures to fulfill and counter the eerie prophecies of three weird sisters. The story has a fresh relevance amidst todays political and cultural climate, wrote Sarah Hovis, a reviewer with Rochester Media. And its bold proclamation is one wed be wise to listen to. You can read the entire review at http://www.rochestermedia.com.

Dr. Joseph Shively was appointed to serve as associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Im excited for and honored by the opportunity to continue to serve the students, faculty and staff of the College of Arts and Sciences, he said. Shively, an associate professor of music education, previously served as interim director of the College of Arts and Sciences and was the interim director of the School of Music, Theatre and Dance.

Karen Sheridan, professor of theatre, was appointed to the rank of Distinguished Professor following a unanimous vote by the Board of Trustees at the formal meeting on Feb. 10. The appointment is effective on Aug. 15, 2020. I think its great to have your work recognized and the amount of time that you spend and how much you care about the university, Sheridan said. I feel its very exciting that the arts are making an impact here at Oakland University. Im the third Distinguished Professor from the School of Music, Theatre and Dance, and I think its exciting when the university sees how much a part of the fabric of the university we are. Im excited to still be working here and to still be challenged by my students. Im delighted and honored. Its a nice group of people to be affiliated with. Sheridan is currently performing in the world premiere of 900 Miles to International Falls, which runs through March 1 at Williamston Theatre in Williamston, Mich., and will be directing George Bernard Shaws Major Barbara, which will run from April 16-18 at Oakland University.

The winners of the 2019-20 Oakland University Concerto Competition Brant Ford (saxophone), Catherine Hectman (piano), Danielle Maurer (mezzo-soprano) and Gillian Tackett (soprano) performed on Feb. 16 during the Oakland Symphony Orchestra 23rd Annual David Daniels Young Artists Concert at Varner Recital Hall. Named after Professor Emeritus David Daniels in recognition of his distinguished career at Oakland University and sustained commitment to teaching Oakland Universitys aspiring student musicians, the concert is always an annual highlight of the OSO season, said Gregory Cunningham, music director of the OSO and professor of orchestral and wind conducting at OU.

Assistant Professor of Music Alta Marie Boover and Applied Instructor Angela Theis were part of a concert series on Feb. 16 called Chamber Music at the Scarab Club: The Romantics from Schubert to Bacri. The concert featured romantic music by Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Medelssohn, Borodin and Nicolas Bacri.

On Feb. 20, graduating theatre students presented their BFA Musical Theatre and Acting Senior Showcase. Next up, they will take their showcases on the road. The musical theatre seniors will travel to New York City to perform on March 2 for casting directors, agents and managers. They will also participate in masterclasses and seminars with the industrys leading artists. The acting seniors will perform March 2 at Stage 773 in Chicago to local agents and casting directors. They will participate in a number of workshops at The Acting Studio, including classes that focus on improvisation, voice over and on-camera work, auditions, and a concentrated introduction to the theatre, film, and television industry in Chicago.

Brant Ford, a junior saxophone performance major, was recently named a semi-finalist for the North American Saxophone Alliance (NASA) Collegiate Solo Competition. The finals will be held at the NASA 2020 Biennial Conference at Arizona State University from March 6-9. Ford is one of 20 Collegiate saxophonists from North America (ages 18-26) selected to the live rounds selected by video recording application.

Theatre alumna Lily Talevski (BFA '18) played the role of Yitzhak in Detroit Public Theatres production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which ran through Feb. 29 in Hamtramck. "I've been wanting to work with the Detroit Public Theatre for years, so being able to come back to the mitten for such a special production was amazing, Talevski said. Working in Hamtramck has definitely been a game changer and highlight as well when my family emigrated to America in the late 60's, they owned a bakery in Detroit right by the border of Hamtramck as well as lived above it in the apartment buildings, so there's a lot of nostalgia driving down there everyday for me. Hedwig's story is incredible and playing Yitzhak with our amazing band makes me feel about as close as I can to being a rockstar. The book and the music are absolutely astounding and I will be in awe of John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask forever."

Music alumna and mezzo-soprano Krysty Swann is playing Mayme in the new opera, Intimate Apparel, in its Off-Broadway run at Lincoln Center Theaters Mitzi Newhouse Theater. One of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottages best known works, Intimate Apparel tells the story of a single African-American woman named Esther, who sews luxurious ladies undergarments. She begins writing to a suitor on the Panama Canal, but quickly realizes she is the only person she can rely on. Performances began Feb. 27 with an official opening marked for March 23. Distinguished Professor of Music John-Paul White, special lecturer Phyllis White, Distinguished Professor Emerita Jackie Wiggins and Professor Emeritus Robert Wiggins were in attendance. It has also been announced that Swann will be making her Metropolitan Opera debut in the role of Mrs Boucher in the highly anticipated premiere of Jake Heggies Dead Man Walking (premiering April 8, 2021). Distinguished Professor of Music John-Paul White, special lecturer Phyllis White, Distinguished Professor Emerita Jackie Wiggins and Professor Emeritus Robert Wiggins were in attendance.

