Special Coverage
Spoleto Festival USA revealed on Thursday its 2019 poster, which features an image of an untitled 2016 painting by 49-year-old Los Angeles-based artist Laura Owens.
What does the handbell bring to mind? Perhaps it’s church or Christmas or white gloves or Hershey's Kisses. Part of the mission of handbell ensemble Palmetto Bronze is to shift perceptions of …
The two works by award-winning choreographer Jodi Melnick were wonderful examples of how the creative process of an art form can be just as illuminating as the final product. The performance T…
By the time Gustav Mahler was writing and conducting music, Wolgang Amadeus Mozart was already a legend — so much so that, according to The New York Times, Mahler was heard repeating Mozart’s …
For the first time in Spoleto Festival USA's 42-year history, its finale will be on the Charleston peninsula — at Joseph P. Riley Park.
The venue might be different — Joseph P. Riley Jr. Park instead of Middleton Place — but the nationally known roots-rock music and fireworks will be familiar to regular Spoleto finale fans.
In the middle of chamber music programs VII, VIII, IX and X, music director Geoff Nuttall inserted some pretty great modern music. It was the meat of the sandwich, the nutritious stuff for whi…
“The wand chooses the wizard,” Mr. Ollivander told Harry Potter.
Performing “Heathers: The Musical” right now can’t be done as a tribute to the classic movies of the 1980s. This musical and its central themes are a brutal indicator of how much has changed i…
Spoleto Festival Wardrobe Director Carolyn Kostopoulos has a keen eye for detail, and that trait enables her, with help from the festival's talented performing artists, to transform costumes i…
For 90 minutes, the Unitarian Church’s Gage Hall transformed into an air-conditioned, two-story brick praise house as The Bright Family Singers invited fellowship with commanding Negro spiritu…
A picture may be worth a thousand words. A live music experience needs none. Pianist Craig Taborn’s Spoleto Festival opening concert proved as much: He did not speak. Commencing a four-night, …
What would happen if Vincent Van Gogh showed up in New York City today? That’s the pretext for the play “Vincent John Doe,” which just completed a three-day Piccolo Spoleto Festival run at the…
If you’ve been to any of this year’s Spoleto Festival USA chamber music concerts, you’ve probably seen the tall, slender, curly-haired fellow grooving along on his double bass at the Dock Stre…
On Friday, Piccolo Spoleto Festival patrons will get a chance to hear The Cecilia Ensemble, a professional chamber choir of about a dozen singers based in Augusta, Ga.
Emily Grace Miller and her sister Lacy, better known as the Charleston-based singing duo Gracie & Lacy, think freedom is a universal message.
From engrossing theatrical performances to rousing music concerts, the final three days of the Piccolo Spoleto Festival includes a variety of programs sure to satisfy any lover of the arts. He…
A New York City Ballet principal dancer and an award-winning choreographer merge artistry and experimentation in their performance of “New Bodies.”
Ein Deutsches Requiem (German Requiem) by Johannes Brahms has been performed so regularly that it’s easy to forget that it’s awfully hard. I’ve done this piece so I’m not unsympathetic to the …
Farrah Hoffmire is on a quest.
Almost a quarter-century after making her Spoleto Festival USA debut, soprano Marisol Montalvo is back. And once again, new music is what brought her here.
“The Complete History of Charleston for Morons” debuted in 2006, two years before Barack Obama was elected president, and the show still feels trapped in the Bush era. While some of the myriad…
The term "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" was coined in 1980, the latest (and most clinical) label for a condition familiar to veterans and their family members since the Great War.
Silent warrior. Underdog. Middle voice. These are the generous words that describe the viola, the string instrument accustomed to the shadows, and to the relentless jokes.
The first time Craig Taborn felt impending danger in a different country, he was standing on a golf course in Mexico. First, there was an earthquake, then, a few hours later, there was a tsuna…
Kids these days: As patrons age, festivals and teachers cultivate next generation of musicians, fans
Admission to secret parties at mansions and private happy hours where acrobats and actors weave through the crowd are just some of the benefits of a Spoleto Scene membership. The only catch? Y…
This year, Piccolo Spoleto Festival's annual harbor cruises feature some out-of-the-ordinary artists.
A series of seven short plays could easily come across as tastings in what should be a full-course meal, but the “Festival of 10-Minute Plays,” presented by Atellan Sandbox Theatre at the Thre…
There is no middle ground in the avant-garde. There is only uncharted territory.
Local assemblage artist Robin Howard’s Piccolo Spoleto Festival show “She Promised to Bring Her Books” is a love letter to books and reading.
Navigating life after losing a loved one is something most of us eventually experience. For composer Johannes Brahms, the death of his mother in 1865 and the loss of his mentor Robert Schumann…
With her Piccolo Spoleto Festival show “Origin,” Annex Dance's Kristin Alexander manages to take her audience inside the mind of a child.
The ushers arrive about an hour before every Spoleto Festival USA chamber music performance at the Dock Street Theatre. They have a brief meeting to go over their roles and responsibilities. S…
Saturday night at the Gaillard Center an event titled “You Are Mine Own” presented two late-Romantic works with original staging by the renowned director Atom Egoyan, winner of many prestigiou…
Which came first, the music or the movement? This is the impossible riddle presented by Dorrance Dance in “ETM: Double Down,” the first of two programs the company is offering at Spoleto this year.
In the company of the jazz group Trio 3, pianist-composer Vijay Iyer, who is a bandleader, producer, Harvard professor and 2013 MacArthur Fellow, feels humbled.
America was a very different place in 1976, the year that Ntozake Shange debuted her poetic play "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf."
A 12-hour shift hunting terrorists in the Middle East would be hard on anyone. George Brant’s one-woman play “Grounded” goes one step further.
The Spoleto Festival chamber music series is a glorious phenomenon, one that is perhaps too successful for its own good.
The performance begins without warning: a dancer walks onstage and stares, affectless, while the auditorium continues to bustle. House lights still up, the audience quiets as we notice more da…
The poster for this year’s Piccolo Spoleto festival depicts a robot sitting in an empty movie theater, munching on nuts and bolts in a popcorn bucket next to a balloon he brought along for company.
Piccolo Spoleto Festival includes a variety of poetry readings and literary events. The Sundown Poetry Series is held at 6:30 p.m. in the courtyard of the Dock Street Theatre, with the last fo…
They weren’t meant to be performed together, or at least not staged like this.
Somebody better check the roof at the the Gaillard Center. A giant of a man left his mark. Pianist Chucho Valdés and his mighty quartet executed flawlessly, bringing a welcomed vitality to thi…
Kristin Alexander’s 2-year-old daughter Anne loves to dance.
How do you get from a start-up musical experiment with a Gullah theme to No. 1 on the Billboard jazz charts? For the Charleston-based band Ranky Tanky, which makes its Spoleto Festival USA deb…
Shortly after Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder took the stage at the Cistern Yard on Thursday night, it was clear that Skaggs has surrounded himself with technical masters. As the group’s lea…
Cards on the table: I love immersive, interactive theater. If the fourth wall is breaking, if the action ignores the proscenium and uses the entire theater space, if the audience can get in on…
When the play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf” premiered in 1976, playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, a self-proclaimed black feminist, couldn’t have fo…
As the St. Lawrence String Quartet, JACK Quartet and double bassist Doug Balliett readied themselves to perform a stirring rendition of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio” at a Monday afternoon Spoleto F…