Raising Cain at the Cain Center With Million Dollar Quartet

August 23, 2026TheatreBeth Killion, Chip Decker, Connor Nielsen, Eli Fischer, Gordon Olson, Ian Benjamin, Julia Freeman, Levi Kraus, Matty Montes, Scott Albert, Steve Kaliskiperryt77

Review: Million Dollar Quartet at Cain Center for the Arts

By Perry Tannenbaum

By some cosmic coincidence, the publication of Rolling Stone’s special edition listing of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in late 2004 anticipated the great flowering of jukebox musicals on Broadway almost immediately afterwards – with hardly a hiccup since. A good 40 years after my last look at Billboard and Cashbox’s weekly Top 100s, the idea of collecting chart-topping hits recorded by the great kings, queens, and groups of pop or rock for live theatre must have been in the air.

Suddenly it gained new traction as a bankable concept. Songlists associated with Elvis Presley, John Lennon, The Beach Boys, and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons all got the Broadway treatment in 2005. Bob Dylan, Johnnie Cash, Dusty Springfield, and Earth, Wind & Fire were among those basking in the lights of the Great White Way the following year.

So it was hardly a surprise that Cain Center for the Arts, up in Cornelius, was sold on Million Dollar Quartet for their first co-production with neighboring Davidson Community Playhouse. After all, the original concept and book were inspired by hitmakers Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash – all of whom are enshrined in the top 100 of the Rolling Stone 500 list.

The new Cain-DCP collaboration is making history with history: the four rock legends actually did converge in Memphis, at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records studio, spontaneously jammin’ together for one magical evening in December 1956. Phillips wasn’t sure people would believe it, so he snapped a photo of the quartet. Meanwhile, some rascal in the soundbooth rolled the tape.

Was Million Dollar Quartet inevitable by the time it premiered at the Nederlander Theatre in 2010? Maybe it was nudged a little by the Rolling Stone list or the efflorescence of jukebox musicals in 2005, since the Mutrux concept was first put on its feet in Daytona Beach the following year.

The Complete Million Dollar Quartet album, 47 tracks compressed into 78 minutes, had been available commercially in the US since 1988, after gathering bootleg-edition cache for more than three decades. And the whole scenario of the Sun Records session remained the subject of fevered speculation; if anything, boosted by the commercial release, years after the best tracks – and then the complete session – had been kosher in Europe.

About the only logical argument against memorializing the historic Memphis summit meeting was the lukewarm music captured on tape.

Rolling Stone gave it three stars out of five.

Some might find even that middling rating overly generous. Aside from the wretched sonic setup, the fragmentary and impromptu song list was hardly formidable. “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” “Peace in the Valley,” and “Down by the Riverside” were readily available from the 1956 tape, but Mutrux nixed other staples such as “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In,” “Black Bottom Stomp,” and “Just a Little Talk With Jesus.”

Apparently, Mutrux had to tread softly among The King’s hits, for “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Love Me Tender,” both on the Complete Million Dollar album, are MIA in the musical, though both were approved for All Shook Up in 2005. So were “Hound Dog,” “That’s All Right,” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” which thankfully – and with full propriety for 1956 – were made available once again.

“Blue Suede Shoes,” a bone of contention between Perkins and Presley – Carl made the big hit recording, but Elvis made his big national live TV splash with it on the Ed Sullivan Show – was an absolute must for Mutrux and co-writer Colin Escott. It was the sort of historic tidbit that could add edge to a chance meeting whether or not it actually came up for conversation, but the writing team had grander plans.

Cleverly sidestepping the question of which of the two disputants would sing the song in their musical, Mutrux has all of the Quartet members on vocals – at the top of the show before Phillips’ narrative unfolds. It’s a perfect fit, beginning with an anthemic cry: Carl sings, Well it’s one for the money, making his entrance. The stop time after that cry allows Johnny to materialize beside a second mic for his Two for the show.

No contest about who makes the biggest entrance after Three to get ready. It’s Elvis, kicking “Blue Suede Shoes” into its 4/4 locomotive gear. Jerry Lee will get his chance, late in Act 2, for a barbaric yawp of his own, his You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain from his iconic “Great Balls of Fire,” when this session reaches full blast.

Now it’s fair to say, even though they aren’t on the Memphis tapes – and didn’t get released until 1957 – that Lewis’s monster hits, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and maybe even “Great Balls” were already in the oven getting baked. Chronology for Johnny Cash’s Sun Records hits, “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line,” is indisputable; they aren’t on the Million Dollar album, either.

Cash’s borrowings are shrewdly selected, stealing “Sixteen Tons” from Tennessee Ernie Ford, a hot hit in ’56, and “Riders in the Sky” from Burl Ives and Vaughan Monroe, already seven years old. Likewise, Perkins is only flashing back a little when he pilfers Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” and Bill Haley and the Comets’ “See You Later, Alligator,” both of them ’56 hits.

Even truthier than Perkins’ dispute with Presley, the singer-guitarist actually did record his forthcoming single, “Matchbox,” in December 1956 – but a day before the Million-Dollar bootleg. And Jerry Lee, still months away from his first Sun release, was an unknown sideman for Perkins at that session. So the script is almost accurate in setting up the Sun Studio get-together as Elvis and Johnny crashing Carl’s recording date.

And Elvis did bring his current girlfriend to the party, though here the writers change her name. They give their Dyanne two sexy songs her real-life counterpart never sang, “Fever” and “I Hear You Knockin’,” again authentically from that era. No less importantly, they have her standing by to console Phillips when his grand plan for the evening falls through.

Inside and out, Cain Center can be viewed as a somewhat downsized Knight Theater, beautifully accommodating around 400, about a third of the Knight’s (and the Nederlander’s) capacity. With its rousing opening, Million Dollar Quartet instantly proved to fit perfectly at the new Cornelius arthouse. Sound was perfectly potted for these ears, and not a single word was lost in our back-row seats on the sold-out opening night.

The same can rarely be said of touring shows at Belk Theater. Or at Theatre Charlotte, which sports half of the Cain’s capacity.

And we liked what we heard as much as what we saw, thanks to director Scott Albert and his cast, costume designer Beth Killion, scenic designer Chip Decker, and lighting designer Gordon Olson. Nor was it surprising to learn that Matty Montes, who portrays Carl Perkins, was also our music director. He plays a mean ax.

Nearly forty years after first discovering the Queen City/Metrolina theatre scene, I found it fairly groundbreaking for DCP artistic director Steve Kaliski to assert in his curtain speech, on a stage so grand, what my first Creative Loafing front-page feature pointed out then: people here greatly underestimate our local theatre talent pool. We can cast all four of these iconic rock giants with local actors, even if they are tasked with accompanying themselves and each other instrumentally as they perform.

All four pairs of blue suede shoes were filled very handsomely, thank you very much. You could actually look forward to a Montes’s instrumental licks as avidly as his vocals. Same can be said even more prodigiously for Ian Benjamin as Jerry Lee, the role that catapulted Levi Kraus to a Tony Award.

Kicking away his piano bench in the flamboyant style of The Killer would oblige Cain Center to take out some serious insurance, yet Benjamin had most of Lewis’s other wild antics covered. He lacked the finely tuned right heel in Jerry Lee’s arsenal, but he had the signature pumping piano action and zigzag runs securely in hand, as well as his outré mic handling. After bringing down the house with “Great Balls of Fire,” Benjamin also proved he could work the crowd he had rattled so triumphantly with his so-predictable “Shakin’” encore.

If you know Jerry Lee’s Sun catalog – or his sensational marital history – you’ll understand why Benjamin gets to be the most sensuous and bawdy member of the quartet. If not, you’ll be reminded. Although there were no photos of The Killer wearing suspenders for me to find with Google, Killion follows in the Broadway production’s footsteps by outfitting Benjamin with a pair.

We see why after Lewis leers at Dyanne in a way that risks Elvis’s rage and his girlfriend’s rejection. But Julia Freeman as Dyanne will not be intimidated. Au contraire. With her “Fever” and her “Hear You Knockin’,” she gives Lewis and then Presley the vamping of their lives.

But it’s with Lewis that she leans suggestively over Jerry Lee’s piano and tugs at those suspenders. Fever, indeed!

For their respective partisans, Eli Fischer as Elvis or Connor Nielsen as Cash may emerge as the apex among the vocalists. Though his bass register doesn’t reach as richly down to San Antone as Johnny’s, there’s an uncanny sameness between Nielsen and The Man in Black up higher in his mid and upper range, conveying the penetration and distinctive off-key astringency of that voice as well or better than I’ve ever heard it before.

Sometimes the visual resemblance was also uncanny. With Elvis or Johnny, just listening obviously wasn’t enough to satisfy Albert in his director’s chair. Most audience members wouldn’t require any actor playing Cash to be as true to his look as you have to be to either the look of Elvis or the less universally imitated Jerry Lee. Nielsen, we can suspect, put in that extra film study.

Fischer may have had the most daunting task as Elvis, considering the charisma he must live up to. Even if this is pre-Army Elvis, Mutrux conscientiously points out that Presley has already played Vegas. That’s more than sufficient excuse for Fischer to layer on all of the signature moves we associate with The King, from his scandalous Ed Sullivan days to his polished King of Vegas years.

So Fischer’s mic handling and stage movement must be on a par with Benjamin’s. We’ve seen enough sliding on two knees to celebrate World Cup goals for that onstage move to strike us now with the same excitement it packed back in the ‘50s. With that move masterfully conquered, this Elvis doesn’t need to sing better than this Jerry Lee, but he does. And anachronistically, when he tosses his scarf and sweat hanky into the front rows, he slays better than The Killer as well.

To say that Fischer’s “That’s All Right” and “Hound Dog” are electrifying is more than fair. But to say that they steal the thunder from Benjamin’s prime Jerry Lee exploits would be very presumptuous. Things get very hot at the Cain.

Come on over.

Ludlam’s “Reverse Psychology” Proves Devilishly Ridiculous

Review: Reverse Psychology at VisArt Video

By Perry Tannenbaum

Best known for his international comedy hit, The Mystery of Irma Vep, Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatre Company struggled for 17 years before his 1984 breakthrough brought him financial security. But AIDS took him down, so he couldn’t enjoy his celebrity and notoriety for long. Ludlam was gone less than two months after my first reviews and features appeared on the Charlotte theatre scene in 1987.