The School of Music, Theatre and Dance will recognize distinguished students, alumni and community members with MaTilDa Awards on Monday, April 6. The MaTilDas are named to honor Matilda Dodge Wilson who donated the land on which Oakland University is built. This years recipients include alumni achievement awards for Ann Toomey (music), Lance Mier (theatre), Ralaya Rai Goshea (dance) and the Distinguished Community Service Award for Kevin Corcoran, Ph.D., dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. For a full list of this years award recipients, visit http://www.oakland.edu/smtd/community-engagement/matildas.

Ann Toomey, soprano, (BM '14) who is receiving this year's MaTilDa Award for Alumni Achievement in Music recently made her European debut at Philharmonie Berlin in Puccinis Suor Angelica, under the baton of Kirill Petrenko (Berliner Philharmoniker). The opera is currently streaming for free in their Digital Concert Hall at https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/concert/53056.

Dance Department faculty selected Alexa Donnellys work, Intervolve, which she created for her senior capstone project, was selected to be performed at the East-Central regional ACDA (American College Dance Association, which takes place March 1-4 and is attended by around 20 colleges from the region. It is a wonderful dance that uses intricate partnering that evolves into tangled limbs and spectacular lifts, said Thayer Jonutz, associate professor of dance. It was well received by the audience and audible gasps were heard as Alexas cast out of nowhere lifted each other in surprising ways. Intervolve will be performed in the Senior Concert series on March 12-14, along with the works of other seniors.

Ben Fuhrman, a lecturer of music technology and composition at Oakland University will be performing his piece,Particle Forge, at the MoxSonic festival in Missouri on March 7. Also, Fuhrmans piece, Xenoglossia for solo pipe organ, will premiere on March 28 as part of the Vital Organ Project concert at Ann Arbor's First Congregational Church. Fuhrman has also been busy writing software, including a Scanline Synthesis, which takes a photo and converts it to waveform values on a pixel by pixel basis.

Fuhrman will also be performing and presenting, along with other OU music faculty, during the 38th College Music Society (CMS) Great Lakes Conference, which will take place April 3-4 at Oakland University.

Devin Price (BFA 15) has just been cast as Wailin Joe in the musical Memphis, opening March 24 in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium at Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts in North Carolina. Music faculty John-Paul and Phyllis White recently met up with Devin at Top of the Rock in NYC.

Alyssa Primeau (BM '18) is the 40th Annual James Pappoutsakis Memorial Flute Competition prize winner. Primeau will graduate from Boston University in May 2020 with her masters degree in flute performance. Her teachers at OU included Detroit Symphony Orchestra flutists Sharon Sparrow and Jeffery Zook. For more information, visit http://www.pappoutsakis.org/

Detroit Symphony Piccoloist and Applied Instructor at OU Jeffery Zook will host a Mile High Piccolo Masterclass from July 10-12 at The Highland Center in Denver, Colo. For more information, visit http://www.jeffzook.com.

Music alumnus Jacob Voight is marching this spring with the Crossmen Drum and Bugle Corps, a member of the DCI (Drum Corps International). Another music alum, Michael Abel, who also marched DCI but as a member of the Phantom Regiment Drum and Bugle Corps, is now working with the Carmel High School Marching Band multiple time finalist and champion of Bands of America in Indiana.

JLBoone Photography, the photography company of OU alum Jessica Stasik, was recently announced as a winner of the 2020 WeddingWire Couples Choice Awards, an accolade representing the top wedding professionals across the board in quality, service, responsiveness, and professionalism reviewed by couples on WeddingWire.

Former OU Community Music student Marina Kondo, who studied voice with Elizabeth Medvinsky, made her debut as Anna in the first Broadway national tour of Disney's FROZEN: The Musical. Never let someones lack of imagination dictate your self-worth, your power, and your dreams, Kondo wrote on her Facebook page. I promise, believing is worth it. Who you already are is enough. And what you identify with is incredibly unique. Claim it. Love it. Use it. Show it loudly! I urge you to learn and dive deeper into your own culture. Youll be amazed at how empowering it is to know where you come from. Thank you to the @frozenbroadway team for seeing me for me. I am incredibly grateful to be here.

Coming Up:

Take Root one of OUs resident professional dance companies, co-founded and co-directed by OU dance faculty Thayer Jonutz and Ali Woerner performs March 6-7 in Varner Recital Hall. The March 7 performance will begin with a special presentation by Take Roots Dance for Parkinsons Disease Program and Arts Education Program.

IGNITE! Productions will present The World Goes Round (the music of Kander and Ebb) featuring work of faculty members Stephanie Michaels, director and Amanda Lehman, choreographer and current musical theatre seniors Annika Andersson, Josh Frink, Mackenzie Grosse, Alaina Whidby, and theatre alumnus Tony Sharpe (BFA 18). OU faculty members Dan Maslanka and Mark Kieme will also be featured in the shows band. The World Goes Round will be presented at The Berman Performing Arts Center at 2 p.m. on March 20 (sponsored by the Ethel Hyman and Rose Kaplan Foundation to bring musical programming to the elderly) and at 3 p.m. on March 22 (open to the public). Tickets are available at theBerman.org.

The March 24 Guitar Ensemble Concert will feature the premiere of music faculty member Terry Heralds Jovian Encounter for 5 Electric Guitars and Surround Sound Synthesizer, with projected images of Jupiter animated by Brian Bukantis. The work will be conducted by Victoria Shively.

