No one doubts that during the Holocaust, American Jews wanted to help their European brethren. But then why was so little done? Theodore Hamerow, a retired professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, answers this painful question by presenting an extensive study of the days when rescue was still possible.
A dazed-looking young man with long curly strawberry-blond hair wandered alone onstage and sat cross-legged, watching the still-chatting audience at the sold-out, opening night performance of University Theatre’s production of the 1960s rock musical “Hair.” More flower children dressed in fringed leather vests, crocheted tops and peasant skirts filtered through the seats handing out daisies and herbal joints.
With their silken gowns, soft curls and smoky, come-hither eyes, the screen sirens of the 1950s exuded feminine sophistication. Stars like Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer seduced a nation with a potent, untouchable sensuality.
It is this feminine power that William Farlow, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s University Opera, hopes to harness in his upcoming production of “Alcina,” set in 1950s Hollywood, in a three-show run that begins this weekend in Music Hall.
From the World Music Festival in September to the Isthmus Jazz Festival in June, next year’s season at the Wisconsin Union Theater is guaranteed to get people out of their seats and bodies moving.
The 2009-2010 season, released Wednesday, is an eclectic, worldly lineup, heavy on dance and international acts. Performers include returning favorites like African performer Baaba Maal, an appearance by young jazz chanteuse Jane Monheit, and mandolin player Chris Thile (formerly of Nickel Creek) with the acoustic bluegrass group Punch Brothers.
Hip hop performer/poet Marc Bamuthi Joseph returns to campus to perform a piece he wrote while in residency at the university in 2007 called The Break/s. Bamuthi Joseph and acts like Tiempo Libre, a Cuban-inflected salsa band from Miami, exemplify what the Union Theater is known for: “the hottest new thing,” according to publicist Esty Dinur.
Klezmer, as a musical form, is a bit of a rambler.
Like any music of a people scattered by diaspora, danceable Yiddish rhythms pop up at music festivals everywhere from New York and Chicago to our own International Festival at the Overture Center each spring.
The difference between klezmer, or Jewish secular music, and its Brazilian, African and Celtic stage-mates is that there’s no “old world” where the history still lives. Instead, about 5,000 klezmer recordings made in the U.S. between 1895 and 1942 are essentially the wellspring of the entire genre.
Raking leaves, pulling weeds, trimming, planting, cleaning and more â?? they may even whistle while they work.
The UW-Madison Concert Choir is offering to do your spring yard chores in order to pay off the cost of a European concert tour.
Beverly Taylor is having a particularly busy spring.
Taylor, director of choral activities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has three major works scheduled in as many weeks: Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” with the Choral Union (with boys from the Madison Youth Choirs) on April 18-19, the Bach B Minor Mass with the university’s top chorale, Concert Choir, on April 24, and a trio of performances with the Madison Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Chorale of Verdi’s Requiem on May 1-3.
It’s an exhausting schedule (and a planning headache), but Taylor is enthusiastic about all of the works. The trouble, she says, is quantity — not quality.
Everybody knows Bucky Badger. Then again, nobody knows Bucky Badger.
That’s why the documentary “Being Bucky” will likely open a few eyes as to what it’s like — and what it takes — to be the live version of the state’s most visible symbol.
The film, which played to a sold-out theater at the Wisconsin Film Festival and will return Friday, April 10, to Point Cinemas, tracks the lives of the seven guys who play Bucky. It begins with the tryouts and continues throughout a busy, busy year.
From the World Music Festival in September to the Isthmus Jazz Festival in June, next year’s season at the Wisconsin Union Theater is guaranteed to get people out of their seats and bodies moving.
The 2009-2010 season, released late Wednesday, is an eclectic, worldly lineup, heavy on dance and international acts.
The e is italic and lower-case. It hovers over the shallow vee of an open book, as if floating up off the middle pages. Smaller than a thumbnail, this icon appears with 19 titles in the spring 2009 University of Wisconsin Press catalog. It represents the availability of a title in digital ebook format. It also signifies the opportunities the UW Press is pursuing amid the contractions and growing complexities confronting the book-publishing industry.
