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Downsizing SISTER ACT Pays Big Dividends at Matthews Playhouse

Review: Sister Act at Matthews Playhouse By Perry Tannenbaum A full flowering of onstage success has somehow scurried away from Iris DeWitt in recent years. Just last April, pandemic restrictions and a wretched recording rig trapped her inside a masked, malodorous production of Sense and Sensibility at Central Piedmont Community College. Patchy intelligibility also wrecked DeWitt’s previous…

Spoleto Roars Back, Honoring Africa, Arabic, and Alice (Coltrane)

Review: Jazz @ Spoleto Festival USA  By Perry Tannenbaum It’s difficult to imagine what the stage and the audience would have looked like at Gaillard Center if Rhiannon Giddens’ new opera, Omar, had premiered as scheduled at Spoleto Festival USA in May 2020. #BlackLivesMatter and the COVID-19 pandemic have affected the trajectory of our lives since then, also deflecting the course of the…

Charlotte Bach Festival Ends in Splendor, With Roaring Trumpets and a Double Dose of Oratorios

Review: Bach’s Easter and Ascension Oratorios By Perry Tannenbaum June 18, 2022, Charlotte, NC – Founded in 2017 with the North Carolina Baroque Festival, Bach Akademie Charlotte presented a precocious and ambitious first edition of the Charlotte Bach Festival in June 2018. Unmistakably modeled after the renowned Oregon Bach Festival, where Akademie artistic director Scott Allen Jarrett has…

Review: Opera, Chamber, and Orchestral Music @ Spoleto Festival USA

Review: Opera, Chamber, and Orchestral Music @ Spoleto Festival USA By Perry Tannenbaum Recognition of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and the We See You White American Theatre manifesto (issued by a coalition of BIPOC artists in 2020) were certainly on Nigel Redden’s mind when he decided that the 2021 Spoleto Festival USA would be his last as general director. White and long-tenured at the…

Music and Museum Delivers a “Kaleidoscope” in Four Quartets

Review: “A Kaleidoscope Concert” @ Bechtler Museum of Modern Art By Perry Tannenbaum May 22, 2022, Charlotte, NC – For more than 12 years, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art has done a wondrous job of making modern painting, sculpture, and architecture enjoyable for the Charlotte community – while infusing fresh pride and enthusiasm in the community for the modern art and artists in their midst.…

Warren-Green Bids Farewell With a Rousing Beethoven “Ode to Joy”

Review: Charlotte Symphony Plays Beethoven’s Ninth  By Perry Tannenbaum May 20, 2022, Charlotte, NC – Even back in the early ‘90s, when Charlotte Symphony struggled to sustain respectable mediocrity, the valedictory concert led by Leo Driehuys in 1993 proved that the orchestra could always rise to the occasion when called upon to perform Beethoven’s thrilling Ninth Symphony. Having heard the…

O’Rowe’s THE APPROACH Isn’t Quite Reaching Us

By Perry Tannenbaum It’s tempting to declare Mark O’Rowe’s new play, THE APPROACH, a retro or even misogynistic drama. Now in its US premiere at Spoleto Festival USA through June 12, from the Dublin-based Landmark Productions, O’Rowe’s elegantly circular piece – which he himself directs – does little to push against the stereotyped notion that women chatter endlessly about their men, their…

UNTIL THE FLOOD Overflows With Inner City Insights

By Perry Tannenbaum Conceived and acted by Dael Orlandersmith, UNTIL THE FLOOD is an amazing, transformative theatre experience, briefly at Spoleto Festival USA through June 6. You quickly got the feeling that it was even more transformative for the playwright while she was interviewing the people she portrays – and likely transformative for the actress inhabiting those people before you.…