This years Nightclub Cabarets will be held in downtown Rochester at the Hemmingway Room (139 S. Main Street.) Come laugh, cry and learn through glorious song and story as students share the age old tradition of cabaret, perhaps one of the greatest solo performing art forms. Reserved seating in advance is available at etix.com.

The new NafME Collegiate chapter of OU will be hosting others in the state for a workshop on April 11 and several of our students plan to attend the national NafME Collegiate music education advocacy day in Washington, D.C. in June.

Link:

Music, Theatre and Dance News: March 2020 - 2020 - School of Music, Theatre and Dance - News - OU Magazine - News at OU

The most famous crossdresser in the history of the world may be a young woman from 15th-century France, a person who arguably has had more words written about her (not to mention paintings, sculptures, and musical compositions) than anyone else.

Yes, we have been fascinated by Joan of Arc for a very good reason: She rose from obscurity to challenge the immense power of secular and religious institutions. She disdained women's clothing and a woman's traditional role while burnishing her image as a courageous and fearless female who refused to take second seat to anyone.

The celebrated Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was similarly affected and wrote the play Saint Joan, which is now on stage at the Ohio Shakespeare Festival in Akron. And it is a production that is well worth the short jaunt down Route 8.

As you may know, Joan was dubbed the Maid of Orleans and was put on trial by the Brits after her exploits on behalf of the French forces during the Hundred Years' War. When she rejected an offer of clemency in exchange for renouncing her beliefs, she was burned at the stake before her 20th birthday. But as a character says later, "Her heart would not burn, she is alive everywhere." And so she is.

It may not be too glib to observe that, if she were around today, Joan would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Like Greta Thunberg, our teenage climate-crisis Cassandra, Joan could not abide deceit and hypocrisy. And she would not be silenced or impeded from her goal.

Moreover, Joan receives specific and detailed direction from voices that she knows for a fact come from God. She has no need for the trappings of the Church and all its rules and rigmarole when she has a hotline to the Man, Himself. When it comes to having the courage of their convictions, Joan and Greta are a matched pair.

Observed from that angle, Saint Joan has a very contemporary vibe. And this lively production under the direction of Nancy Cates avoids most of the chuckholes this material can fall into, while providing a number of impactful and clarifying moments. Plus swordfights!

That said, even in this lightly abridged version, the layering of religious, philosophical and legal palaver can be, at times, a bit much. Shaw was a man who never settled for one word when 20 were possible, and he wields his prolix proclivities with unstinting ardor.

Of course, the chances for pontification are many, since Joan has a wide variety of antagonists. These include Peter Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais (a nicely tight-ass Ryan Zarecki who also plays the stud Lord Chamberlain), the Archbishop of Reims (the splendid actor Brian Pedaci who, in this role and as the Executioner, tends to swallow the ends of his sentences), and Dumois, the Bastard (Joe Pine, admirably intense as always).

The imposing Inquisitor is played by Jim Fippin, who executes a nifty acting grand jete from his earlier portrayal of a lickspittle Steward to become the main man controlling Joan's fate. Double-cast as both the Steward's boss Robert de Baudricourt and as the Earl of Warwick, Terry Burgler handles his chores efficiently but with little clear delineation of the two roles. And James Rankin is most affecting in the conflicted role of John de Stogumber, the chaplain who evolves from fierce accuser to broken man after he witnesses Joan's immolation.

The major comedy relief comes in the persona of Charles, the Dauphin, who is given a stellar turn by Geoff Knox. Charlie disclaims any interest in being an adult in the world, asserting that he chooses not to be a father, a son, a military hero or a leader of any kind. He becomes a work-in-progress for Joan, who tries to implant a functional spine into the amoeba-like Dauphin. And it's a treat to watch Knox slither and slide among all the stalwart dudes in his court as he tries to avoid his responsibilities.

Of course, the key part in this play is Joan herself, and Tess Burgler is more than up to the task. Early on, her Joan bubbles with teenage passion as she wheedles her way up the chain of command, perplexing the older males in power with her unabashed optimism and boundless self-confidence.

But Burgler's performance is launched to another level in the second act, when the captured Joan is tried by church officials. Bruised and slumped on a stool, she essays a dicey three-stage transition from wise-cracking defendant to totally melted-down victim and finally to the ennobled character who lives in our dreams. It's a fine, well-crafted piece of acting.

As an atheist, Shaw pokes fun at the church bigwigs and exposes their corrupt nature. But he also gives them credit for sometimes trying to see both sides, even through the cloud of their dogma, as they try to extend to Joan a bit of mercy.

But those efforts end up strapped to a stake set ablaze, along with our protagonist. While we don't see that conflagration, its effects are apparent in the trembling accounts of onlookers who are sure to be haunted by that event for life as the Church itself was for eons, before canonizing Saint Joan 100 years ago this May.

Christine Howey, former stage actor and director, is executive director of Literary Cleveland.

Read more:
Shaw's 'Saint Joan' Comes Alive at the Ohio Shakespeare Festival - Cleveland Scene

By Eleanor Ringel Cater

You could say Gordon Gekko was wrong. Greed isnt just good.

Its hilarious and ultimately quite sobering.

Steve Coogan stars as the aptly-named Sir Richard McReadie (tabloid-dubbed McGreedy), a vain, selfish, manipulative fashion tycoon who made his fortune thanks to questionable wheeling-dealing and sweatshops in Sri Lanka.