“We’ve been going through this really big transformation of our publishing model,” says Sheila Leary, who assumed directorship of the press last June after 2½ years as interim director. “It used to be that for some books we’d publish simultaneous cloth and paper editions.” After a few years of working with companies like Netlibrary and ebrary to meet research and university libraries’ growing appetite for ebooks, Leary says, future editions will be paper and ebook or cloth and ebook.
So, what’s the deal with the chickens?
Our feathered friends are everywhere in the promotional materials for this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival — on the posters, on the T-shirts, in the TV ads. What’s the underlying rationale for featuring chickens so prominently in the marketing campaign for a film festival?
“I don’t know,” said film festival director Meg Hamel with a mock shrug. “I just like chickens.”
Sometimes, more is definitely better. One of the most popular art exhibitions in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union art galleries is the combined work of dozens of artists.
The UW-Madison Annual Juried Student Art Show, which opens with a reception on Friday, April 3, generally includes between 20 and 40 works of art from students in any major.
Being Bucky Badger just suits some guys better than others.
It takes a lot of time. It takes an ability to wear a big clunky smelly thing on your head. It takes an ability to remain silent.
And it takes an ability to lose one’s self and be one’s self at the very same time.
That’s the world filmmakers John Fromstein and Scott Smith dived into with their documentary “Being Bucky,” which screens at 6:15 p.m. Saturday, April 4 as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival.
A new movie is renewing the city’s fascination with the brilliant, beautiful college student who led a second life as a prostitute and killer in the 1970s.
The movie — “Winter of Frozen Dreams” — is debuting Saturday at the Wisconsin Film Festival. It recounts the story of former University of Wisconsin-Madison biochemistry student Barbara Hoffman, who moonlighted at a massage parlor and was accused of fatally poisoning two of her clients for money.
A new film is renewing Madison’s fascination with the smart college student who led a second life as a prostitute and killer in the 1970s.
“Winter of Frozen Dreams” is debuting April 4 at the Wisconsin Film Festival.
It recounts the story of former UW-Madison student Barbara Hoffman. She moonlighted at a massage parlor and was accused of fatally poisoning 2 of her clients.
Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” has always had nice things to say about Madison. In his 2002 book, he ranked Madison No. 1 among small cities with metro populations of 250,000 to 500,000.
Florida has long argued that communities which offer a stimulating working environment for creative people will thrive in the 21st century. This includes towns that embrace the arts, pop music, gay people and ethnic food.
Quoted: UW-Madison professor of real estate Steve Malpezzi, who says it’s way too early to proclaim the housing is crisis over.
When Tino Balio convinced United Artists to donate its early films, photographs and corporate records to the University of Wisconsin Center for Theater Research in the 1960s, it put UW-Madison on the map as a major film research center.
Before long, the center’s name would be changed to reflect that status, becoming the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
But it’s likely that not even Balio — who came to Madison to run the center in 1966 — knew the extent to which the United Artists’ donation would continue to reverberate. It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving.
Former “Malcolm in the Middle” star Jane Kaczmarek is getting in the middle of the battle over Wisconsin’s film incentives.
She and her “West Wing” actor husband Bradley Whitford, both of whom are Wisconsin natives, sent Gov. Jim Doyle and legislative leaders a letter recently asking them to work on improving the state’s current incentive program rather than scrap it.
“Monk” star Tony Shalhoub, a Green Bay native, also sent Doyle a similar letter on Thursday. Shalhoub spent three weeks in February shooting the independent film “Feed the Fish” in Door County and said that wouldn’t have been done here without the incentives.
(Jane Kaczmarek is an alumna of UW-Madison)
….For a relatively small city, Madison has a wealth of opportunities for adults to learn international dance, from drop-in classes at Dance Fabulous to six-week sessions hosted by Continuing Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The international dance forms have been extremely popular,” said Maureen Janson, a teacher and choreographer who coordinates dance offerings at Continuing Studies. “A lot of our students go because they want an alternative to the gym.
When UW-Madison graduate student James Kryshak walked onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera Feb. 15 to prepare for one of the worldâ??s most prestigious vocal competitions, it felt like a big hug.
“It seems like such a massive space, but when you walk out on stage, it kind of shrinks down,” he said. “You feel like youâ??re being hugged by the space. It was really great to sing out there, to hear your voice bouncing off all the space around you.”