Vep wasn’t too long in finding me. Following up on previous drag triumphs in Psycho Beach Party and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom at the storied Pterodactyl Club, Alan Poindexter and innovative Theatre Company introduced the crowning Ridiculous Theatre glory to the Queen City in 1993. Poindexter was only partially mincing in Ludlam’s flamboyant footsteps, for the Long Island native not only wrote a large chunk of his Ridiculous rep but also starred and frequently directed.

In all, Ludlam’s Complete Plays runs to over 900 pages, including such promising titles as Turds in Hell, Eunuchs of the Forbidden City, Isle of the Hermaphrodites, Secret Lives of the Sexists, and Der Ring Gott Farblongett. Despite these temptations, we’ve waited over 30 years to dip further into the Ridiculous oeuvre.

But it’s not surprising that PaperHouse Theatre is the perpetrator. After all, they exhumed Irma Vep two summers ago at VisArt Video’s clubby setting at the rear of their alley. It’s also rather discerning of them to ignore Ludlam’s more sensational titles in favor of Reverse Psychology.

The original 1980 production drew one of the strangest reproaches ever seen in a review. Writing for the New York Times, Frank Rich declared that Ludlam’s new farce did not live up to the playwright’s Ridiculous brand: “Silly? Perhaps. Clever? Certainly. Funny? Absolutely,” he conceded. “But ridiculous? When a play is as well-crafted and sharply written as Mr. Ludlam’s, honest-to-God respect must be paid.”

Rich wasn’t done, citing Ludlam’s production for selling his own play short.

PaperHouse doesn’t make the same mistake – or any others, for that matter. Shrewdly in charge, PaperHouse founder and artistic director Nicia Carla gives her players free rein to go with the freaky flow of the action and to underscore their quirks and hypocrisies, even if they trespass the borderlines of caricature. But they keep their mischief within the two psychiatrists and their two patients, never breaking character or milking an easy laugh.

That approach enriches the ironies Ludlam explores and sharpens the satirical points he scores with his four intertwined adulterers.

Leonard Silver and his wife, Karen Gold, are the psychiatrists who begin secret affairs at the beginning of Act 1, neither of them aware that their new paramours, Silver’s Eleanor and Gold’s Freddie, are also patients of their spouses. Ludlam is showing us all this gradually in a series of two-handed scenes between Silver and Eleanor, Silver and Freddie, Freddie and Eleanor – yes, they’re married – and Silver and Gold.

So the accumulation of deliciously absurd discovery adds fuel to the comedy as we piece together the big secret that this unfaithful quartet doesn’t, that they’re all being cheated on. Yet the business end of this farce, juxtaposed with the couples’ home lives, compounds the comedy long before their intertwined deceits unravel.

For the most absurd thing you’ll notice is that the psychiatrists’ marital relationship is far more hostile and acrimonious than their patients’! They’re the ones who need therapy!

Nevertheless, Gold is making Freddie, a struggling artist, feel guilty because she can lavish all the money she receives from Eleanor and her other clientele on a new gallery where Freddie can paint and exhibit. Silver, meanwhile, is wowing Eleanor on her own dime, if we presume that Freddie can’t really afford his therapy on his own.

Ludlam will keep leaning into this point even after the farcical climax in Act 2, where all four of his sex-driven cheaters are found out in a frantic scene at a beachside resort. The upshot of all these blasted deceptions is a double fake-out epilogue that serves to magnify Ludlum’s exploitation theme to the magnitude of horror.

And yes, Rich may have missed what Ludlam saw as the most ridiculous aspect of his satirical tale. A specter of promiscuity hovers over it all. All the wicked stealth and hurried cover-ups are driven by axiomatic beliefs in the sanctity of marriage, fidelity, and monogamy. Each of these pieties may have seemed supremely ridiculous to Ludlam – inside the box – before he was diagnosed with AIDS a mere two months before his death.

Carla and her cast make it clear that the psychiatrists are definitely among the loonies that we see. The most promiscuous of these is Ashby Blakely as the ravenously omnivorous Dr. Leonard Silver, madly attracted to all the other people onstage except his wife. Brilliantly layered on in the epilogue is an eerie touch that would have been unavailable to Ludlam when he originated this role: a spot-on evocation of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.

It’s pretty obvious that Carla and Lisa Schacher, in her yummiest role yet, see Eleanor as the polar opposite of Silver, the least guilt-ridden by promiscuity and the most horribly victimized. Partly due to her sunny histrionics and partly due to Ludlam’s portraiture, we find Eleanor the most artless and appealing of these risk-takers. Her most extreme travails begin midway through Act 2 when she is visited by a quasi-nightmare.

This is when Rasheeda Moore comes to the fore as Dr. Karen Gold and begins to seize her rightful place as the cunning and evil of the bunch. Blakely as Silver offers keen competition, shamelessly wooing Freddie during multiple therapy sessions and shredding his Hippocratic oath when his dear patient forsakes him. Moore is merely cruel and unscrupulous with Eleanor, taking multiple phone calls in the middle of their session and then brusquely shutting her down mid-question when time is up.

How does Chaz Pofahl as Freddie manage to keep paying Silver if the starving artist cannot sell even one of his paintings? Supreme poseur and part-time sponge, the stylish and cavalier Pofahl charmingly shows us that our Freddie cares nothing for such mundane matters, slickly picking up Gold at a museum when only one of them can pay the cab fare to his humble abode.

On your ride home, with your impressions of Reverse Psychology still fresh, you may consider the notion that Eleanor and Freddie have somehow cured their therapists.

That may be the last of multiple meanings that you’ll find in Ludlam’s title. It’s the last of his ironies, for sure, and devilishly ridiculous.

Or it was the last irony in this farce. Grimmer ironies surfaced when Ludlam’s death was front page news in the New York Times. Public Theatre’s legendary Joseph Papp, with whom Ludlam was engaging in contract talks, put it bluntly, as he always did: “We lost an extraordinary artist who was just on his way to a tremendous breakthrough in the theater and opera.”

“Dracula” Transforms from Bela to Bowie in “A Comedy of Terrors”

**Review: Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors at Booth Playhouse**

By Perry Tannenbaum

Even before he became a Muppet or a General Mills breakfast cereal, Bram Stoker’s Dracula regularly took on a comical tinge that the novelist could not have foreseen when his masterwork was published in 1897. You can probably place the blame on Bela Lugosi, the first actor to portray the vampire in a talkie, released in 1931. Not only did numerous comedians, impressionists, gameshow hosts, and late-night TV celebs take stabs at imitating Bela’s Transylvanian bloodsucker, so did many of my classmates and kids on the block.

Extra points went to those who flicked their tongues out saying “blod,” the fang-tastic villain’s favorite elixir.

Lugosi himself was in on the joke, reprising the undead Count in an Abbott & Costello flick, but he always remained in character, a mesmerizing, dimly-lit creature of the night. Later films, in the wake of numerous cartoon desecrations, inflicted comical cracks in the mold.

In Love at First Bite (1979), George Hamilton became a New York playboy, still deadly serious but younger, more lustful, more fashionable. He even turned the silky collar of his tux down. And he loved to boogie. Compared to the white-haired Leslie Nielsen in Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), however, Hamilton was orthodox. Brooks freed Dracula to be bumbling and accident-prone.

Worst of all, the Nielsen Drac could almost crack a smile. “It’s good to be dead!” he crows.

As their title tells you, Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen’s Dracula: A Comedy of Terrors is even more brazen. With primeval Transylvanian fogs and mists sprayed from aerosol cans, cute neighing hobby horses terrified by Dracula’s name, and puppet rivals for Lucy Westveldt’s hand, gasps of surprise stem more from mirth than terror. Even flipping the given names of Stoker’s Westveldt sisters is for the sake of getting a laugh.

So it was under Greenberg’s direction on opening night at Booth Playhouse last week, where Blumenthal Arts is presenting the show through August 9. When it came to comedy, there was no suspense at all. Fanged marquees front the lobby off Founders Hall and over the Booth’s proscenium. Themed cocktails are among the sweets and beverages available at the bar, including the lurid “Type A,” served up in a blood bag with a straw. And of course, a swag stand at the other end of the lobby and selfie backgrounds in the middle.

It’s decades too late to accuse the Blumenthal and other tour backers of commercializing Dracula, don’t you think? Just enjoy.

A huge part of Greenberg’s comedy, from the aerosol and hobby horses onwards, is the cheap flim-flam of his theatrics. Skimping on scenery and realism isn’t all. This Dracula also skimps on players. No, our scenery budget cannot accommodate a real spiral staircase. Nor can our cast fill all the roles in our story without most of them doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the characters they portray.

They soldier on, patching the cracks with lame shtick, shameless mugging, cheap props, hurried costume changes, and – when all else fails – pure chutzpah. The flimsier the patchwork, the funnier it gets.

Skimpy is a better word for the outfit that Christopher James Stevens arrives in as the studly Count. No coat, no sleeves, and no shirt – but production photos do reveal a bit of a collar at the top of his sheer, elaborately woven David Bowie vest. The blonde Nordic hair is as sexualized as Dracula’s black jeans and studded belt.

This old man looks really young. And his luscious, toothsome Lucy! What a Victoria’s Secret morsel she becomes when we see Adriane Leigh Robinson (through July 19) in her Victorian boudoir, besieged by a thirsty vampire who has never been so aroused.

With so much excess and kinkiness already on demand, Greenberg compounds it by leaning enthusiastically into crossdressing. Not only do we get a bounty of elaborate outfits for Lucy and her Transylvanian worshiper, but costume designer Tristan Raines lavishes outrageously ornate dresses for , to cross-dress into as Mina – before and after Lucy’s ugly sister is bitten and undead – and out of as he transforms into a bustling female Dr. Van Helsing.

Crossdressing goes the other way for Kelly Bashar, who mainly fails to protect the siblings as their daddy, Dr. Westfeldt, when she isn’t moonlighting as the insane, insect-eating Renfield. Her costume changes are among the swiftest, especially funny when they’re on the run.