A scene from Greed

When we meet him, hes preparing for his 60thbirthday bash an obscenely gaudy Gladiator themed party on Mykonos. Therell be togas, orgies, celebrity look-alikes, even a slightly mangy lion named Clarence.

For entertainment, Elton John, if they can afford him; Tom Jones if not. It must be costing a fortune, notes his tough-minded Irish ma (Shirley Henderson).

It is, he replies. Thats the whole point.

Interspersed among the lavish preparations (whatare they to do about the unsightly Syrian refugees ruining the beach view) is a brief history of the birthday boys rise from privileged twit to obnoxious zillionaire. Through the eyes of his bearded biographer (David Mitchell), a man whod be much more comfortable writing about George Bernard Shaw, we see how McReadie turned failure into triumph as he bullied his way through bankruptcy and bad press to the top of the rag trade.

Yet its not all fun and games.

A Triangle Factory-type fire in Asia will have repercussions down the road. And McReadies personal life is in shambles. His smart, sexy ex-wife (Isla Fisher) seems to have things in hand (her own mega-yacht anchored in Monaco). But their daughter is a bargain-basement Kardashian (oxymoron?) with her own reality show, The Young, the Rich and the Beautiful. Their son is a run-of-the-mill druggie-wastrel who, nonetheless, will have a considerable impact on Daddys big day.

Greed poster

Coogan, with his too-white teeth and too-coifed windblown hair, is marvelous, as is everybody in the eclectic supporting cast. Granted, the movie isnt especially subtle; nor does it try to be. Its more like a romp through the abuses of the rich and infamous, with a whiplash turn-around at the end.

Director Michael Winterbottom long ago established his political bonafides with the superb Welcome to Sarajevo, as well as his sympatico relationship with Coogan in the equally marvelous Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.

Together, the pair might be a little too goofy, a little too mutually enamored. But as I said, Greed, much as it bounces merrily about, also has bite. And you have to have a certain respect for a film that tries so hard to do the work for you.

Sometimes, obvious and over-the-top is just whats needed.

Greed will open this Friday, March 6 at the Landmarks Midtown Art Cinema.

Read more from the original source:
'Greed' a romp through the abuses of the rich and infamous - SaportaReport

Londons blue plaques have been celebrating influential figures since 1866, and fortunately, theyre now more representative than ever.

The publicly nominated scheme, run by English Heritage, has been a little slow to recognise the achievements of women in Londons history only 14 per cent of the 950 existing blue plaques are to women but things arechanging.

This years list includes botanist and leader of the first womens army corps Dame Gwynne Vaughan, British agents during the Second World War, Noor Inayat Khan and Christine Granville, and sculptor Barbara Hepworth. There will also be plaques recognising the The National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies and the Womens Social and Political Union.

To mark the occasion, weve put together a walking tour of the plaques celebrating nine famous women, plotting a route through some of Londons most historic streets.

While there are too many to visit in one day by foot,weve picked a total of nine closely clustered stops, beginning by Hyde Park and ending by the river in Chelsea, forming a nice walk from Holland Park, past Kensington Gardens and down through to Kensington and Chelsea.

Fittingly, it begins with the plaque commemorating mother and daughter Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst and eventually concludes with Sylvia Pankhurst by the Thames.

The walk is a total of 9km about five and a half miles and should take around two hours to complete. Take a look at the route on the map below.

The tour begins at the former home of suffragettes the Pankhursts, instrumental figures in campaigning for womens right to vote at the beginning of the 20th century. Their former home 50 Clarendon Road is close to Holland Park underground station, and our starting point.

Thingsmove along Clarendon Road and along Holland Park Avenue towards Notting Hill, before coming to 58 Sheffield Terrace the former home of world-famous crime novelist Agatha Christie, where she wrote her most classic works Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile in the 30s.

Around the corner on 37 Holland Street is the plaque for Radclyffe Hall, the writer who wrote influential lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. The route then skirts around Kensington Gardens before arriving at the plaque for novelist and playwright Enig Bagnold at 29 Hyde Park Gate.

Then its a case of heading down past South Kensington to Chelsea the longest section of the walk before arriving at the former home of army matron-in-chief Dame Maud McCarthy at 47 Markham Square. Right around the corner at 152 Kings Road is the plaque for Russian ballet dancer Princess Seraphine Astafieva, who lived and taught there for nearly 20 years.

