Category: Arts & Humanities

Michael Goldberg, the acting director of the Overture Center of the Arts, is one of three finalists who will be interviewed by resident arts groups and Mayor Dave Cieslewicz for the high-profile job of the center’s new director.

….Goldberg is a long-time veteran of the Madison arts scene. He was an assistant director and director of the Wisconsin Union Theater for 25 years before retiring, and then becoming a vice-president for programming and development at the $210-million Overture Center, which is the state’s largest performing arts presenter.

The real center of “Ghost Hunters” is not, as its subtitle suggests, William James, the American pioneer in psychology and researcher in the paranormal, but Leonora Piper, a Boston housewife, mother and paranormal phenomenon. Her astounding capacities as a medium captured the attention, and often the approbation, of not only James but a crowd of 19th-century scientists.

Many art show openings and receptions take place at the beginning of the month, as you can see from the accompanying gallery listings. But this is an especially big weekend over at the Memorial Union on the University of Wisconsin campus.

That’s because the Memorial Union will open a show of historic photos to accompany the 75th anniversary of the Wisconsin Hoofers, which bills itself as the largest inland sailing club in the world. There will be other activities including a reunion, demonstrations and a film.

Poetry performances and Latin music are planned to celebrate the creation of a new diversity office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The “multicultural extravaganza,” called Rhythm and Poetry Sin Fronteras, will be Friday at 7 p.m. at the Majestic Theatre, 115 King St. It will highlight the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiative (OMAI).

Veteran satirist Harry Shearer — best known as the voice of Mr. Burns and other characters on “The Simpsons” — told a national audience on Sunday that Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) canceled his show because the statewide network’s officials “were displeased with the political content” of his liberal-leaning national public radio series.

The open road beckons. The feel of the asphalt under the tires, the hum of the engine, the promise of some new adventure around the next bend.

But with gas prices topping $3 a gallon, who can afford a road trip this summer?

Luckily, the UW-Cinematheque is stepping in with its latest summer film series, a salute to the American road movie. And you won’t have to pay for gas, or a motel room for the night, or even those high-carb cheese puffs you like to munch on while you’re driving.

Most summer theater tends to be light, airy and little more than superfluous entertainment. The University Theatre’s production of Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” thankfully, turns that equation on its head.

Telly Leung, who recently completed a year-long run as Boq in the sit-down production of Wicked in Chicago, will co-star in the Four Seasons Theatre’s upcoming presentation of Sweeney Todd at the Wisconsin Union Theater.

Tuesday would have been an excellent night for the Wisconsin Union Theater to send out its seats for a cleaning. Because while hundreds paid for their seats, few actually used them.

Instead, the audience spent the night on its feet to see Brazilian superstar Seu Jorge and his powerhouse band unleash an electrifying and highly danceable show.

Today’s “What They’re Listening To” surveys recordings of 16th and 17th century music in late- and post-Renaissance Spain.

It is the third of three installments of CD recommendations on early Spanish music by John W. Barker, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of medieval history. Barker is also a nationally recognized record and music critic who sits on the Madison Early Music Festival advisory board.

“Early Music From the Iberian Peninsula: Spain and the Age of Discovery” is the theme of this year’s festival, to run July 8-15.

If you happened to be on the Memorial Union Terrace this past Tuesday night, you got your appetite whetted for Seu Jorge’s upcoming show next Tuesday indoors at the Union Theater.

It’s like slapping a “natural” label on a box of sugar-coated cereal, says Joshua Greene, of the way the word “spiritual” has been maligned.

The 1971 UW alum, who has turned his life into a study of religion and human nature, laments the “bastardizing of spiritual principles” by “another brand of commercial selfishness” — the gurus, books and events that fuel the self-help industry. It is a field full of self-absorption, one where few people truly put their beliefs ahead of self-interest.

Who is an exception? Greene’s latest work is “Here Comes the Sun: The Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison” (John Wiley & Sons, $25.95), a project that frames the youngest Beatle as a sincere and devout guy who was way ahead of his time.

You might think of John Wilde’s art as a mix of the subconscious and the superconscious.

Of course you can draw your own conclusions at “Things of Nature and the Nature of Things,”Ã? a retrospective of the longtime UW professor and area artist who died March 9 at 86. The exhibit opens Saturday in the Mayer Gallery of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art and runs through Aug. 20.

For those who consider cow-tipping a sport, what happened at the Kohl Center early Thursday was not very sportsmanlike.

Three whimsically decorated artificial cows, part of the Milk Marketing Board’s CowParade Wisconsin, were found lying on their sides Thursday on the concrete sidewalk in front of the arena.

Dozens of flashy fiberglass cows will descend on Downtown Madison Saturday morning, covered in everything from the American flag to Georgia O’Keeffe paintings to picturesque vistas of the Wisconsin countryside.
It’s the beginning of CowParade Wisconsin, an international event that mixes community, charity, artistic creation and, of course, colorful cows.

The artsy herd coming to the Madison area consists of about 100 life-size cow sculptures, which state artists have designed and painted in recent months to represent facets of life in Wisconsin.