Though not as detailed, intricate, scenically sumptuous, or crammed with characters as the Brooks spoof, Greenberg and Rosen arguably skim Stoker’s storyline more faithfully. A couple of times, in letters from Jonathan Harker and Dr. Westfeldt, Greenberg and Rosen remind us that Stoker’s Dracula was often an epistolary novel when it wasn’t huge chunks of Harker’s and Mina’s journals.

So we begin with Jonathan as he travels to Castle Dracula, where his time is spent more on business, securing multiple properties for the Count in the London area, and not at all on being terrorized by bad dreams and ravenous vampiresses. As Bashar advises us, before transforming into a Man-Eating Wolf and later Dr. W, our presentation will be significantly shorter than the book’s 418 pages.

Harker is significantly different from Stoker’s vision of him – or anyone else’s. It’s almost so fine a runway for James Romney, this wonderful character arc of his, that he nearly steals scenes from Stevens’ flaming bisexuality and Robinson’s voluptuousness. He is no Indiana Jones in Transylvania, nor even a Brad from Rocky Horror. He’s a bit tremulous like Gene Wilder was as a leading man in horror films if he were played by Woody Allen, a nebishy weakling.

You begin to wonder what Lucy sees in him – and Lucy herself begins to harbor doubts. Compared with Lucy’s and Dracula’s wild animal libidos, Jonathan’s is a clam. But there is a delicious irony embedded in this Comedy of Terrors storyline, for Harker is startlingly transformed from the moment he is ravaged by his Transylvanian rival. He discovers the animal lurking within him, a midlife onrush of hormonal chaos and libido.

Suddenly, he is capable of fighting for Lucy’s love – and dressing in leather! With all the critical commentary that has been lavished on Stoker’s dark sexual themes, there’s little discussion of the possibility that Dracula is subconsciously crafting his own doom, fulfilling a secret death wish.

Comedy of Terrors brings that notion explicitly to the surface, a wild twist that might actually be a deep and discerning reading of the book. To stage that kind of welcoming of death, of course, Greenberg and Rosen violate all the rules of vampire invincibility by night and vulnerability by day. It’s a climax that audaciously challenges logic, physics, philosophy, and settled pseudo-science.

But it’s just so nutty and hilarious that we go with it. Especially if we’ve drained two Type A blood bags during the show.

Change Comes to Sixties Baltimore in a Rockin’ Good Way at Matthews Playhouse With “Hairspray”

August 9, 2026TheatreBeth Levine-Chaitman, Carter Poulson, Chris Morgan, Corinn Bordelon, Ellen Robison, Eve Monroe, John Waters, Johnny Hohenstein, Keenan Tabor, Layne Harder, Logan Cosper, Mike Carroll, Olivia Greene, Rachel Peterson, Sidney Horton, Todd Burnetteperryt77

**Review: Hairspray at Matthews Playhouse**

By Perry Tannenbaum

July 10, 2026, Matthews, NC – One of the most confounding things humans ask themselves and each other is “When are things going to change?” Too many things are changing all the time for that generalized question to be taken seriously – and too many people asking that question seriously have too little inclination to make change happen. In Hairspray, adapted from John Waters’ 1988 film, change comes to Baltimore in 1962, a year before Bob Dylan declared that “the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,” and two years before LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

Waters’ script was a rewrite of history that stuck, given new life by the Tony Award musical adaptation. Because you not only can change things with a winning strategy and sufficient effort; when you do, and you’re one of history’s winners, you get to rewrite history as you see fit and invent new heroes. Watching Tracy Turnblad spark change in 1962 Baltimore, you just set aside the need for JFK, Dylan, MLK, and LBJ for a couple of hours. Leave it to Tracy, supported by her dad, to rally a whole city and overturn segregation at a teen dance show on local TV.

The current Matthews Playhouse production, directed by Sidney Horton, reminds us why Hairspray not only won Best Musical in 2003, but seven additional Tonys. These included Thomas Meehan and Mark O’Donnell for best script and statuettes for Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman honoring their best musical score. When Horton put out the casting call, the Metrolina talent pool could eyeball four different roles that were juicy enough to deliver Tony nominations to the original Broadway cast. All three Turnblads won the prize, led by Harvey Fierstein as Edna, who undergoes a personal makeover, inspired by her plucky daughter.

Watching Horton’s players at the Matthews Playhouse, you may find yourself surprised that only four original cast members won Tony nominations. What about Corny Collins, the deejay who fronts the afternoon TV dance-a-thon, receptive to the new grooves on the airwaves and open to featuring Blacks more often than on the current once-a-month “Negro Day”? Or Motormouth Maybelle, Corny’s counterpart when the Afro-Americans get their brief chances to shine? Or Link Larkin, the dreamboat teen idol Tracy craves, pragmatic about his career, yet open to developing as a musician and a person?

All three of these prove to be plum roles for Johnny Hohenstein, so charismatic last July as the iconic baddie in Peter and the Starcatcher, and two newcomers, Carter Poulson and Olivia Greene. Corny’s pragmatism allows Hohenstein to be different characters when he’s on-air holding a mic, behind the scenes sparring with his station manager or the show’s sponsor, and out in the wild scouting talent. It’s a less outré ride than Black Stache, but there’s a wider range of phoniness to savor.

At first, Poulson appears to be the trophy boyfriend of fellow Corny Collins regular Amber Von Tussle, the daughter of WZZT station manager – and former Miss Baltimore Crab – Velma. But when Corny suggests that he croon his new song, “It Takes Two,” as a serenade to Tracy, newly installed on the show over the Van Tussles’ objections, he addresses only his opening overtures to Amber. With both lasses vying for his attention, Tracy nearly drooling, Poulson’s appeal swells the more he croons and swivels his guitar from back to front. Then he comes on to Tracy with a cinematic zeal that would make any girlfriend jealous. A dreamboat’s dream kiss ends the song.

Thematically, Maybelle may be pre-eminent in Hairspray, the mother that Tracy, her bestie Penny, and Amber should have had in their earlier years. Off-air, she’s the den mother to all the talented Afros on The Corny Collins Show who have been relegated to second-class status. Her own brood includes Seaweed, the Afro stud who teaches Tracy and Link some slick moves, and Little Inez, whose audition for the open slot on Corny’s show is doomed by her race. As this living rebuke to Velma, Greene needed to be a big personality from the start. She must grow bigger when she and Tracy lead a street demonstration outside WZZT, demanding desegregation. By the end of the show, Greene must sing “I Know Where I’ve Been,” the anthemic peak of Hairspray.

In her auspicious Matthews debut, Greene showed us that her role in the doo-wop trio in Theatre Charlotte’s Little Shop of Horrors was a mere foretaste of her capabilities. True, she seemed a bit small for Motormouth’s shoes when we first saw her, yet she was more than ample for her climactic showstopper, her crusading gospel spirit getting by far the loudest roar from the opening night audience prior to the big crowning of Miss Teenage Hairspray and the spectacular Edna Turnblad reveal.

So at various times, the Turnblad clan was gloriously upstaged at Matthews’ Fullwood Theatre. When they’re all professionals or seasoned community performers, that’s not a problem at all. Although I’d never seen her in performance before, Logan Cosper took command of the full Fullwood stage as Tracy from the moment we woke up with her in “Good Morning Baltimore.” Not really your ideal candidate for body shaming, Cosper’s only truly plus-sized aspects were her energy and her smile. As the stage fills up around her, making her way through the city to her high school, those two ingredients are perfect: she needs that sunny cheer so the comedy will click when she passes a drunken derelict on the street. And make no mistake: she’s not merely one of Link’s admirers; she’s his most fanatical. We see significant personal growth from there.

If you spotted Leopard at Booth Playhouse a couple of months ago in his leather motorcycle outlaw outfit in Queen City Concerts’ We Will Rock You, you likely emerged with the impression that he’s way tall and rail thin, not the best fit for Edna. But if you’ve caught him at Theater Charlotte in either Something Rotten! or The Producers, where he formally cross-dressed as the Chrysler Building,you would also realize that sashaying and drag are right up his alley. God and costume designer Beth Levine-Chaitman only know what garments and appliances may lurk under Edna’s housecoat and subsequent makeovers to transform Leopard into the Turnblads’ plus-sized fashion plate.

Yet I was a wee bit disappointed to see him so controlled and disciplined. Leopard’s voice could have been an octave lower at key moments for the fullest plus-sized Edna experience. Nor were the constraints strictly directorial. The kitchen or laundry room that scenic designer Chris Morgan provided for Tracy’s mom and dad was woefully minus-sized, barely allowing breathing, let alone stateliness or flamboyance. For the novelty showstopper, Edna’s “You’re Timeless to Me” duet with Wilbur, Horton wisely closed the curtains on the entire set. The effect was very vaudevillian, drawing lusty ovations before and after the couple’s reprise.

That duet was probably the best hook-up between Horton and choreographer Rachel Peterson – or one of the turning points. Through most of Act 1, dancers often moved in place rather than zipping around, so the tableaus lacked depth until the climactic chaos of the protest riot at WZZT. Seemed to me that the onrush of cops and Billy clubs was what transformed the righteous protest into a riot. You can be the judge whether Horton is making that point.

Honoring (or disregarding) the script, Horton allows Mike Carroll, in one of Levine-Chaitman’s tackiest costumes, to attend the big integration protest as Wilbur. Yet somehow, he isn’t arrested along with his family, the Von Tussles, and the Black folk. Overnight during intermission, he is able to sell his store and raise bail for everybody – except Tracy, specially targeted by the malign Velma. So despite his seeming subservience, Wilbur is a mover and shaker, a chief driver in the changes dramatized in Hairspray.Not only is he a struggling store owner, but also a believer in Tracy’s ambitions, in Edna’s dormant dreams, a liberator of jailed protestors, and a supporter of Tracy’s adopted Black community. Along with Tracy, Maybelle, and Corny, truly one of the chief engines of change.

Yet at times, Carroll makes Wilbur cuddly if not diminutive. You may recognize a Buddy Hackett impishness to him in his “You’re Timeless to Me” serenade, before and after Edna warms to it. Apparently, he isn’t Jewish. His best quip, “Shabbat Shalom!” was mangled beyond recognition on opening night, with none of the requisite gusto. OK, Horton does not have the right DNA to make the correction by himself, but where were you, Levine-Chaitman, when we needed you?