The “Current Tendencies” exhibit, which will open tomorrow at the Haggerty Museum of Art is the first survey of the best contemporary, regional art to be shown in a Milwaukee museum in some time. The show, which will feature 10 artists, marks a change in direction for the Haggerty and its new director Wally Mason.
One of the 10 artists is Jennifer Angus, a Madison-based artist, curator, writer and UW-Madison educator.Here is a video sneak peek at her installation.
My first instinct on hearing that Duke Ellington is now the first African-American to appear alone on a coin was to call Marsh Smith and sit him down at a table at Babe’s on Schroeder Road and get him to tell me the story of the Duke’s appearance at the Memorial Union in the 1950s, when Marsh was handling the Union’s public relations.
MADISON, Wis. — The Babcock Hall Dairy Store on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus is teaming up with the Wisconsin Film Festival to create a new ice cream flavor.
PLATTEVILLE, Wis. (AP) — An art display at a southwestern Wisconsin college has prompted free-speech debates after campus police ordered it modified.
Student Michael Hannigan wanted to juxtapose the innocence of teddy bears against the ferocity of real bears. So he lined up 25 stuffed bears in the University of Wisconsin-Platteville Art Building — with kitchen knives in their laps.
Ah, what fools we mortals are.
With “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare gave the English-speaking world a nice bit of escapism, the kind of play it’s fun to see as the roads ice over and skies remain gray.
In a sensual, Caribbean staging with hanging vines and an onstage waterfall, University Theatre interprets the beloved comedy with a good dash of Latina flair. A lively opening dance sets the heady tone for the evening: warm, breezy and boldly physical.
It was the age of Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Dorothy in the land of Oz. Theatrical “fairy spectacles,” with special effects to evoke moonlight, were a huge hit. Even newspaper reporters would gush over artworks and exhibitions as “veritable fairylands” that would “enchant” the viewer.
From literature to theater to everyday life, something magical was in the air as American popular culture turned the corner from the 19th century to the 20th. Fantasy made anything possible. In that spirit, women picked up their sewing needles, and the craze was on.
“A Fairyland of Fabrics: The Victorian Crazy Quilt,” on exhibit at the Design Gallery at UW-Madison through March 8, brings back a time when amateur needle workers fashioned scraps into artworks that sparkle with inventiveness and play.
“They live in a small country that has often found itself in the path of imperial powers, a condition they address with guile, stubbornness and a measure of grace. And lately with some pretty great movies.”
That’s how film critic A.O. Scott concluded his rave review of the Romanian film “California Dreamin'” in the New York Times in January. “California” is just the latest film out of the relatively small Eastern European country of Romania, along with “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” to gain international acclaim.
When it comes to watching movies, there’s no snack quite like buttered popcorn sorry, you Milk Duds zealots out there. But Babcock Hall has a tasty promotional idea in conjunction with this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival — a new festival-themed flavor of ice cream.
Matt Albrecht isn’t your typical theater guy. He’s an avid outdoorsman with a big truck who loves to fish, someone who’s been known to come into rehearsal still outfitted in hunter orange.
“I pull about 90 percent of my inspiration from nature,” said Albrecht, a graduate lighting designer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who will complete his Master of Fine Arts degree this May.
The absence of a pay plan in Gov. Jim Doyleâ??s budget proposal may cause the University of Wisconsin System faculty and staff to experience a net pay decrease in the 2009-10 fiscal year.
The lineup of movies for the Wisconsin Film Festival will be announced next week, but here’s a sneak preview: “Winter of Frozen Dreams,” a noir thriller based on one of Madison’s most notorious murder cases, will play during the festival’s April 2-5 run.
….For some of us it’s hard to grasp that next year it will be 30 years since Barbara Hoffman, a brilliant UW-Madison chemistry student who played the violin and spoke six languages, was convicted of murdering a man she met while working as a “masseuse” in a West Side “health studio.”
On his way to claiming third place in the 1993 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, a 23-year-old Christopher Taylor impressed the jurors and the rest of us in attendance as much for his enterprising spirit as for the security of his playing. The competition eliminated its repertory requirements that year, allowing players to roam far beyond standard competition fare, and Mr. Taylor responded imaginatively with Bachâ??s â??Goldbergâ? Variations, Pierre Boulezâ??s Second Sonata and other adventures.