One of the cows, designed by UW-Madison senior Emily Gritt, wears a UW Marching Band uniform. Calling her design “Moo Rah Rah Wisconsin,” Gritt says her cow will be visible in front of the Kohl Center on Saturday.

The Isthmus Jazz Festival has shed its indoor confines to embrace the natural risks that befit an art form based on improvisation. Somehow this feels right, especially in a city that defines its urbane lifestyle and politics through its environmental realities.

After losing its access and time slot in the Overture Center, the city’s fortress of cultural control, Madison’s largest annual jazz gathering will now make music amid nature’s vagaries on the shore of Lake Mendota, with all its potential for pollution and storms or blissful, sparkling harmony. This weekend’s fest digs are the Memorial Union Terrace, 800 Langdon St.

Perhaps the rough textures and shimmering prisms of surface reflections will surprise you.

Perhaps the less-than-mammoth scale will draw you in and surprise you with intimacy, even delicacy.

When Madison’s Doug Bradley hears the Animals’ vintage hit “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” he’s back in Vietnam, reliving his war experiences.
For many Vietnam veterans, rock music links seamlessly to their wartime memories.

Take a little song and a little sass and add “three parts black beauty and one part white heat.” Toss in a local musical notable and cap that cadre with one of Broadway’s premier performers and you have a splashy cornerstone to the Overture Center’s “Standing O Overture Completion Celebration.”

OUT TODAY for the first time on DVD: “Side Effects,” perhaps the best of the many independent films shot in Madison in recent years.

Written and directed by Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, a 1991 UW-Madison grad, the film, starring Katherine Heigl of “Grey’s Anatomy,” is a romantic comedy with serious undertones about values and ethics in the pharmaceutical industry.

(This column also contains information regarding several other UW-Madison alumni.)

Have you seen the best new public art in Madison?
Better hurry.

Today is supposed to be the last day for “Portals to an Architecture,” a series of arches that has graced the lawn of the UW-Madison Engineering Hall since the beginning of May.

It might be classical music or Broadway shows or modern dance or world music or children’s entertainment he’s speaking of.

But when Michael Goldberg, the acting president of the Overture Center for the Arts, talks about the newly unveiled 2006-07 season, it’s all, well, “stuff.”

But make no mistake: Goldberg doesn’t use the word lightly, in some insulting or dismissive way. The man has spent his professional life booking great performing artists and presenting them to the public. Instead, the term “stuff” simply shows the lack of pretension Goldberg has about his job as the foremost arts presenter in Madison.

Here’s what retirement looks like for UW film Professor Emeritus David Bordwell: He had to miss the end of the Wisconsin Film Festival (for which he helped secure several films and the presence of Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, a Bordwell fan) to fly halfway around the world to the Hong Kong Film Festival.

He came back late last month, was home for a couple of days, and then went down to Champaign-Urbana for Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of John Malkovich and “Junebug” Oscar nominee Amy Adams. Then he finally returned home to Madison, where he and his wife, fellow film scholar Kristin Thompson, have to finish three books between them in the next month.

For more than a quarter century, the UW-Madison Metals program was guided by Fred Fenster and Eleanor Moty. Together they forged a vibrant program that stretched the boundaries of contemporary metalsmithing, while maintaining a dedication to technique that firmly rooted it in the history of the craft.

What’s a city without a guide? That’s not for us to say. Madison has lots of guides, many of them useful. The latest, “Madison: The Guide” by Gwen Evans (Jones Books: $13.95) is one of the most useful.

If you want to be better informed about the best ways to reform our schools, you ought to study the history of American education. A good place to start might be William J. Reese’s informative book, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind (Johns Hopkins, $21.95, 333 pages).

Mr. Reese, an education historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has set out to tell the entire history of our schools in a book.

There’s no place like home, as Dorothy said, especially when there seems to be a wizard behind the curtain to give you Oz-like thrills.

That’s the big upside for the city’s two classical music orchestras, whose top-flight home performance halls could provide some dazzling experiences in the 2006-07 seasons.

….The Wisconsin Union Theater’s classical music season will unfold in its well-worn but reliable performance space. Truth be told, the Deco-era theater needs some sprucing up, but that shouldn’t affect the standard of performance.

Is it my imagination, or does Gallery Night keep getting better?It’s probably a little of both. But some of the city’s new fine arts facilities sure help to give the twice-yearly event a higher profile.

Friday’s Gallery Night, from 5 to 9 p.m., features a record 47 venues, including museums, galleries and businesses.

The intimate Mills Concert Hall felt hardly large enough to contain the force of the UW Choral Union and Symphony Orchestra without crumbling. Director Beverly Taylor led 168 choir members, a 69-piece orchestra and four soloists, narrowly confined within the rim of the stage, in a colossal concert.

The Saturday and Sunday performances featured Antonin Dvorak’s weighty “Stabat Mater,” one of his rarely heard choral works, despite the fact that the Czech composer, more known for symphonic and chamber music, actually wrote several pieces for voice.