On the other hand, we can probably credit L-C for the horrid wigs that crowned the VanTussles’ toxicity, so we can partially commute whatever punishment she deserves for not supplying Carroll with the necessary Hebrew. Keenan Tabor as Velma was far more repellent as Velma when the spotlight was on her for “Miss Baltimore Crabs” in Act 1, but the apple didn’t fall far from the tree when Layne Harder seized center stage for her “Cooties” showpiece. Most of the bug motif that infested the original Waters movie has been fumigated in this Meehan-O’Donnell adaptation. Mercifully so, but Harder’s opportunities to be singularly noxious are curtailed and muted by this cleansing.

Who to single out among all the other players? Todd Burnette as Seeweed Stubbs was likely the coolest, hippest sight on stage, and Eve Monroe as Little Inez – the standout WZZT auditioner spurned for her race – also springs instantly to mind. As Tracy’s best friend, Penny Pingleton, Corinn Bordelon doesn’t gush over Burnette as Cosper does over Poulsen, but she’s ready enough for love in her shy way. In the breakout double-duet, “Without Love,” where both of the young couples exult over their newfound bliss, it’s a shame that the volume of the eight-piece band, so zestfully led by Ellen Robison, threatened to drown out Bordelon’s most hilarious lyric.

That budding romance Waters filmed in the late 80s wasn’t quite daring enough to say, “now I’ve tasted chocolate and I’m never going back.” So our journey back to the twist and shout and the Madison of the 60s has a sprinkling of the new millennium. Change is good.

What a Web Is Woven by the Adulterers of Don’t Dress for Dinner, but They’re Both Off-Mic

August 9, 2026Theatreperryt77

Review: Don’t Dress for Dinner at Davidson

By Perry Tannenbaum

July 16, 2026, Davidson, NC – Thanks to its Gallic amorality, Marc Camoletti’s Don’t Dress for Dinner has aged rather gracefully. After its eager reception in Paris as Pyjama Pour Six in 1985, when cads and mistresses had to content themselves with landline communication if their affairs were about to be discovered, a London translation by Robin Hawdon opened to comparable success in 1991. We didn’t see this fast-paced farce in Charlotte until two months before Camoletti died in 2003, a decade after its American debut at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey – and nine years before its Broadway premiere.

Since the BareBones production of ’03, the piece has been presented to Metrolina audiences exclusively in Davidson, by Davidson Community Players in 2005 and 2015, and currently by DCP’s offshoot, Matt Merrell Productions, founded by DCP’s former executive director. The latest edition returns to Duke Family Performance Hall, on the lovely Davidson College campus (currently disfigured by a massive construction project near the Student Union where the theater is housed), where DCP ran an astounding Evita less than a month ago. The quality of the playing, directed by Andy Rassler, reaches a level parallel with the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Sadly, though, all those accomplished players are off-mic.

The action is triggered by Bernard in the burbs of the Big Apple, where he has planned to wine and dine his mistress, a model named Suzanne, on her birthday while his wife Jacqueline is away from the summer home visiting her mother. Haste is built into the sleek machine of this farce from the outset, since Bernard needs to whisk his wife out the door before Suzanne walks in. Before this key objective can be met, Jackie intercepts a phone call from the caterer letting Bernard know that the cook, Suzette, is on her way. Somehow, Jackie is sufficiently acquainted with her husband’s foibles to have her suspicions aroused.

Bernard thinks he has come up with an alibi, but he’s disastrously wrong. He has also invited Robert over for this catered dinner, whom Jackie is sure to remember as the best man at their wedding. Trouble is, Jackie is Robert’s mistress – so the main reason Robert has accepted Bernard’s invite is that he might be able to shack up with Jackie. Similarly capable of adjusting on-the-fly and deceiving, Jackie finds a way to cancel her trip, presumably with romantic weekend plans that align with Robert’s.

While the wily Bernard triggers the action and the comedy, poor unsuspecting Robert is trapped at the center. Counting on their longtime friendship to keep his infidelity under wraps, Bernard asks Robert to pretend that Suzanne is his girlfriend when she arrives. Tough spot. As freely as Jackie and Bernard will both engage in infidelity, Robert must now make the impossible calculation on which of the two would be angrier upon discovering that she or he was betrayed.

The arrival of the two women, Suzanne and Suzette, compounds the complications. As much as their names sound alike, Camoletti intends their appearances to be radically different. Suzette, we’ll discover, is married to a human bulldozer, George, who is capable of intimidating – and manhandling – both of the other men at the same time. Nevertheless, when Suzette arrives before Suzanne (Bernard and Jacky are out food shopping for things to cook), Robert somehow presumes that it’s Bernard’s mistress ringing the doorbell.

The ensuing get-acquainted conversation, based on wild mutual misunderstandings, is classic, easily worth all of Camoletti’s contrivances. Robert, thinking that sleeping in the same bedroom with Bernard’s mistress is a small part of his assignment, is a bit shocked when Suzette starts off by asking him to show her “where everything is.” Meanwhile, the cook is almost equally alarmed that the strangely rattled Robert needs to know more about her before showing her the kitchen so she can get to work.

Robert’s mistake only assures that more difficult challenges lie ahead when Bernard returns, Suzanne arrives, and new deceits must be devised. How will Jacky’s wrath be averted if Robert sticks with his girlfriend pretense? How will Bernard and Suzanne react when they learn that the slot reserved for Robert’s girlfriend has been filled? How will that fancy dinner get cooked?

Once Robert initiates his mixed-up girlfriend charade, we can be sure that a placid evening does not lie ahead. How happy will Suzanne’s birthday be if she must now don Suzette’s cook uniform and confine herself to the kitchen? If Jacky’s rage veers out of control, how will his secret keep safe from Bernard’s discovery?

In real time, all the misperceptions, panicked changes of plans, and raging discoveries are more than dizzying enough to keep an audience leaning forward to keep pace. It’s also hard for Camonetti’s characters to adjust sometimes: often the barrage of comedy emanates from somebody reflexively blurting out the truth – or a lie that has been superseded by circumstances and changes in plans.

On opening night at Duke Performance Hall, most of the audience couldn’t lean forward enough because the players were often inaudible, short on energy and lacking amplification. Though Rassler’s directing and Della Knowles’s costume design made it clear enough that Lacy Camp was not the knockout model Bernard had foretold, my wife Sue and I didn’t know who or what she was when she arrived. That’s how much of the dialogue we had missed in Row H. My own initial surmises ranged from masseuse to physical therapist until I caught on.

Merrill absorbed most of the assaults as Bernard when the comedy mayhem got physical, obliging him to be the first to climb into his pajamas. He probably sustained the most energy vocally until Brian Rassler arrived late in Act 2 as George, the husband who will have gripes with both of the other guys. But Merrill’s physical energy was fine, enabling us to track Bernard’s ebbs, flows, and on-the-fly calculations as they twisted the plot.

Lou Dalessandro, who has played the high and mighty right up to Macbeth, comes off surprisingly well as the hapless victim, Robert. You almost had to adore him when he reacted with such obvious shock to Camp’s appearance and proceeded to go with the flow – after objecting so vehemently minutes before to Bernard’s scheme.

Camp is not only the most inscrutable of the players as Suzette. She is also the most frequently inaudible. She does transform handsomely from dumpy cook to a plausible, jealousy-worthy girlfriend, relishing that slinky physicality. Camp also logged maximum mileage demanding and receiving extra cash for services beyond the culinary, a zestful working-class opportunist.

All the ages of the principals have been discreetly adjusted upwards, both from the script and the 2003 BareBones premiere, yet Karen Christensen is still a marvel in tossing off the role of Suzanne a full 30 summers after first appearing on my radar. It wasn’t age that Christensen added to Suzanne’s glamor as much as a patrician elegance. There was a bit of goofball poutiness to Christensen as Suzanne sulked off to the kitchen, but she somehow managed to mix in an air of condescension.

No doubt about it, Jacky remains the she-who-must-be-fooled adversary through most of the evening – until the action suddenly flips and Bernard’s fury is kindled. So Cat Rutledge perhaps had the most reason from start to finish to keep her energy blazing hot, whether in suspicion, jealousy, or amorous passion. She actually performed rather well, but because she had a head start on drawing our ill will, she likely drew the most frustration when the audience struggled to hear the verbal barbs and nuggets in the script – or failed to follow what was going on. Just a half dozen well-deployed microphones would have made opening night so much more enjoyable, possibly sparking the standing ovation that didn’t happen when the cast took their bows.

Evita’s “New Argentina” Suddenly Reeks of MAGA USA

**Review: Evita at Duke Performance Hall**

By Perry Tannenbaum

As women and as films, Evita and Melania will never be viewed as two of a kind. Yet in recent years, as Ms. Trump’s husband becomes more ceremonial, militaristic, and authoritarian, a mild kinship and a certain sisterhood have emerged between the two first ladies. There are only a few moments when the current Davidson Community Players’ production of the revered Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, directed with surprising ferocity by Steve Kaliski, seems to reference that kinship.

But there are many more instances when Eva Perón’s “New Argentina” brings present-day USA to mind in all its vulgar MAGA glory. Those happen whenever fervent religious enthusiasm is misdirected. Or when working-class people are talked up so they can be more easily exploited.

By juxtaposing Evita’s glamor, pragmatism, and humble origins with the mixture of street-smart cynicism, working-class empathy, and grudging admiration for homegrown “star quality” that we hear from Che, our narrator, Tim Rice’s libretto has always radiated a reasoned objectivity.

So Kaliski and his principals, Melissa Lozada and Neifert Enrique, aren’t reversing the political lean of Evita. They’re giving the music, the recitative, and the main characters a firm shove in a more malevolent direction.

Enrique is particularly startling, easily the most dominant Che we’ve had in the QC. This is a rock tenor who can produce piercingly strong falsetto treble and, minutes later, invade the bass clef so deeply that you wonder where that voice is coming from – and Enrique never makes the mistake of yielding to Lloyd Webber’s singsong to the extent that it dulls Che’s subversive edge.

In sum, Enrique is often powerful enough to make us see the charismatic Evita through his eyes. If you wanted to see the icon as a calculating seductress, who may or may not have gotten religion through her good fortune or failing health, Whitney Drury was perfection in Queen City Theatre Company’s 2010 production, both in the sexual predation that catapulted Evita to celebrity and in her terminal suffering.

