Another delightful back-to-back comedy feast at Theatre 99. This is the last one for THIS 2009 17-day arts festival.

The good news: Charleston  improv comedy continues all year long.

Greg Tavares welcomed the sold out crowd Saturday night and proudly proclaimed his group The Have Nots has been active now for 14 years and the insanity will continue. Hooray!

(My blog  http://chuckography.blogspot.com has several pictures of this fun evening but, as usual, I have not conquered how to post photos HERE.)

The first 90-minute show was Upright Citizens Brigade. They announced they were the touring company as opposed to the real people I guess you would see if you caught the show up in Boston.

A sweet volunteer came onstage and they rifled her purse, wallet, her several id badges as well as her Weight Watchers diary to gather fodder for the first half of their show. They ran with it and a great exaggerated image emerged.

Shouted actions and places came from the audience for the comedy flashpoints the rest of the evening.

The next show - the finale - was almost three hours of hilarity. Many of the performers from the last two weeks came back for the reprise and all the stops were pulled out. Rude words were heard. Lewd actions were pantomimed. In short, a good time was had by all and only one couple seemed to have disappeared.

The troupe Cupid Has A Heart On waved a farewll to the standing, applauding audience.

My stint as an ersatz Spoleto reporter has ended for another year. I hope I’m invited to play again next year.

What would you say if your best friend brought a white painting with a couple of off white stripes for $200,000?

Would you tell him that understand the aesthetic of the famous artist or would you say that the emperor has no clothes and he’s been bamboozled?

That’s the beginning premise of Art which gave it’s last Piccolo performance to a packed Chapel Theatre yesterday evening.

Even though its title is Art, and a painting is the catalyst, the work is more about the complexities of friendship including the things we do to keep it going and what we do when a it all starts going wrong.

Art is  filled with lots of humor and sharp observations.  The interaction between the three characters: the owner of the painting, the sharp, sarcastic friend, and the eager-to-please, put upon friend were fast, furious, and enjoyable.

It’s all a thoughful and funny treatise on the nature and value of art and frendship.

Just as the appearance of  The Seed and Feed Marching Abominable Band heralds my Spoleto experience, the Felder Film Festival signals the end, and it’s rapidly becoming one of the events I look forward to the most.

Over the last several festivals, I’ve enjoyed the short (15 minutes or less) films and documentaries.

Some of the my most memorable ones have been about the Florence Crittenton Home, a store employee’s relationship with creepy mannequins, how Dance Dance Revolution completely changed a life, and a woman who wants to rename the Atlanta Falcons to the Atlanta Tercels.

And I’ll never forget Cupcake, The Killer Kitten.

The 6th Annual Fedler Film Festival kicks off this afternoon with family films from 1:30-3:30pm.  The documentaries start at 5:00om followed by the comedy and drama offerings at 6:00pm.

Come wind down from (or even start) your Spoleto experience with some fun–and free– film watching.

Update:  Saw 12 enjoyable shorts tonight.  My favorites were Une Vignette de Melancolie– an intriguing look  into a bi-polar mind, Worth–an object lesson on adding value, and Remote–a where the present and future meet with chilling consequences.

Oh, and I’ll always look at penguins differently after watching Hector Corp.

They mean justice.

Tags: Felder Film Festival

The Charleston Farmers Market is ranked as being one of the top 10 best in the country. To me, the farmers market symbolizes everything that is right in our world. Fresh, local vegetables, hand made art and music combine my three favorite things. Farrah Hoffmire sells another one of my favorite things, goat cheese.  Having just recently started selling her cheese at the farmers market, Hoffmire started Giddy Goat, fresh, local, hand made goat cheese prepared by the woman behind the stand selling it to you.    Flavors include crystallized ginger, black pepper and sea salt as well as cranberry-orange walnut.  There is nothing better than lying on a blanket in the park, eating a crepe and watching the people of our community interact with one another.  Stop by every Saturday from now until Christmas and support your ever growing local economy.   

 

 

 

Tags: black pepper, christmas, cranberry orange, economy, farmers market, favorite things, flavors, giddy goat, ginger, goat cheese, hand made art, Music, sea salt, vegetables

Friday night I went to see Skinny White Comics,  a stand up comedy routine by two New York City comedians that left my stomach aching from laughter.  

The first comedian was David Lee Nelson, a former Charleston local- Nelson’s routine was bold. Despite the rather conservative crowd, Nelson didn’t shy away from topics such as gay marriage and legalizing marijuana.  Nelson interacted with the crowd, asking people to raise their hands and picking people out and incorporating them into his routine.  His ability to think quickly on his feet was proven when a couple walked in and out of the show two times looking for seats and Nelson made the crowd clap for them when they finally sat down. 

I enjoy smart comedy that doesn’t rely on the obvious- such as how the last president couldn’t speak English or awkward sex jokes and Isaac Witty seemd to be a master at this.  Whitty made my sister cry with laughter over a joke he made about wearing a cape while getting his hair cut. The end of his performance was hilarious, talking about a spill in the grocery store while shopping late at night. Witty has the amazing ability to take the ordinary events from everyday life and present them in such an original and entertaining way, I was quite impressed.    

It was nice to have such a varied comedy routine. The hour and a half show went by very quickly and I laughed equally during both sets of the performance.   Witty and Nelsom are as funny as they are white- and they are pretty white.  No need for them to quit their day jobs, they have found what they should be doing with their lives- make other people laugh.