It’s a weeknight rehearsal in the Humanities building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, and the scene is chaos. Somebody’s playing the piano. Somebody else is eating Doritos. One guy is mugging for the photographer with a bottle of Tabasco sauce (“Take a picture of this!”). Everybody is talking and laughing.
Eventually the dozen or so college boys meander toward the center of the room, pushing back chairs and tables and lining up in a horseshoe formation. Someone plays the starting pitch.
Violinist Benjamin Seeger, 18, knows the math on winning music competitions. Last summer, he was among 100 young musicians competing for a four-year scholarship to UW-Madison for 2009.
Ten students won the prize, including him.
UW-Madison graduate student James Kryshak heads to competitive audition at the Metropolitan Opera.
On Sunday at noon, James Kryshak walked onto the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in a three-piece suit and embarked on one of the most important auditions for a young singer on the continent.
“For an American, this is the competition,” said Kryshak, 25. “It’s very, very exciting. I never expected this to happen so soon.”
Kryshak — a high lyric tenor and UW-Madison student working on his master’s degree of music in opera performance — was one of two singers chosen from the Upper Midwest last month to advance to the semifinals of the Met’s National Council Auditions.
Listeners might never again hear the charming sound of a bus engine rumbling behind the smooth talk of a morning DJ.
And students likely wonâ??t need to suffer spiritedly through shifts in a 100-degree studio, overheated by broadcast equipment.
As one of the world’s premier bass players, Richard Davis’s music has touched the lives of countless fans, and his teaching has inspired generations of students in the classroom as well as with the Richard Davis Foundation for Young Bassists, Inc., which provides musical instruction for financially challenged youth.
The tumultuous relationship between brilliant artists Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock seems designed for opera — it’s dramatic, passionate and artistically inspired.
So thought Minnesota-based composer Maura Bosch, who wrote “Art and Desire” about the two 20th century abstract artists. University Opera gives the work a world premiere on Feb. 20 and 22 in UW-Madison’s Music Hall.
Barely two months remain before the opening of the eleventh Wisconsin Film Festival, and preparations for it are in high gear. Though the final selection of films has yet to be determined and ticket sales are a month away, there has already been a tremendous response from persons interested in volunteering for this celebration of cinema.
Buried in the recent news about big endowment losses and the steps colleges are taking to weather the economic crisis is an emerging pattern: Culture, it would seem, is expendable.
First came Brandeis Universityâ??s decision to close its art museum and sell off more than 6,000 works in its collection. Then Miami University, in Ohio, and Texas Tech moved to sell or shutter their radio stations. Now Utah State University may stop its academic press.
Winter in Madison gives artists a new set of materials: snow, ice and freezing temperatures. In a creation that is beautiful (and, it appears, functional), first year MFA artist Hongtao Zhou has created furniture and domestic items, “rising” out of Lake Mendota. It’s located in front of the Memorial Union.
Kathleen Horning, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center, has won a prestigious honor from the American Library Association.
The association, at its midwinter meeting last week in Denver, chose Horning to deliver the 2010 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture. The award is given to an individual who has distinguished themselves nationally in the field of children’s literature.
Quoted: Andrew Taylor, director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Chris Walker dances with the orishas in the university’s hallowed Lathrop Hall. The UW Dance Program assistant prof is a long way from his native Jamaica, but the walls of his cozy fourth-floor office sport big pictures of Ochun, Oyá, Obatalá, Changó and Yemayá. Even in the dead of winter the Afro-Caribbean saints seem content in their new surroundings.
“Stroszek,” in all its bizarre glory, is going to be featured at the 2009 Wisconsin Film Festival, which runs April 2-5 in Madison.
It’s a common scenario: Students pick a major they’re excited about (or, at least, do reasonably well) in music or dance or drama. They go to school for four or five years, then graduate with a degree in cello performance/acting/painting/dance.
Great. Then what?
Enter the Arts Enterprise Symposium, running this weekend (Jan. 30-Feb. 1) at the Pyle Center on the UW-Madison campus.
A story about Henry Sapoznik, artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has become a classic, appearing in many accounts of the modern revival of klezmer, the folk music of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewry.