On the other hand, if you wanted to be fascinated by an enigmatic Evita, one gifted with so much natural charm and regality that she refuted the whole concept of aristocracy, Lucia Stetson was ideal at Central Piedmont in 2018 – with no shortage of Evita vanity.

At Duke Performance Hall, on the Davidson College campus, Lozada is simply the meanest and most malignant Eva Perón you’ll likely ever see. Even her “star quality” has a punkish edge as she never quite sheds her peasant roots. There’s a somewhat ghoulish tinge that lingers softly on her final prideful declaration that she has brought her people closer “to the heart of Perón,” her autocratic husband, the nation’s president.

In that moment especially, our clueless Melania pales next to her. We must revert to the golden-haired Trump for a parallel.

Of course, if you saw Lozada in the title role of Electricidad last August, you may already be altering your plans for the final weekend of Evita.Or, if you witnessed Enrique in his most recent title-role triumph down in Matthews as The Prince of Egypt, you may be astonished to hear that his Che is as potent as his Moses.

They aren’t the only reasons why word-of-mouth touting Evita is spreading like a Lake Norman wildfire. Kaliski’s design team has also risen to the challenge of creating a spectacle to match the dimensions of the Duke. Most notable of these are costume designer Sarah Deutsch, lighting designer Kaylin Gess, choreographer Tod A. Kubo, and – perched high in the stratosphere behind the stage’s second scrim – the 10-piece band directed by Matthew Primm.

Upstaging and outsizing them all are the projections designed by Caleb Sigmon, beginning with what may be an actual Eva Perón film! Rice and Lloyd Webber wanted to simulate us all being gathered at a movie theater at the start of their musical when the flick is suddenly interrupted by the announcement of the beloved Evita’s death.

For the first time, this opening scene with its operatic choral requiem seemed prophetic, previewing the wailing and grief that is sure to engulf our streets, churches, and national monuments when 45/47’s number is up. The Amazing Tangerine tries so hard to alienate and disillusion his cult following. In vain, it seems.

Victimized by the wayward Halton Theater sound system when he portrayed Che in 2018, Ron Turner Diaz ages gracefully in the role of the militantly urbane Perón. Effortlessly, he conjures up the personality of a chieftain who will either succumb to Evita’s charm and chutzpah or slay her instantly. There’s a nice tension to their “I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You,” spiced with a tango tang of violence.

Lastly – except for dozens of aristocrats, lovers, family, military, children, and the citizen ensemble – there’s Tristan Nogueira, rounding out an all-Latino cast of major characters, conclusively answering the question of whether we have enough Hispanic talent in Charlotte to deliver a truly authentic Evita. If you saw Nogueira as the surprisingly skeptical Aaron in The Prince of Egypt, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by his transformation from the future High Priest into lounge lizard Agustin Magaldi, Evita’s first discard.

Extra bonus: Lindsay Litka-Montes sings “Another Suitcase in Another Hall” with a quiet, simmering bitterness as Juan’ s discarded Mistress.

More significant extra bonus: due to popular demand, an extra performance of Evita has been added to its closing weekend. This coming Sunday at 7pm.

Beginning at the Beginning at Cunningham Theatre Center

Before the news broke about the extra Evita performance, we returned to the Wildcats campus to usher in the summer – and celebrate Father’s Day – with Common Thread Theatre Company’s Beginning at the Beginning. Staged at the Cunningham Theatre Center, B @ the B was a miniature new play festival showcasing two works-in-progress with an intermission in between and a talkback with playwrights Brian Daye and David Scheonfeld afterwards.

This time, the trip up I-77 wasn’t quite as rewarding. Daye’s one-act, The Race, directed by Eric J. Little, was the better of the two pieces: more compelling action, fuller characterizations, and high-energy performances. Shawn Halliday portrayed the overtly racist Lavell Anderson, on death row as a convicted murderer awaiting execution, while Vanecia Boone was cast as his eleventh-hour appeals attorney, African American cub lawyer Cory Williams, understandably reluctant to take the case.

The two shrunken timeframes, the impending execution and the brevity of Daye’s script, short-circuited any racial animosities that may have clouded the budding attorney-client relationship between Cory and Lavell. He had undergone a religious transformation, and she, with even greater speed, is convinced of his innocence.

Worse, the case against Lavell, whether 19 years or three months old, is so laughably flimsy that it should never have been brought to court – unless the charge had been armed robbery. Lavell maintains that his accomplice, Vern McCluskey, was the trigger man and that he never fired his gun. Criminology or Forensics 101 are not prerequisites to knowing how Lavell’s assertion can be confirmed: anyone who has read a Perry Mason novel – the series began over 90 years ago – is aware of scientific tests that match a bullet with a gun and determine whether a person has recently used a firearm.

Open and shut. We also liked Isaac Hampton as the big, bigoted prison guard.

Scheonfeld’s Massage Group Therapy was even less fully developed and, consequently, less satisfying. Aside from a creep named John who bedevils at least half of the four masseuses, none of the playwright’s people were sufficiently fleshed out. It was a little awkward to see Justin Peoples as John upstaging the exploited women we’re intended to care about.

Even if Scheonfeld had made his massage parlor workers more distinctive, there would have been another tall obstacle to overcome for me. Switching roles from female lead to director, Boone did not insist that her players – or the dude reading stage directions – speak loudly enough to be heard.

B @ the B hits the road for its concluding weekend, resurfacing at North Carolina A&T University on June 27 and 28, up in Winston-Salem. For the time being, the more rewarding trip is to Davidson for the resumption of the Community Players’ Evita.

As for Winston, best to wait for the International Black Theatre Festival, July 27 through August 1. Charlotte’s own BNS Productions will be among the many fine Black companies there, presenting four performances of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, afternoons and evenings on July 31 and August 1.

“Flip” Is Charlotte Ballet’s New Lab and Launching Pad

July 9, 2026DanceAdriana Wagenveld, Alejandro Cerrudo, Anna Owens, Barkley and Adriana Wagenveld, Clay Houston, David Anthony Scheuerman-Saucedo, Isaac Aoki, Jenni Propst, Launer and Luke Csordas, Mario Gonzalez, Mark Izu, Maurice Mouzon Jr., Oliver Oguma, Raven Barkley, Rees Launer, Remi Okamoto, Rick Moll, Serafina Wagenveld, Stephen Myersperryt77

By Perry Tannenbaum

Whenever you see a Charlotte Ballet performance at Knight Theater or the mighty Belk, you’re going to see talent, grace, athleticism, imagination, and dancers in abundance. At the McBride-Bonnefoux Center for Dance, however, only the first three of those wondrous plenitudes are guaranteed. Formality is loosened. Scale is often reduced. And over the past few years, Charlotte Ballet’s season has concluded with evenings of homegrown choreographies by members of the troupe, many of them new to the art.

The title of these venturous, experimental evenings has evolved from Choreographic Lab, when Hope Muir established them in 2018, to the current Flip – as in flipping the script – when Alejandro Cerrudo took over as artistic director. Moving from the big venues to the double-studio layout of the McBride-Bonnefoux, one studio accommodating the audience and the adjacent studio (partition opened) serving as the dancers’ stage, you feel like you’ve abandoned Broadway for a black box.

But without sacrificing the swank factor: the façade and lobby of the Center for Dance are more like a modern museum than a ballet school. So there’s an elegant patina layered onto the funky ambiance of briefer, smaller budget pieces, often reduced to solo performances or pas-de-deuxs. You might expect two or three pieces at most before an intermission at the Knight or Belk Theater. This year at Flip, there were nine, with five more in the lineup after the break.

So you can conclude that, among the 20 dancers in the Charlotte Ballet troupe, 70% can now affix the profession of choreographer to their résumés. Not quite. At this year’s Flip, members of the secondary Charlotte Ballet II troupe also participated in performing and choreographing the program. Six of the eight CB2 members profiled at the charlotteballet.org website danced in the program, with David Anthony Scheuerman-Saucedo also among the choreographers.

What happens behind the scenes must be a fascinating process, as the dancers choreograph for their comrades, teaming up by preference, negotiation, or random assignment. Two lighting designers, Jenni Propst and Rick Moll, split the 14 pieces between them, another negotiation or lottery.

Normally, two solo dances would be two too many for me. But at Flip, Raven Barkley’s “Groove” and Clay Houston’s “Nuit tombante” both transcended the norm. Set to Jackie Wilson’s cover of “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher,” Barkley’s choreography put little demand on her athleticism and was hardly unique. She was: lithe and charismatic in a vivid red dress.

In a sense, Houston’s piece wasn’t a solo at all. When night fell, he not only switched soundtracks, he also switched genders, discarding a wig and assorted paraphernalia and becoming more himself. At first, the transformation hit me as surprising and comical, but the mood – and the choreography – deepened and became touching.

Between these two solos, two of the best duets were programmed: Anna Owens’ “That’s all” and Adriana Wagenveld’s “Tethered.” Owens’ piece, set to a couple of non-Tiny Tim versions of “Tip Toe Thru the Tulips,” actually offered a rather comical reason for all the tiptoeing. At the climax, Owens in the female role gets Oliver Oguma to assist her in reaching a tulip that dangles temptingly from above. That’s when the “That’s all” came into play, as Owens departed instantly afterwards, without according Oguma the thanks he deserved.

Oguma, in the comical spirit of the music, looked more bewildered than pissed by the brush-off.

Wagenveld spliced two favorite Sebastian Plano tracks together for her soundtrack, recruiting her sister from CB2, Serafina Wagenveld, to join her in the project. Fortunately, Adriana’s tethering concept isn’t carried out literally. Though neither of their bios suggests that the siblings are twins, the matching costumes for the piece only encouraged that conjecture.

At times, Plano’s minimalist style seemed mated with the Wagenvelds’ walk-like-an-Egyptian grace and their stolid serenity. The sisters’ intertwinings, beautifully timed and carefully composed, might also take on a hieroglyphic look. Their costumes were sleek and timeless, sheer taupe tops with tight half-sleeves – think nylons – over flowing white slacks.