Choreographic Lab Distills Inventiveness and Energy

Review: Charlotte Ballet’s Choreographic Lab By Perry Tannenbaum May 13, 2022, Charlotte, NC – We’ve been seeing plenty from Charlotte Ballet in the past month. Ending April and plunging into May, the company unveiled the world premiere of Sleeping Beauty: A Fairy Tailored Classic, with choreography by Matthew Hart – a ballet about a sleeping princess that had slumbered for two years prior to…

Domingo’s Dot Makes Its Point

Review: Three Bone Theatre Presents Dot  By Perry Tannenbaum The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing. –Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird” Since their return to live performance last October, Three Bone Theatre has been contracting and then expanding as they adapt to The Arts Factory, their new base of operations on W. Trade Street. They were breathing in at…

Heretical Fairy-Tailored Format Is a Winner at the Knight

Review: Charlotte Ballet Premieres Sleeping Beauty: A Fairy Tailored Classic By Perry Tannenbaum   Whether paired with Vampire Lesbians of Sodom onstage, orchestrated by Tchaikovsky for ballet, or adapted by talents as diverse as Walt Disney and Matthew Bourne, Sleeping Beauty isn’t a title that sleeps for long. Between here and Greensboro, the title appeared more than a dozen times on our…

US Premiere Keynotes Symphony Concert, with Multiple Thrills and Triumphs to Follow

Review: Charlotte Symphony Plays Sibelius Symphony No. 2  By Perry Tannenbaum April 22, 2022, Charlotte, NC – There had been no foretelling that five weeks ago, the Belk Theater stage would be splashed with the colors of Ukraine’s flag for a Charlotte Symphony concert. Nor could guest conductor Karen Kamensek, making her Charlotte debut, have predicted that the music she was bringing to Knight…

Biff! POW!! Welcome to Geek Theatre

Review: She Kills Monsters at The Arts Factory By Perry Tannenbaum The curtain is finally going up in Charlotte on the works of playwright Qui Nyugen, the American son of Vietnamese parents who founded the Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company back in 2000. Soon afterwards, Nyugen’s brainchild transplanted from Ohio to Off-Broadway – where it became the first theatre company sponsored by NY Comic Con…

Donald Harrison Launches a New Jazz Room Season, Heralding a New Big-Name Era

Review: JazzArts Charlotte Presents Big Chief Donald Harrison By Perry Tannenbaum   April 8, 2022, Charlotte, NC – With teeming pedestrians, barhoppers, diners, and operagoers overflowing Uptown sidewalks, Charlotte’s nightlife was livelier and more exuberant than I’d ever seen it on a Thursday night when we went to see the opening performance of Opera Carolina’s Aïda. Excitement among jazz…

KAT EDMONSON Brings Latenight Chic to Middle C

By Perry Tannenbaum Kat Edmonson tended to look on the bright side of things when I interviewed her a few weeks ago. Confined to her home for long stretches when the pandemic hit, halfway through a 40-city tour promoting her 2019 Dreamers Do album, she eventually cranked out 66 podcasts, learning how to improvise to canned soundtracks while singing to a cellphone camera. She’s learned as an…

Scaling Back on Brassy Pomp, OpCarolina Brings Us a More Classic and Elegant Aïda

Review: Opera Carolina Presents Aïda By Perry Tannenbaum April 7, 2022, Charlotte, NC – Premiered in Egypt in late 1871 and brought home to Milan less than two months later, Giuseppe Verdi’s Aïda has become synonymous with all that’s grandiose and spectacular in grand opera. Opera Carolina has now produced this signature work nine times since its founding in 1948, only once allowing more than a…

Charlotte’s Jazz Scene Takes a Big-Name Leap

Review: Bigger Names Are Invading Our Smaller, Club-Sized Venues, Bringing an Overdue World-Class Vibe By Perry Tannenbaum Singer-songwriter Kat Edmonson has performed on Austin City Limits, A Prairie Home Companion, and Letterman. She has sung at Carnegie Hall, the Montreux Jazz Festival, and Blue Note in Japan. Her 2020 concept album, Dreamers Do, topped Billboard’s traditional jazz chart, and…