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The National Endowment for the Arts has selected two San Diego County music organizations for major grants for the coming year. NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman announced Tuesday (Nov. 27) that San Diego Opera is slated to receive a $50,000 grant in support of its new production in the spring of 2013 of 20th-century Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Murder in the Cathedral. The other grant will be awarded to the Carlsbad Music Festival in the amount of $10,000 to support the contemporary music festival’s 10th Anniversary Festival, which will take place in Carlsbad in September 2013. These two organizations are clearly…
Life and death. The really big topics. Once religion had the monopoly on this conversation, but in our essentially secular culture, the arts increasingly carry on the discussion. Art of Élan staged Tan Dun’s evocative, recondite “Ghost Opera” Tuesday (Nov. 20) at the San Diego Museum of Art’s Copley Auditorium, the second installment on the company’s avant garde series “in your dreams.” A theater piece that weaves aspects of ancient Chinese funeral rites with the warm sounds of the string quartet and the piquant edge of the pipa (a traditional Chinese lute), “Ghost Opera” creates an esoteric but mesmerizing 40-minute…
Tarell Alvin McCraney is clearly a theatrical heir of playwright August Wilson, and Mr. Wilson served as a mentor during his graduate playwriting education at Yale. Mr. McCraney’s work, like that of his mentor, is a product of big ideas and bold theatricality while at the same time honing to the cultural traditions of the African American community.
As a child I liked singing that old revival song “Blest Be the Ties that Bind,” but with adulthood came the realization that binding ties may bring about the opposite of blessing. Stephen Adly Guirgis’ 2008 play “The Little Flower of East Orange,” which San Diego’s adventurous ion theatre company opened Saturday (Nov. 17) in Hillcrest, is a cornucopia of tortured family relationships blighted by substance abuse, alcoholic co-dependency, life-long grudges, and chronic manipulation. But I cannot believe that Guirgis would have written this autobiographical play if he had not seen blessing underneath the scarred exteriors of this broken family.…
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