50 Clarendon Road, Notting Hill, London W11 3AD

English Heritage

29 Fitzroy Square, Fitzrovia, London W1T 5LP

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

118 Long Acre, Covent Garden, London WC2E 9PA

English Heritage

58 Doughty Street, Holborn, London WC1N 2LS

English Heritage

3 Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, London NW1 8YB

English Heritage

6 Carlyle Square, Chelsea, London SW3 6EX

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

1 Avondale Road, Palmers Green, London N13 4DX

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

120 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London SW10 0ES

English Heritage

37 Holland Street, Kensington, London W8 4LX

English Heritage

2 Garbutt Place, Marylebone, London W1U 4DS

English Heritage

10 Curzon Street, Mayfair, London W1J 5HH

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

24 Chester Square, Belgravia, London SW1W 9HS

English Heritage

14 Soho Square, Soho, London W1D 3QG

English Heritage

27 Stockwell Park Road, Stockwell, London SW9 0AP

English Heritage

21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, London NW3 1NT

16 Langford Place, St John's Wood, London NW8

English Heritage

72A Upper Street, London N1 0NY

English Heritage

1-7 Clarence Terrace, Regent's Park, London NW1 4RD

English Heritage

7 Jews Walk, Sydenham, London SE26 6PJ

English Heritage

58 Sheffield Terrace, Holland Park, London W8 7NA

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

50 Clarendon Road, Notting Hill, London W11 3AD

English Heritage

29 Fitzroy Square, Fitzrovia, London W1T 5LP

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

118 Long Acre, Covent Garden, London WC2E 9PA

English Heritage

58 Doughty Street, Holborn, London WC1N 2LS

English Heritage

3 Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, London NW1 8YB

English Heritage

6 Carlyle Square, Chelsea, London SW3 6EX

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

1 Avondale Road, Palmers Green, London N13 4DX

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

120 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London SW10 0ES

English Heritage

37 Holland Street, Kensington, London W8 4LX

English Heritage

2 Garbutt Place, Marylebone, London W1U 4DS

English Heritage

10 Curzon Street, Mayfair, London W1J 5HH

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

24 Chester Square, Belgravia, London SW1W 9HS

English Heritage

14 Soho Square, Soho, London W1D 3QG

English Heritage

27 Stockwell Park Road, Stockwell, London SW9 0AP

English Heritage

21 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, London NW3 1NT

16 Langford Place, St John's Wood, London NW8

English Heritage

72A Upper Street, London N1 0NY

English Heritage

1-7 Clarence Terrace, Regent's Park, London NW1 4RD

English Heritage

7 Jews Walk, Sydenham, London SE26 6PJ

English Heritage

58 Sheffield Terrace, Holland Park, London W8 7NA

English Heritage/Derek Kendall

Keep heading down Kings Road before turning onto Carlyle Square, where theres a plaque for actress Dame Sybil Thorndike, for whom Bernard Shaw wrote the part of Saint Joan.

Finally, head up to Donovan Court to see the plaque for crystallographer and DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin, before heading down Beaufort Street towards the river for the final stop the former home of womens rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst on 120 Cheyne Walk.

See the original post here:
From Pankhurst to Pankhurst: Celebrate famous women from history with the blue plaque walking tour - Evening Standard

Its not so much thatPretty Woman: The Musicalisnt much good, which it isnt. More to the point is that this West End replica of the recent Broadway musical of the 1990 film feels utterly superfluous: a gloss on a popular romcom that doesnt improve upon or deepen our appreciation of the original in any way. Indeed, at the press preview attended, one could feel the audience all but marking time until the iconic Roy Orbison song of the title gets trotted out in order to bring an expectant crowd to their feet. Nothing else in the preceding two and a half hours comes close to achieving that level of connection.

Thats not to fault a (mostly) game cast who attempt to fulfil their roles within a formulaic piece that might as well have been assembled by the sorts of money-minded apparatchiks held up for scorn within the show itself. Revisiting the eyebrow-raising story of the billionaire Edward and the prostitute, Vivian, whom he hires for a week at the Beverly Wilshire hotel, the director-choreographer Jerry Mitchell struggles to kickstart the material afresh as he managed so well withKinky BootsandLegally Blonde, two other stage musicals that began as films.The book by JF Lawton and Garry Marshall, the second of whom directed the movie (he died in 2016), tries effortfully to flesh out characters who have always been defined by surface appearance and style first, depth of feeling second. Its laughable when one or another of the leads makes mention in passing of Shakespeares sonnets (um, really?) or of George Bernard Shaw, beyond reminding us how much more playfully and well Shaw told a makeover story of his own inPygmalion.(A polo gathering at the top of the second act is this musicals in-your-dreams equivalent to the Ascot sequence in thePygmalion-inspiredMy Fair Lady.)

The Bryan Adams-Jim Vallance score mostly belabours the obvious, announcing again and again a prevailing restlessness to both Edward and Vivian, the first of whom sings a repeated paean to freedom which in context seems to imply the ability to let Vivian run wild with his credit card: so much for her as an enlightened, independent woman for our time. Vivian sings endlessly of wanting something better "I'm not this girl," she lets us know early on which in context results in her emergence as a vapid scrounger. Still, it could have been worse: she might have married Donald Trump.

Danny Mac, a pretty man if ever there was one, sings beautifully as Edward and nails the accent, leaving Aimie Atkinsons charmfree Vivian to take the metallic-sounding high ground favoured by so many musicals these days: one is again reminded of the real joy to be experienced not far away in Sara Bareilles's London stint in her self-composed show Waitress: a star performance possessed of soaring vocals that seem to waft up mysteriously, and beautifully, from the singer rather than being engineered to wow by the busy sound desk. (Rachael Wooding's brassy sidekickis cut from the same cloth as Atkinson, which, to be fair, is all her role requires.) As it happens, the show is pretty well stolen by supporting performer Bob Harms in a vivid range of parts (a cheery hotelier chief among them, pictured above, right), each of which brings a synthetic musical roaring, however briefly, to life. Pretty Woman won't be the last cynical miscalculation to hit the West End, but if it brings Harms to a broader public, well, no harm done there.