Two other duets stood out for me. Rees Launer’s “Kinetikos” was appropriately pulsating and percussive in opening the evening, set to a mashup of a couple of Aphex Twin tracks for Scheuerman-Saucedo and Serafina Wagenveld, growing more lyrical and nostalgic when the music transitioned to an Emile Mosseri piece. Most unique of all, perhaps, was Isaac Aoki’s “Topaz,” set for himself and Remi Okamoto to Mark Izu’s “Mermaid in a Silent Sea.”

With Aoki’s videography, we were taken more explicitly to desert lands in “Topaz” than we were by “Tethered.” The torrid climate fit hauntingly with the plodding tempo of the music, caravan-like when the whining Japanese shakuhachi dominated. Or the flute. Or the bass clarinet. The loneliness of the dark-clad Asians contrasted starkly with the sun-drenched hilly terrain, justifying that whining sound. Unlike “Tethered,” there was little connection at first between the two dancers. The piece was the antithesis of festive – until the tabla began to bubble underneath, gradually emerging and quickening the pace.

Of the remaining pieces, I found that the love-triangle narrative shape of Scheuerman-Saucedo’s “you and me and me and you” overcame my misgivings about listening to yet another setting to Jules Massenet’s “Meditation from Thaïs.” Although Part 1 of Mario Gonzalez’ “Fever Dream” struck me as a generic piece for four dancers, never once reminding me of Geppetto’s search for Pinocchio (let alone “Chapter 35”), Part 2, “25%,” enabled Stephen Myers to deliver one of the most vivacious solos of the evening, set to “Orchestra” by Labrinth.

Both his costume and charisma rivaled Raven’s. Nor was “Chapter 35” a waste, for it prodded me to investigate the insane “Big Hammer” video by James Blake. A cinematic masterwork!

You may disagree, but discovering new music is a key part of the adventure that Charlotte Ballet’s labs or Flips has to offer me. That was not the case with the closing offering of the evening, Maurice Mouzon Jr.’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” set to the Nina Simone recording. It’s been done before – and before that.

Mouzon’s setting, for four dancers, doesn’t stop at the threat of separation. It crosses over into the agony of it when it happens. So two couples is the right choreographic choice, for Mouzon allows ample opportunities for the two women, Barkley and Adriana Wagenveld, and the two men, Launer and Luke Csordas, to suffer and commiserate with one another in alternating segments.

Nor does Mouzon send the women off, an annoying choreographic tic, when the spotlight shifts to the men. Instead, he freezes them in a sad attitude while Moll dims their light. Why should they be out of sight if they’re not out of mind? Since the Simone track peters out in pitiful pleas, seemingly repeated after being irrevocably denied, Mouzon can only offer us a wan hope of reconciliation.

Hugged from the rear by their partners, their legs bent and suspended in air, Barkley and Wagenveld reached across the void between them and embraced with their arms fully extended, forming a poignant bridge. What a wonderful closing tableau.

Newsflash: Printedprograms for Flip and Charlotte Ballet’s previous show, One Thousand Pieces back in early May, contained announcements of the company’s 2026-27 season and a slate of touring engagements, an exciting new dimension for the troupe. A couple of new developments since Flip concluded its run on June 20.

The company has already appeared at the American Dance Festival in Durham for the first time since 2017, bringing with them a work by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin once again later in June. Then, less than a week ago, they fulfilled their promise to add to their announced touring dates.

Newly augmented, here’s the slate:

Sept. 25-26, 2026: Ballet Bend – Fall Dance Festival (Bend, OR)
Oct. 29-30, 2026: Brooks Center for the Performing Arts at Clemson University (Clemson, SC)
Nov. 7, 2026: Dance Cleveland (Cleveland, OH)
Jan. 27-31, 2027: The Joyce Theater (New York, NY)

The 2027 rendezvous at The Joyce Theater will be the first time Cerrudo has brought them there during his tenure. Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux, who died in the spring of 2025 at age 82, was still the artistic director when the company last wowed New York audiences at The Joyce in 2004. Ten years later, he would rebrand his troupe, but back then, they were known as the North Carolina Dance Theatre.

Charlotte Bach Festival Hits High Notes with Echoes of Bach and Handel’s Theodora

June 28, 2026OperaAisslinn Nosky, Benjamin Bayl, Carley DeFranco, Carrie Cheron, Circa, Emi Ferguson, Eric Carey, Esther Jeehae Ahn, George Frideric Handel’, Guy Fishman, Nicholas Garza, Ryne Cherry, Thomas Morell, Yaron Lifschitzperryt77

Review: Theodora at Sandra Levine Theatre

By Perry Tannenbaum

June 6, 2026, Charlotte, NC – After witnessing a mighty Mahler “Titan” Symphony and a world premiere Violin Concerto, “Agrifolia,” by Paul Wiancko at Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, we passed up Emmylou Harris, Sullivan Fortner, and Ayodele Casel to hurry home and catch a couple of nights at the seventh Charlotte Bach Festival. With an Echoes of Bach program of solo instrumental and chamber music followed by an evening with George Frideric Handel’s Theodora, my wife Sue and I did not at all feel let down.

We already knew the mettle of violinist Aisslinn Nosky and cellist Guy Fishman, co-artistic leaders at Bach Charlotte and festival mainstays since its inaugural year in 2018. Nor did we lack confidence in the singers and instrumentalists recruited to the festival, no less consistent in their excellence. We also knew from last year’s experience, the first time that the North and South Carolina festivals overlapped, that maintaining our loyalty to Spoleto for my 33rd consecutive festival now came at a cost. Last year’s greatest regrets, before catching the Mozart Requiem finale, were missing Bach’s complete Brandenburg Concertos on opening night and Pius Cheung’s rendition of Johann Sebastian’s Goldberg Variations on marimba.

This year’s biggest regrets included missing excerpts from Handel’s Messiah, played on authentic instruments, at the opening weekend Gloria! concert, which also spotlighted works by Bach and Vivaldi, and the opportunity to hear a full Arwen Myers concert two nights later, accompanied by Nosky and theorbo ace John Lenti. Fortunately, Dido and Aeneas did not make my list. We had seen a very fine – if idiosyncratic – production at Spoleto, staged and designed by Yaron Lifschitz in collaboration with Circa, his contemporary Australian circus company. Bolstered with interstitial music curated by Lifschitz and conductor Benjamin Bayl, this US Premiere from Opera Queensland was not as absurd as you might assume. Think Cirque du Soleil without the gibberish.

Somehow, the piano did not look out of place as we settled into a nearby pew at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, though this was the first keyboard we had seen at the festival that wasn’t an organ or a harpsichord. Joining Fishman for the opening pieces, however, were two musicians we had never seen before, pianist Esther Jeehae Ahn and Emi Ferguson – carrying a modern metal flute with her, unprecedented at Charlotte Bach. As it turned out, the ladies would be the stars of this program with Fishman confining himself to continuo through the first half of the concert before ceding the stage.

Ahn had made her Charlotte Bach debut last year while we were away in the Holy City for Spoleto, so it was fitting that she should dazzle us first, which she did on César Franck’s Prélude, Choral et Fugue, a piece for keyboard as expressive and epic as anything Chopin ever gave us. The performance echoed Bach more in its title than in its considerable tumult and turbulence, taking me by surprise. On the other hand, Francis Poulenc’s Sonata for Flute and Piano is likely the composer’s most familiar work, a favorite among flutists, and found on at least three CDs in my collection – plus the obligatory Jean-Pierre Rampal on vinyl.

Regardless of how well Bach was echoed, you could hardly ask for a lovelier, sprightlier ending for a concert. We can only envy those hearing this Poulenc gem for the first time. Ferguson’s lovely tone, evident earlier in the evening in less challenging fare, remained firm and supple throughout her Poulenc romp, equaling the mastery we’ve heard from Tara Helen O’Connor during her many performances at Spoleto USA. Ahn also took advantage of her chances to shine.

In contrast with Messiah, we can all sense that an opportunity to see Handel’s Theodora performed live is a chance of a lifetime. So the robust turnout at the Sandra Levine Theatre at Queens University’s Gambrell Center was not a surprise, though the absence of the two trumpets listed in the program book was a disappointment. The story of this lesser St. Theodora is not nearly as well-known as that of the two Empress Theodoras who were similarly canonized.

Her story seems to hover between history and fairy tale, with details and names – aside from those of the saints, Theodora and Didymus – varying among tellers. Compared with others, Handel and librettist Thomas Morell not only cleansed Theodora’s backstory of prostitution, but also punished the steadfast Christian less salaciously for defying the Roman governor Valens’ edict to worship Venus and Flora on Emperor Diocletian’s birthday. Here, the local Antioch despot dispatches her to prison rather than a brothel.

Secretly a fellow convert to Christianity, Didymus first pleads with Valens to allow all citizens to follow their own beliefs if they cannot worship Venus in good faith. After Valens rejects his petition, the most famous plot twist in Theodora is triggered when the lady is imprisoned. Didymus contrives to visit Theodora in prison and exchange clothing with her after he arrives, allowing her to escape in his soldier’s uniform. The tang of discovering Didymus’s ruse would have been so much tastier and comical in a brothel, but Morell – true to his name! – was a clergyman and wouldn’t have it.

Morell and Handel manage to lift the lechery to a higher plane with Septimus, Valens’ henchman, charged with spreading the word of the cruel edict. He wishes to persuade Theodora to yield to the edict and to him. More righteous pleadings on Theodora’s behalf come from her bestie, Irene, whose motivations are purer, allowing Theodora to engage in more practical disputation.

Against Theodora’s ardent trio of well-wishers, the mighty bass baritone Ryne Cherry, as Valens, stood alone. After witnessing his power in issuing Valens’ edict in the opening scene, my greatest worry was that he might never return! No doubt about it, Cherry can rage fiercely, counterbalancing the high voices and varied sincerities of his castmates with his massive presence and demonic energy. As new to me as Cherry, tenor Eric Carey as Septimus was also a force to be reckoned with, capable of projecting a poisonous and devious malignity of his own.

What’s left of the potential for comedy was surrendered by the concert staging at Levine Theatre, preventing countertenor Nicholas Garza, as Didymus, from donning Theodora’s ladies’ wear. While there was an undeniable plaintive tone to his singing, Garza was able to couple his earnest supplications with an earnest religious zeal. Garza’s power not only lifted his Didymus far over the threshold of masculinity, but it also helped to fill in the void left by Theodora’s total lack of will to survive.