Tags: clap, comedian, comedians, comedy routine, crowd, david lee, day jobs, everyday life, friday night, gay marriage, grocery store, laughter, lee nelson, legalizing marijuana, sex jokes, sister cry, spill, stand up comedy, stomach, whitty

Once you’ve been to Charleston during Spoleto, the spell of the city hooks you. Here’s a message from one of the Spoleto interns from last year, who is now longing for the Holy City. She’s also writing a blog for Southern Living.

Hi!

An Alabama native, I interned with Spoleto last year as a public relations apprentice—which meant daily perusings of P&C’s Spoleto Today. Though I’m back in Birmingham these days, I’m craving Spoleto and keeping up with everything thanks to your website!

I’m interning at Southern Living and blogged about weekend’s events on the Travel blog. I just wanted to let you know that there is a link to your website. If there is anything you can do to help drive traffic to our blog, I’d appreciate it—the website is another gateway to a plethora of Charleston  information (decades worth) for visitors.

http://talesfromtheroad.southernliving.com/

Thanks so much! Good luck with the finale—I sure miss The Post & Courier!

Ashlyn

(Thanks Ashlyn!)

Spoleto Festival USA is  monitoring the weather very closely.  In the event of rain for tonight’s performance of Noche Flamenca, the performance will be relocated to the Charleston Music Hall at 37 John Street.  A decision will be made closer to the time of the performance. For regular updates, please check the Festival’s web page, or call our box office at (843) 579.3100.

Ticket holders for the cancelled Thursday June 4 performance are asked to call the box office for additional information.

We have five tickets to Sunday’s 3 p.m. performance of La Cage Aux Folles at Footlight Players, so we can have two sets of winners, a twofer and a trio.  Answer this question and win. Be sure to tell us if you want the three or two grouping.

What was the name of the 1996 comedy starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane inspired by La Cage Aux Folles?

How to enter
E-mail your answer to TicketContest@postandcourier.com. Since e-mail is time-stamped, we will go strictly by the first-come, first-entered standard.   Please give us a name so we can leave the tickets for you in The Post and Courier lobby, 134 Columbus Street.

The Charleston Ballet Theatre performed their version of The Great Gatsby last night.

From reading about the event, I was very interested to see how literature translates into dance.

The theatre chose to use narration. So, in the beginning, to introduce all the characters, the narrator–a speaker–bounced around the novel to introduce Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, Tom–his mistress, of course–and Jordan Baker. Then the narrator continued to bounce around so the story of Gatsby, a man who has done everything to end up in West Egg across Long Island from East Egg and his long lost love, Daisy, makes sense to those in the audience who might not have read Fitzgerald’s novel.

The music used in the performance was the best part. It was clear to the audience that the songs, their lyrics, were chosen carefully and specifically to add to the time and place of the story being told through dance.

At some points I almost did not feel like narration served the performance as well as adding an element of drama would have. I wanted the dancers to speak. I know that’s know what ballerinas do, but since they were already creating a hybrid of dance and literature, I thought it could have been taken further.

The dancing was beautiful despite the chosen narration, and it’s worth checking out–they will perform again tonight at 7 p.m., 477 King Street.

Tags: Charleston Ballet Theatre, Dance, Literature, Piccolo Spoleto, The Great Gatsby

I first heard the opening notes of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in 1993. It was coming from the snowy static reception on a red, plastic, black and white Soviet-made TV in Budapest, Hungary. In the early 1990s MTV (thanks BBC!) had a 30-second commercial for itself that ran repeatedly – you know, like MTV did things in the early 90s. They had a clever spot that opened with “Spring” – the first notes in the audio link below– and it featured time-lapse photography of a flower blooming. It quickly cut (a la 1990s MTV jump editing) to a cold winter and a stop-motion figure of some something shivering and becoming frozen. Good ol’ MTV, way back when they played videos…

The opening bars are captivating, uplifting. During the two year Eastern Europe Grand Tour, a street vender in Krakow, Poland sold me Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on a cheaply pirated cassette. The cover art was poorly photocopied, the music barely recognizable on the muted bootleg format. But still, I could dig it.

Skip to Thursday June 4th 2009 at Piccolo Spoleto where I heard Vivaldi’s Four Seasons performed live for the first time. Wow, when they hit those opening notes (click and listen,about 3 minutes)… Not to get all warm and fuzzy, but music does move the soul, n’est pas?

Four violins, one bass, one cello, one harpsichord. They took turns with brisk high notes (feeling cold, or with the high energy of springtime) and long drawn-out tones (showing a stability, stillness, or a marked change in surroundings). After the performance one of the violinists was backstage checking her cellphone voicemail. Seemed odd to glimpse her as a mere mortal, she’d led me for the past hour to transcend the day to day. Thanks, I needed that.

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the 18th century masterpiece performed by Amos Lawrence and Charleston Baroque, June 4th, 2009 at Spoleto USA, Charleston, SC.
Series: Classical: Early Music Series
Thanks to Ellen Dressler Moryl and the Department of Cultural Affairs for the City of Charleston for Piccolo Spoleto.
Personally, I waited a long time to hear this live and you brought it to us, thank you.

The18th century masterpiece performed in the intimate setting and amazing acoustics of First (Scots) Presbyterian Church

Tags: budapest hungary, first scots presbyterian church, four violins, harpsichord, krakow poland, mtv, scots presbyterian church, Spoleto, stained glass, time lapse photography, violinists, vivaldi