Follow this link:
Pretty Woman: The Musical, Piccadilly Theatre review - not so pretty, actually - The Arts Desk

Early in the morning, we tried crossing a near-empty Kochi road, the narrow carriageway divided into two lanes by Metro rail pillars. Following the keep-left culture, like any prudent person, we were eyeing the vehicles speeding from a distance to our right side. At half the lane, from darkness emerged a scooter to our left, wrong side, a bolt from the blue. Taken aback, we narrowly escaped. The scooter, too, stopped. We asked the gentleman why he had resorted to such dangerous methods, avoiding a slightly longer U-turn. His classic reply, These days one shouldnt help anyone; I stopped only for you!

Some time ago, there was a hue and cry after a motorcyclist fell into a pit dug by a government department and got run over by a bus. A discerning walk through any road could identify a number of killer potholes, dangerously uneven surfaces and dilapidated drains and slabs. Who cares!

Bernard Shaw is right, We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

After a tragedy, the media make a noise but seldom do we follow up or do a stitch in time. The cost of our culpable lethargy is loss of precious human lives, apart from overburdening the fragile healthcare system and the precarious exchequer. In Gods Own Country itself, nearly 4,000 people die and over 50,000 are seriously injured in 40,000 road accidents every year.

The exponential increase in the number of vehicles consequent chaotic driving and parking makes us indifferent to traffic rules. Footpaths are all encroached upon or too filthy to walk. Pedestrians remain the most marginalised and vulnerable, whose very existence is challenged.

A sensible, integrated and time-bound system addressing these issues from the initial conception of the road itself is called for. This would ensure designing of safe roads, timely maintenance, and scientific licensing, regulation and enforcement that is technologically in-built.

We need to think out of the box. The gravity of the problem, involving the lives of tens of thousands of hapless victims and their poor families, warrants empowering the road safety commissioner with executive magisterial powers under provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code for the due fulfilment of the exigencies of road safety. The officials should be made squarely responsible for any lapse in this regard. Based on any complaint and information about any deficiency on any road that has the potential to cause an accident, the commissioner should act emergently directing the custodian of that road, whichever department, to cause the deficiency to be rectified forthwith to avoid danger.

There is no reason the above should not be an effective solution to such a baffling humanitarian problem. Complaints, information and directions could all be communicated electronically and notified on a participatory website that can be accessed by citizens and authorities.

Simple solutions often elude us. Most road accidents are man-made and preventable, if only we take care to tighten enforcement of rules, fill a pothole, put up a board of caution or mirror warning incoming vehicles. All these hardly require huge funds or time for sanction/execution.

(The author is a former IAS officer)

kuruvillaperayil@gmail.com

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New exhibition Among The Trees opens. Things to do

MADE IN ITALY: Cinema Made In Italy, an annual film festival celebrating Italian films, launches today. Highlights include If Only, about three siblings sent to live with their unconventional, broke Italian father, and Stolen Days, about a father and son road trip back to Southern Italy. Cine Lumiere (South Kensington), various prices, book ahead, 4-9 March

AMONG THE TREES: Hayward Gallery's new exhibition, Among The Trees, opens today, celebrating our relationship with trees and forests. The work of over 30 artists is on display, including sculpture, painting, installation, video and photography, dating from the 1960s to the present day. Hayward Gallery (Southbank Centre), 13.50, book ahead, 4 March-17 May

AUBREY BEARDSLEY: Tate Britain dedicates an exhibition to shocking and scandalous Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley. It's the biggest Beardsley exhibition for over 50 years, with 200 of his risqu works on show, including illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salom. Tate Britain, 16, book ahead, 4 March-25 May

LANGLANDS & BELL: Artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell open new exhibition, Degrees of Truth, looking at how architecture bears witness to the technological, political, economic and cultural relationships and changes of society. Newly-commissioned and borrowed artworks feature, including film, video, digital media, sculpture and installation works. Sir John Soane's Museum, free, just turn up, 4 March-31 May

HAMPSTEAD CEMETERY: As part of a series of International Women's Day walks, Cemetery Club leads a guided walk focusing on the gravestones of Hampstead Cemetery. Hear about actresses, illustrators, ballet dancers and writers buried there, whose stories are often forgotten or overlooked. Hampstead Cemetery, 15, book ahead, 11am-12.30pm

SPECTACULAR ASTROPHYSICS: Though astrophysics may sound rather complicated, everything that happens in the night sky is the result of simple laws coming into play together. So explains Professor of Astrophysics Katharine Blundell OBE in this Gresham College lecture. Museum of London, free, just turn up, 1pm-2pm

MARIE LLOYD: The V&A's lunchtime lecture puts the spotlight on 'Queen of the Halls', Marie Lloyd, on the 150th anniversary of the performer's birth. Alison Young and Christine Padwick from the British Music Hall Society discuss the life and career of the first female celebrity of popular entertainment, who performed for Edward VII, George Bernard Shaw and TS Eliot, among others. V&A Museum (South Kensington), free, just turn up, 1pm-1.45pm

TWILIGHT TOURS: There's a rare chance to visit the Royal Hospital Chelsea by twilight on a guided tour, led by one of the Chelsea Pensioners themselves. Visit the State Apartments and the Chapel, hearing the stories of former residents, and finish up with a drink at the Chelsea Pensioners Club. Royal Hospital Chelsea, 28, book ahead, 6pm/7pm