Sweet as can be, soprano Carley DeFranco as Theodora despairs for her life as soon as she hears the government’s edict. But she does not despair for her soul! Theodora’s inner strength remained mostly eclipsed when besieged by Septimus’s ardor and her bestie Irene’s pragmatism, and when Didymus showed up later to liberate her from prison, DeFranco seemed malleable enough to comply with his scheme. What finally fires Theodora up is learning that her liberator has been sentenced to death. Not only does she rush to offer her life for his, real bravery, we also get to see Valens again, brutally rejecting her noble pleas and decreeing that she must suffer the same fate. The diabolical cackle that Cherry piled on top was sheer delight.

At this point, it really was special to see the rapture and joy projected by DeFranco and Garza as they contemplated their souls’ heavenward ascent and everlasting bliss. While it may have remained ambiguous whether Garza as Didymus needed to be won over to Theodora’s point of view, mezzo soprano Carrie Cheron as a very caring Irene seemed to need convincing – a key recognition from Morell and Handel that their audience also needed to be swayed. Actually, DeFranco and Garza’s ultimate duet could be viewed as persuasion enough, but it was nice having Cheron there for insurance.

Menotti Homecoming and Two Spectacular Dance Companies Spark Spoleto

June 23, 2026Classical, Concert, Dance, Opera, TheatreAmelia Hawke, Charlotta Öfverholm, Chrystal E. Williams, Efraín Solís, Gian Carlo Menotti, Harvey Littlefield, Isamu Noguchi, Jamar Roberts, James Bonas, Karen Young, Katharine Goeldner, Kayla-Maree Tarantolo, Laurel Dalley Smith, Madeline Squire, Martha Graham Dance Company, Michael P Atkinson, Mikael Karlsson, Nicol Edmonds, Patti O’Furniture, Rachel Blaustein, Rhiannon Giddens, Roseanna Leney, Sophie Laplane, Soutra Gilmour, Wallingford Riegger, Walt Spanglerperryt77

Review: Martha Graham Dance Company and Scottish Ballet at Spoleto Festival USA

By Perry Tannenbaum

Opera at Spoleto Festival USA is not especially grand this year, with just two one-acts on the 2026 roster, but there are celebrations galore: nods to the nation’s semi-quincentennial, Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s 100th birthdays, and the Martha Graham Dance Company’s centennial. And with the return of Spoleto founder Gian Carlo Menotti to the opera lineup – as a librettist and composer – after a hiatus of 15 years, the opera lineup made up in charm and inventiveness for what was lacking in length.

From the standpoints of technical excellence, choreographic creativity, and musical inspiration – including another serving of Menotti, his rarely performed Errand Into the Maze – the Martha Graham celebration was a triple treat. If anything, the other two works on the program, Graham’s Chronicle and Jamar Roberts’ We the People, had even broader historical significance than the Menotti score.

All of the music, not only Menotti’s, was stellar, helping the company to meet the moment. After Graham Dance rejected Adolf Hitler’s invitation to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the all-female Chronicle spewed forth as a more extended and pointed response. Leslie Andrea Williams, with the assistance of three other women attending her outsized black dress, carefully sat herself down centerstage.

Patience sitting at her monument, but not exactly smiling. Technical difficulties obliged officials to announce a delay, and Williams, assisted by her entourage, to abandon her vigil and return. When the piece finally began with its first segment, “Spectre – 1914,” we could discover the reason for Williams’ careful, stealthy entrance. The underside of her outsized black dress was a fiery red, destined to be fanned into flames by Williams’ movements, taking flight via her arms.

After the three parts of Williams’ solo, “Drums-Red Shroud-Lament,” Graham’s costume designs became more conventional, though barely less outré. Laurel Dalley Smith soloed in the middle segment, “Steps in the Street,” which depicted “Devastation-Homelessness-Exile,” with an ensemble of nine other women. And Williams, in a more liberating costume, returned with Smith to front the two parts of the “Prelude to Action” finale, “Unity-Pledge to the Future.”

Compared to Menotti’s fantasia, Wallingford Riegger’s score for Chronicle was more formal and ornate – appropriately stately and declamatory. But it would be hard for me to dispute that the Errand piece, loosely retelling the myth of Theseus in the labyrinth confronting the Minotaur, wasn’t the most fascinating dance of the evening, with Xin Ying dancing the remade female protagonist and Ethan Palma portraying the beast of fear.

Scenery by Isamu Noguchi was stark and memorable: a long rope winding its way lazily and maze-ily forward from an upstage V-shaped wooden sculpture, representing either “the crotch of a tree or the pelvic bones of a woman,” according to the Graham Dance Company website. So the absorbing journey was either a heroic adventure or a dark inward probe.

The Graham site traces We the People back to Agnes de Mille, though the new score by Rhiannon Giddens, denim-colored costumes by Karen Young, and the martial-artsy touches in Roberts’ choreography signal a comprehensive makeover. With the delayed start of Chronicle and an overlong intermission, Giddens threatened to compete with Giddens, as Michael Abels’ Rhapsody on “Omar” (the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera he wrote with Giddens) was about to receive its world premiere on the other side of town.

So my response to We the People, remade to reflect American life in 2024, was not as stress-free as I would have liked. Yet even if viewing conditions had been ideal, the Graham program would not have rivaled the US premiere of Scottish Ballet’s Mary, Queen of Scots as the most spectacular event at Spoleto so far, likely to remain its artistic pinnacle.

Spoleto Festival USA 2026 Scottish Ballet
CHARLESTON, SC – MAY 28, 2026 – Spoleto Festival USA 2026 Scottish Ballet

The original score by Mikael Karlsson and Michael P Atkinson is nearly as breathtaking as the costumes and scenery by Soutra Gilmour. But the co-creation by choreographer Sophie Laplane and director James Bonas lifts Queen of Scots to its heights, in a staging that hoisted the three walls of the set to the rafters at Gaillard Center. With the inrush of dancers below – royals, courtiers, spies, and guardsmen – it appeared that an epic Rembrandt painting was materializing before our eyes.

Queen Elizabeth is intertwined with Mary throughout the Laplane/Bonas scenario, as the soon-to-die Virgin Queen recollects their lifelong rivalry. This aging and decrepit Elizabeth is danced by Charlotta Öfverholm, who often lurks unseen as Mary’s story unfolds, like a Gothic horror Tinkerbell. We see Roseanna Leney as the future Queen Mary emerge from the loins of Catherine de’ Medici, a metallic dress worn by Madeline Squire that could become a cage.

Dressed in a chic black dress, Leney contrasted dramatically with towering redhead Harvey Littlefield as Younger Elizabeth, dressed in gleaming white, striding as majestically as a heron. Littlefield’s deliberate gait made for an untouchable Liz, while the lithe Leney cycled through at least three men as the flapper-like Mary, accompanied by four other Marys when obliged to flee France.

Arguably, the essence of the Laplane/Bonas concept was Kayla-Maree Tarantolo as the Jester, who moonlighted as Death. The staging weaved between humor or beauty and brutality as the Jester, only lacking a wand to be a second Tinkerbell, brought on one death after another.

Three moments were most indelible. Mary “transforms,” according to the printed scenario, when the last of her lovers, Nicol Edmonds as Darnley, “is consumed.” Leney was joined by a group of other dancers – maybe the other Marys? – who lined up in front of her and, facing the upstage scrim, became a monstrous shadow insect who devoured Darnley.

Shortly afterwards, the pregnant Mary gave birth, a rather hilarious process. When she was showing, a large white ovoid covered her abdomen, which morphed into a large egg or a delicate white balloon, depending on the fate of the fetus. The sturdier egg could be labelled “James” prior to birth. The lad moved horizontally across the stage, obscured momentarily like luggage being scanned at an airport, and emerging as Squire in an all-white costume, still labelled James.

The most stunning effect was saved for the last blackout. With Laplane/Bonas’s narrative framework, elder Elizabeth could die at the same moment that her recollections of Queen Mary ended – with the sound of three vicious chops of an axe resounding through the hall as the queens perished. Our last glimpse of Leney could stay with you for a lifetime.

Although family-friendly Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer ran over the Memorial Day weekend at Spoleto, serious non-puppet, non-animation theatre is backloaded into the schedule. George + George ran as a work-in-progress during the middle week, and Patrick Page’s All the Devils Are Here, originally slated for the 2025 fest, runs during the final weekend.

So the best theatre at Spoleto this year will likely remain director Daisy Evans’ remarkable reclamation of festival founder Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1939 radio opera, The Old Maid and the Thief, for the Dock Street Theatre stage. The old-timey Dock seemed like the perfect place for this retro comedy, not so much adapted for the stage as quaintly preserved there.

Walt Spangler’s set design is a hybrid radio studio and rudimentary theatre space, with Timothy Myers and his Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra upstage from the diminutive cast of four singers. Flanking our players, who are never saddled by microphones, are spaces for Foley operator, Amelia Hawke, and for our emcee, Patti O’Furniture.

Any excuse for including Charleston’s own extraordinary female impersonator, O’Furniture, in a show is good enough for me. His talents are multifold: aside from announcing and helping with scene shifts, aiding the two ninja supernumeraries, he can be the scenery, most memorably when, assisted by the end of a brass bed, he holds up two flashlights and becomes the grille of a luxury car.

Other players strive to snatch the spotlight from O’Furniture, often succeeding. We initially empathize with mezzo soprano Katharine Goeldner as the old maid, Miss Todd, playing her as decidedly more maidenly than elderly. When Efraín Solís, as Bob, a drifter, comes knocking at Miss Todd’s invisible front door asking for a handout, Goeldner is immediately smitten, willing to open up in more ways than one.

Helped by her maid, Laetitia, Miss Todd entices Bob to linger awhile, with free room and board.

Is soprano Rachel Blaustein as Miss Todd’s maid also smitten before Bob takes off his shirt? Can’t remember. At any rate, it’s unseemly for Miss Todd to be asking a vagabond to be her guest, so Laetitia is quickly involved. Secretly competing.

Bob’s sexual leanings may run parallel to his creator’s, but Menotti’s libretto only offers a faint hint. The drifter’s failure to show his appreciation of his benefactress by making a move on her gradually wakes up Miss Todd’s sleeping passions to the point of desperation. She becomes the thief in Menotti’s title, eventually knocking off a liquor store in the middle of the night.