It happened in 1977 when Sapoznik, a banjo player, was studying American old time music in North Carolina.
With about 500 items from more than a dozen different Asian cultures, “Writing with Thread: Traditional Textiles of Southwest Chinese Minorities” communicates values through piles of silver necklaces, elaborate headdresses, delicate embroidery and ancestral images. Chinese miniskirts are among the items on display at the exhibit, which opens at the Chazen on Friday, Jan. 30.
When clothes become more than a functional outer layer, high fashion can cross into high art. Three art exhibits opening and ending this month capitalize on our collective fascination with fabrics, style and status.
With about 500 items from more than a dozen different Asian cultures, “Writing with Thread: Traditional Textiles of Southwest Chinese Minorities” communicates values through piles of silver necklaces, elaborate headdresses, delicate embroidery and ancestral images. Chinese miniskirts are among the items on display at the exhibit, which opens at the Chazen on Friday, Jan. 30.
….In a different way, American crazy quilts reveal cultural values. “A Fairyland of Fabrics: The Victorian Crazy Quilt,” a new show at the Design Gallery in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology, describes how “maid, wife and widow” (to quote an 1890 “Good Housekeeping” poem) were caught up in “crazy quilt mania.”
University Theatre Director Tony Simotes will leave Madison to lead Shakespeare & Company, a theater company in Massachusetts that he helped found.
Simotes, who has been a professor in the Department of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2002, has led University Theatre since fall 2006. He most recently directed “The War of the Worlds” in the Mitchell Theatre in October 2008.
MILWAUKEE (AP) — The Milwaukee Art Museum has a new chief curator. Museum Director Dan Keegan announced Monday that Brady Roberts will start March 2.
He was previously the curator at the EVO Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M.
Pop superstars Elton John and Billy Joel will perform a joint concert in the Kohl Center at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 7. Tickets, ranging from $55 to $180, go on sale at 10 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 31.
Part of the “Face 2 Face” tour, the show features solo sets by each performer then a combined set by the two legends.
Every year for the past decade, the biggest customer at the Columbus Antique Mall has been Famous Dave’s barbecue. The franchise regularly bought up bric-a-brac to decorate the restaurants’ walls.
Until last year, that is, when the biggest spender was Universal Studios.
(Jeopardy’s 2008 College Championship and scenes from “Madison” were filmed on the UW-Madison campus and students worked on both productions.)
Noted: The 5,000 specimens in â??Insect Fantasiaâ? represent about a quarter of her collection; the installation, by Ms. Angus and two assistants from the University of Wisconsin, where she is associate professor in the environment, textiles and design department, took one week.
The arts are in trouble.
Or are they? “The good news is that the arts seem a little bit immune to challenging economic times. Donations to arts groups sometimes stay the same or go up,” says Samantha Crownover, one of the organizers of the Arts Enterprise Symposium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Layoffs from arts groups may be the result of past difficulties that the economy only exacerbated, Crownover suggests. Still, even in good times, funding is dependent on at least rudimentary business and marketing skills that are seldom taught in conservatories or
But the real reason Madison is perfect for some kind of event with Michael Mann and “Public Enemies” is that Madison is where Mann first fell in love with movies and made it his life’s dream to be a director.
I had known Mann was a UW-Madison alumnus, but until the other night, when I saw a documentary on his career on the Reelz channel, I didn’t realize the profound impact Mann’s campus experience had on his career.
Maybe it’s the flaming figgy pudding. Maybe it’s the carols, or the decorations, or the seemingly endless hors d’oeurves and bottomless wassail in the Great Hall.
Whatever its secret, the Tudor Dinner at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Union has lasted for 75 years, through world wars, recessions and campus troubles of all kinds.
Art glass lovers will get a chance to see how it’s made and also buy affordable pieces during the UW-Madison Glass Lab open house Saturday and Sunday.
The lab, at 630 W. Mifflin St., is the oldest university glass program in the country, starting in 1962.
The numbers tell the story.
Twenty movements of dense piano playing over a 120-minute span: Pianist Christopher Taylor performs the massive “Vingt Regards sur L’Enfant-Jesus” by Olivier Messiaen completely by memory.
By any account, that’s a formidable task. It’s one that had its start seven years ago when Taylor first played all the movements at Columbia University.