TRIBUTE INK: Stay late at National Army Museum, which has an evening opening on the theme of tattoos. Find out about the art, history and meaning of body inkings in the Armed Forces. Serving soldiers, Chelsea Pensioners and art historians are among those taking part in talks and panel discussions. National Army Museum (Chelsea), free, book ahead, 6.30pm-9.30pm

OUTER SPACE: NASA scientist and astronaut Kathryn Sullivan was the first American woman to walk in space. Here, she discusses her career, including her experiences of living in space, taking off in a space shuttle, and making repairs to complex scientific instruments. Conway Hall (Holborn), 30-42.50, book ahead, 6.45pm-8pm

MISBEHAVIOUR: Catch a preview screening of new film Misbehaviour, about a team of women who plan to disrupt the 1970 Miss World competition in London. The screening launches British Librarys new Unfinished Business: The Fight for Womens Rights events season, and is followed by Q+A with its director Philippa Lowthorpe and Sally Alexander, who was central to the real-life story the film depicts. Regent Street Cinema, 15, book ahead, 7.30pm-10.30pm

Our idiosyncratic weather forecaster keeps you up to date on London's skies.

The weather is broken. You've probably noticed. It's been stuck on the same setting for days, a grim cycle of showers, grey skies and chilly winds. I've called a servicing centre in Edgware and they're going to take a look, but they suspect it will need a spare part. Apparently, that hail we got a few days ago has clogged up a filter somewhere, and everything's borked. Bloody typical the warranty only ran out last week.

Mr Attlee can be reached by emailing hello@londonist.com; lord knows why you'd want to.

Our resident tube fancier dishes out daily thoughts on the London Underground.

Time for my never-popular 'name the station from the Google screengrab' game. Which underground station have I got my back towards in the above image? Send answers on Twitter to @HeckTube for your chance to win the foil disk from inside today's bottle of milk (which is slightly torn and sodden but might find service in a child's craft project).

Book ahead for Fourpure Global Gathering Festival on 21 March. Held at Fourpure Brewery in Bermondsey, with kegs donated by various breweries, the event raises money for Global Gathering's work supplying clean drinking water in Malawi. Find out more and sign up.

See the original post here:
Things To Do Today In London: Wednesday 4 March 2020 - Londonist

Ken Ludwig, author of Murder on the Orient Express, gave up the law after the success of Lend Me a Tenor

Murder on the Orient Express: Continues through March 8 at Asolo Repertory Theatre, 5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Most performances are sold out. 941-351-8000; asolorep.org

After the major premieres of his new plays, Ken Ludwig usually doesnt see them again.

With many of his 28 plays frequently produced at professional and community theaters, he would never have time to write if he checked in on new productions even occasionally.

But he came to Sarasota this month to see Asolo Repertory Theatres sold-out production of Murder on the Orient Express, his adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel, because Ive heard so many wonderful things about this theater from lots of different sources, friends who have worked here or seen shows here.

While here, he saw all three Asolo Rep shows now in production, met the cast of Orient Express and its director, Peter Amster, had a lunch with Producing Artistic Director Michael Donald Edwards.

Ludwig said hes always delighted to see how people interpret the plays. Love seeing people doing new things with my work.

And he was particularly excited about the Asolo Rep production. Im not just saying this because Im sitting in the theater, but I thought everything about it was wonderful. The set was incredible, the lighting, the direction. Each character was so well defined. I thought it had a terrific thrust to it. The engine got started and didnt let up.

Ludwig, who is best known as the author of the comedies Lend Me a Tenor, Moon Over Buffalo and the musical Crazy for You, was commissioned to write the play by Agatha Christies estate.

His agent was contacted about five years ago by Christies grandson, Matthew Pritchard, who was interested in seeing a new stage adaptation of her work.

They were starting to do some new television projects and OKd a three-movie deal with Kenneth Branagh, and apparently they wanted to do something new on stage, Ludwig said in an interview in the lobby while an audience watched his play inside the theater.

Hes not exactly sure why he was asked perhaps it was the Edgar Award he received from the Mystery Writers of America for his comic mystery The Games Afoot, which Asolo Rep produced in 2013. Maybe that helped them find me.

Ludwig was given a choice of any Christie book and he chose Orient Express because Its a terrific story and it has a great title.

The result was a mystery with the kind of comical touches audiences have come to expect from this lawyer-turned-playwright. It had its world premiere in 2017 at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, N.J.

I tried to very much consciously to tell the story with as much integrity as I could, and I didnt think of it being a comedy at all, but all the characters are basically funny, even in the novel, Ludwig said. Not laugh a minute funny, but when you tell a story about these very eccentric people, put them on the stage and clothe them, humor naturally emerges.

Ludwig isnt sure why more new murder mysteries arent being produced because audiences love them. Ive thought seriously about writing another mystery for the stage and toying around in my notes on a pad. Its one of three or four things Im thinking of turning into a play.

The line between mystery and comedy is a thin one, he said.

Its hard to write a mystery that wouldnt have some laughs in it. Hercule Poirot, for example, is innately a comic character. He preens, he fixes his mustache, he wears a hairnet. Watson is a comic creation who talks about Holmes as this completely eccentric madman, who in a sense is also a comic creation. If you write a really good play about eccentric people youre in a comic world.

Christie wrote stage plays herself, most notably The Mousetrap, which has been running in London since 1952 and is approaching its 70th anniversary.