All this while, there are newspaper and radio reports that a notorious escaped criminal is on the loose and on a thieving rampage. This romanticizes Bob to his hostess, further inflaming her and Laetitia. But augmenting these media bulletins is mezzo soprano Chrystal E. Williams as the neighborhood snoop and gossip, Miss Pinkerton, whose visits at Miss Todd’s become progressively less welcome as the ballyhooed criminal rampage rages on. The strait-laced chatterer becomes a nemesis.

Of course, Bob is perfectly innocent. It becomes progressively more unlikely that the drifter would trouble himself to leave Miss Todd’s for a criminal caper when he’s living in the lap of luxury! That need was clearly Miss Todd’s.

Throwing a veil over Menotti’s denouement, I’ll leave it to opera companies and producers to seek out The Old Maid and the Thief, so they can deliver the goods to audiences that have missed out for nearly 90 years. Evans’ way of doing it could conceivably be improved upon, but it should remain the model.

Amid Multiple Celebrations – and a Shoutout to NC – Spoleto USA Regains Its Giddiness and Swagger

June 22, 2026Classical, Concert, Dance, Feature, Jazz, Opera, TheatreAbels-Bailey, Gian Carlo, Hector Berlioz, Henry Purcell, Mali Obomsawin, Mariana Corichi Gomez, Michael Abels, Timothy Myersperryt77

Review: Opening Weekend at Spoleto Festival USA 2026

By Perry Tannenbaum

Spoleto 2026 Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5
CHARLESTON, SC – MAY 23, 2026 – Spoleto 2026 Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 with the .Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra and maestro Timothy Myers.

May 26, 2026, Charleston, SC – The semi-quincentennial edition of Spoleto Festival USA has begun in Charleston with a roar, a momentum, and a dizzy effervescence that I’ve never seen before in my 33 years of covering America’s preeminent performing arts festival. Performing together, Renée Fleming and Béla Fleck led the parade of international stars converging on the Holy City for the opening weekend of the annual 17-day festival.

In this procession were the Martha Graham Dance Company, celebrating their centennial; rising jazz-rockstar Mali Obomsawin; and cellist Zuill Bailey with a new concerto written for him, Rhapsody on “Omar,” by Michael Abels. That opera, with libretto by co-composer Rhiannon Giddens, premiered at Spoleto in 2022 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. So the climax of Abels’ final movement, “O People of North Carolina,” reprised Giddens’ shoutout to the Tarheel State.

Another Tarheel tribute follows shortly: Terence Blanchard + The E-Collective’s Miles Davis & John Coltrane at 100. Coltrane, of course, hailed from Hamlet, NC, ascending to jazz fame as a member of the first Miles Davis Quintet – and beyond in the landmark Kind of Blue album and with his own legendary quartet, peaking in A Love Supreme. We didn’t expect anything less than a sellout for The Fiddle and the Drum, the Fleming-Fleck tribute to Appalachian folk traditions and the nation’s 250th anniversary. Besides, we saw the Fleming gala with the Charlotte Symphony less than three years ago, so it seemed greedy to grab another pair of reviewer freebies. Our virtue vis-à-vis la Renée, however, did not reward us with reviewer seats at Charleston Music Hall for the Blanchard tributes.

Spoleto 2026 Dido and Aeneas dance opera.
CHARLESTON, SC – MAY 22, 2026 = Spoleto 2026 Dido and Aeneas dance opera.

The Abels-Bailey concert seemed to be a sellout as well. So did the charming Gian Carlo operetta, The Old Maid and the Thief at Dock Street Theatre, at its second performance on Memorial Day. All of this frenzied ticket-buying, the likes of which I haven’t seen in many years, caught the Spoleto box office off stride. This was keenly evident at the first event we attended, Opera Queensland’s ultra-lavish production of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, replete with flying acrobatics and aerial silks. Outside at Will Call, we were expecting to receive our tickets in a prepared envelope as in previous years, only this time they would be issued one event at a time.

The plan changed. Our names triggered a protracted computer search for our tickets, which led to our tickets getting printed out on the spot. But these weren’t merely tickets for now or for today’s events. While people waited behind us and the line steadily grew, piling onto our embarrassment, tickets came spewing out of the printer that seemed to cover the remainder of our 12-day sojourn at Spoleto. Then two or three Spoleto employees had to set about folding this perforated ribbon of tickets into pairs and packing them into a pocketable envelope.

Inside the Sottile Theatre, we saw and heard more. Acquaintances of ours from Charlotte told us about their tribulations, which included not receiving the tickets that were purportedly mailed to them and then being sent to the Charleston Visitor Center to extend their pickup adventure. Curtain time was still at least 15 minutes away, but the size of the crowd seemed slightly anemic for an opening night. When magic time came, there was still a steady inrush of ticketholders, definitely more than the usual trickle of latecomers, yet not quite as populous or herd-like as large groups who might have been bused. We could only imagine what their ticket tales may have been. Whispers of a bumpy transition to digital ticketing were heard a couple of days later.

If you’re booked for as many events as we are at Spoleto, snafus, delays, and recalculations are occasionally part of the experience. A technical glitch at the Martha Graham centennial delayed its start for more than 15 minutes, and the intermission felt like it was dragging, imperiling the half-hour cushion we had left for driving from Festival Hall to the Gaillard Center and the Abels premiere. A quick glance at the festival program book disclosed that the Abels premiere, as hoped, would be preceded by a musical aperitif, in this case, Hector Berlioz’ Beatrice and Benedict Overture. So seeing the Martha Graham celebration to its end would only mean sacrificing the Berlioz at most.

Two amazing parking-spot finds helped validate my assumption. I dropped my wife Sue off near the rear entrance to the Gaillard and miraculously found parking out front on Calhoun Street. She was able to be seated for the Berlioz while I was obliged to stand at the rear of the hall. Of course, there were people in the Martha Graham crowd who had made the opposite calculation from ours, leaving before the final “We the People” piece – or, more awkwardly, in the middle – with music by Giddens!

Gifted with an aisle seat, my pathway to joining the crowd was simple and direct. Others in the queues at the rear were counterintuitively shy, holding back until I took up the lead, since they needed to act more expeditiously to squeeze themselves into a full house while trying the patience of those already seated and settled.

My assumption that Spoleto’s conducting fellow at the Gaillard podium for the Berlioz, Mariana Corichi Gomez, is a woman was shaken when her ponytail disappeared and music director Timothy Myers took her place for the remainder of the concert. The gender switch escaped me as I hurried down the aisle to my seat. The stubble on Myers face was likely visible enough when he looked at Bailey, but my attention, like everyone else’s, was riveted to the guest cellist – not only because he is reputed as a handsome and charismatic performer, but because of the extreme demands of Abels’ Rhapsody.

More reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations than the typical concerto, Rhapsody is hardly a dialogue between cello and orchestra. Rather, it’s an extended series of accompanied episodes of ardent lyricism and cadenza dazzle with some merciful orchestral interludes that allowed Bailey to regather his strength and focus. Quickly, the memory of Gautier Capuçon’s amazing performance with the Czech Philharmonic came to mind, shaping my expectations. Since three of the four Omar Rhapsody movements have multiple episodes (3., for example, is marked “The Whirlwind / His Mercy / Psalm 23,” and the concluding movement has the Carolina shoutout flanked by “Tell Your Story” and “Oroborus”), I gradually reached the conclusion that Myers, Bailey, and the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra were playing the four movements attaca, without pause.

Modern composers, after all, tend to be taciturn in comparison with their ancestors. Compound that gnomic tendency with the minimalist practice of numbing repetitiveness, and you reach the presumption that new classical works will have little to say and be over quickly. Whether or not Abels’ first movement, “Futa Toro / Middle Passage,” actually timed out as longer than Tchaikovsky’s full Rococo, I had fallen into the error of presuming that Piotor Ilych had provided the template. Two or three times, I was confident that Bailey had transitioned into “Julie’s Aria,” Abels’ second movement – and had moved beyond!

We can therefore excuse the audience for breaking into an appreciative ovation when Bailey raised his bow for the first time. They were witnessing an unprecedented outpouring of catchy, contemporary, and contemplative sound along with me. With three more movements to follow! Hopefully, Abels’ magnificent eye-opener, commissioned by Spoleto Festival USA, will be allowed to tour with Bailey as Omar did, giving North Carolina a shot at seeing it live.

As thoroughly as my tardiness shielded me from a fair hearing of the Berlioz overture (and recognition of Gomez’s departure), Bailey’s dominance kept me in the dark in assessing Myers and his orchestra. After intermission, there would be Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 to shed conclusive light.

What a treat! From the first notes, it was obvious that this performance would not pale in comparison with the stunning Tchaikovsky Fifth that Kwamé Ryan delivered with the Charlotte Symphony just three months ago. To say that the Spoleto Orchestra made no missteps would be discounting their flair and confidence. No doubt about it, Spoleto ranks among the most elite youth orchestras on the planet, a yearly spring benchmark for the youth ensembles that flower internationally at music festivals across America and Europe. Make no mistake about Myers, either: this Tchaikovsky 5 reaffirmed that he is also top-tier.

Still to come on the Festival slate is most of the Live at the Cistern series, outdoors under the College of Charleston live oaks, including Mountain Goats, Indigo Girls, Pedrito Martinez Group, Molly Tuttle, Emmylou Harris, Colin Meloy, and Brandi Carlile. Maybe then, audiences will start trending younger than we’ve seen so far.

Aside from the giddiness of Spoleto at its best, the audacious cutting edge still rears its head occasionally. And bites. That was what happened with Mali Obomsawin on our first night in Charleston. The Odanak First Nation artist started out mainstream enough on her upright bass, prefacing “Lineage” softly before the remainder of her pianoless quintet sounded like the classic ECM new age albums led by John Abercrombie, Pat Metheny, or Jan Garbarek back in another century. But then tenor saxophonist Yuma Uesaka exploded into “Reverse Wawasint8da,” with alto sax player Alfredo Colón barely less raucous afterwards. People began gathering their stuff, standing up, and retreating from the hall, not worrying about disturbing their neighbors. When something like that happens, you can be sure you’re at Spoleto!

Art on My Sleeve

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