Ludwig studies the work of great playwrights, including William Shakespeare, George Farquhar, Oliver Goldsmith, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward to figure out why theyre masterpieces. Usually its because the playwright really knew what he or she was doing. They didnt happen to fall into it and happen to write Pygmalion. Shaw understood what made great theater. He was a critic and he worked like a dog at it.

He may not follow all the productions of his plays, but Ludwig is involved up to my eyeballs when a new one is getting ready for production. Im working with the director, the designers, the cast and doing any rewrites.

His most recent play is also his most personal, Dear Jack. Dear Louise, in which two actors tell the story of my parents courtship through letters, because they met through letters and got to know each other before they ever met in person. Its very different from anything Ive written before.

It had its premiere in December at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where critics and audiences greeted it warmly.

Ludwig was working as a lawyer in Washington when he started writing plays.

I had this day job and I was writing in the morning from 4-8 and then Id put on my suit and go to work at the law firm.

His first plays were done in church basements and tiny off-off-Broadway type places, he said. Then came his farce Lend Me a Tenor, his fourth or fifth play, which opened in 1986 in London and three years later on Broadway, leading to countless productions around the country.

It took off and I was able to leave the law, he said. I was not an instant success. I paid my dues in the sense that I worked really hard to become a playwright over a 4-5 year period.

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Lawyer-turned-playwright finds a home in the theater - Sarasota Herald-Tribune

By James A. Haught

This is the third segment of a series on renowned skeptics throughout history. These profiles are drawn from 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People With the Courage to Doubt, Prometheus Books, 1996.

Of course, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a Christian. It was a crime to be otherwise, in a time when church attendance was enforced by law. But whether he believed the supernatural dogmas remains a topic of debate.

Although there are few records of his life, Shakespeare undoubtedly received Anglican indoctrination as a schoolboy at Stratford, eighty miles northwest of London. All pupils were required to memorize and recite long segments of scripture.

Shakespeare married, but evidently left his wife and children behind in Stratford when he went to London in the 1590s. He began writing poetry, and became involved in theater, both as actor and playwright.

His plays contain references to God, as well as to ghosts, fairies and witches. What he personally believed seems impossible to learn. Obviously, Shakespeare did not share the beliefs of Englands Puritans, who sought everywhere to stamp out play-acting and theater-going as wicked. For a time, he lived in the bawdy Bankside district of London, hotbed of prostitution and carousal; yet some researchers say Shakespeare lived more sedately than Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and other theater colleagues.

Near his death, after Shakespeare had grown wealthy and returned to his family in Stratford, he wrote a traditional Christian testimonial into his last will. Authorities disagree over whether it was sincere, or a formality. A half-century after his death, an Oxford chaplain wrote that Shakespeare died a papist but most scholars doubt this assertion. Perhaps, like many people, the bard wavered in matters of religion. A definite answer seems unknowable.

In Shakespeares plays, believers tend to see evidence of faith, and skeptics signs of doubt. At the height of the Enlightenment, freethinker Joseph Ritson wrote that Shakespeare was free from the reigning superstition of his time and subscribed to no temporary religion, neither Papish or Protestant, Paganism or Christianity.

Atheistic philosopher George Santayana wrote an essay titled Absence of Religion in Shakespeare, commenting on the bards strange insensibility to religion. Santayana said it is remarkable that we should have to search through all the works of Shakespeare to find half a dozen passages that have so much as a religious sound, and that even these passages, upon examination, should prove not to be the expression of any deep religious conception. At another time, Santayana remarked: For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

Playwright George Bernard Shaw observed: Shakespeare had no conscious religion.

As for the meaning of life, in all his profound passages, Shakespeare never says that the purpose of human existence is to be saved by the mystical Jesus and go to heaven. Instead, in Macbeths great lament (Act 5, Scene 5), he bitterly contends that each life proceeds to oblivion without ultimate meaning. The soliloquy is a classic of existentialism:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Lifes but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.

Shakespeares comments on religion:

In religion, what damned error but some sober brow will bless it, and approve it with a text, hiding the grossness with fair ornament? The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 2

Thrust your head into the public street, to gaze on Christian fools with varnishd faces. ibid, Act 2, Scene 5

Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian. . . . Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 3

It is an heretic that makes the fire, not she which burns in it. The Winters Tale, Act 2, Scene 3

Thou villain, thou art full of piety. Much Ado About Nothing, Act 4, Scene 2

His worst fault is, hes given to prayer; he is something peevish that way. The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 1, Scene 4

Scurvy jack-dog priest! By gar, me vill cut his ears. ibid, Act 2, Scene 3

I always thought it was both impious and unnatural that such immanity and bloody strife should reign among professors of one faith. Henry VI, Act 5, Scene 1

Modest doubt is calld the beacon of the wise. Troilus and Cressida, Act 2, Scene 2

Thou art a proud traitor, priest gleaning all of the lands wealth into one, into your own hands, cardinal, by extortion.Ill startle you worse than the sacring bell, when the brown wench lay kissing in your arms, lord cardinal. Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 2

We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1

I tell thee, churlish priest, a ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling. Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 1

(Haught is editor emeritus of West Virginias largest newspaper, The Charleston Gazette-Mail, and a weekly contributor to Daylight Atheism.)

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2000 Years of Disbelief: William Shakespeare | James Haught - Patheos