When Denise Maddox left the Chicago housing projects with her two children to come to Madison in 1999, she could barely write a letter, let alone an essay.
Now, thanks to the help of the UW-Madison Odyssey Project, the 41-year-old mother of two is beginning her long journey toward a doctorate in literature.

Discover “Treasures in the Garden” at the opening reception for artist Rachel Dorn’s master of fine arts exhibition on Sunday (April 23) from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. in the Allen Centennial Gardens on the UW-Madison campus.

Dorn’s ceramic sculptures, such as “Romanesque Cauliflower” and “Gooseberry,”Ã? will be placed throughout the gardens, located at the intersection of Babcock and Observatory drives. (It is Dorn’s final MFA exhibition.)

In a time of war and unrest on issues like immigration, the UW dance faculty’s spring program might have dripped with social and political commentary.

This is Madison, after all. But Thursday night in a packed Lathrop Hall, the audience got something entirely different.

They got great dancing for the sheer love of it, with no visible agenda. With little use of multimedia and with minimalist backdrops, it was an evening all about movement.

At first it might seem strange to see a cow fly over the moon. Then again, seeing a “Duke” of Hazzard sing “Over the Rainbow” and hearing Barry Alvarez’s flawless Porky Pig impersonation is pretty weird, too.

Considering this all happened in 3 1/2Ã? hours, it’s easy to understand why the University of Wisconsin Band’s 32nd annual spring concert Thursday night at the Kohl Center was a spectacle to behold.

DALE CHIHULY, the celebrated glass artist whose sprawling sculpture, “Mendota Wall,” helped open the Kohl Center in 1997, is having some tough times.

The good news, according to a lengthy front page story in Monday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is that Chihuly, 64, is working through his problems, which include lawsuits, feuds and depression.

The bad news is the story in the Seattle paper included this paragraph: “Chihuly didn’t start the studio glass movement. Harvey Littleton did in the 1960s in Madison, Wis. But Littleton’s work never went anywhere, and Chihuly’s made the studio glass movement catch fire.”

When Anne Lambert arrived at the University of Wisconsin’s Elvehjem Museum of Art in the fall of 1975, it had been open for just four years and had about 2,000 works in its permanent collection.

Today, the museum, renamed the Chazen Museum of Art last year, has about 18,000 works of art.

It is up to Lambert, the museum’s longtime curator of education, to help the public appreciate those works of art, which run from the ancient world to contemporary society and which cross many cultures.

“Everything you need to know about a culture can be found in its rubbish pit,” Patricia (Sara Phillips) tells artist Jonathan Waxman (Josh Aaron McCabe) in the University Theatre’s production of “Sight Unseen,” which opened Friday to a half-full Mitchell Theater on the University of Wisconsin campus.

It’s a message that resonates both physically and metaphorically throughout the troupe’s vibrant production of Donald Margulies’ play.

Perhaps it was the giant sucking sound of inevitability that brought the Southern Graphics Council Conference to Madison.

Even though the national printmaking artists’ organization is based in the South, its national gathering of artists and art professionals is taking place this weekend on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

“It is a big deal,” says Andrew Stevens, the curator of prints at the UW’s Chazen Museum of Art. “It happens once a year. It brings together a lot of the most important teachers and printmakers in the U.S.

“TWO DAYS in October,” the documentary film based on Madison author David Maraniss’s acclaimed 2003 book, “They Marched Into Sunlight,” has won a Peabody Award, widely considered the most prestigious award in electronic media.

….Maraniss served as “senior consultant” for the film, which, like the book, focuses on two days in October 1967 in two very different locales – Vietnam, where a fierce battle was taking place, and Madison, where the anti-war movement on the UW-Madison campus was reaching its peak.

“Two Days in October” was produced and directed by Robby Kenner for the “American Experience” series on PBS. The executive producer of “American Experience,” Mark Samels, is himself a UW-Madison grad.

In A Question of Torture, University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred W. McCoy documents the CIA�s use of abusive interrogation techniques during the past 50 years.

To acknowledge applause while introducing a movie, Wisconsin Film Festival interim director Meg Hamel would often raise both fists over her head, like Rocky Balboa reaching the top of the steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

It’s a gesture of triumph that many patrons at this year’s festival would say was well earned. Having started from behind in terms of both resources and time – she was only hired to replace former director Mary Carbine just over four months ago – Hamel and a large cast of sponsors and volunteers put together a film festival this past weekend that equaled past festivals, and even exceeded it in spots.

As the audience filed out of “Young Visions and Voices” – a collection of short films made by Madison area kids and shown Sunday as part of the 2006 Wisconsin Film Festival – young filmmaker Tykem Balentine, 9, still felt a little bit thrilled and awed.

Closing credits roll on this year’s Wisconsin Film Fest. The eighth addition of the annual festival was a success.
Movie lovers from across the country turned up for the Film Fest, which started Thursday and ended Sunday night. 26,000 tickets were sold, that’s two thousand more than the old attendance record.

If you wanted to see the world’s most famous movie critic present one of the most famous (and strangest) film noirs in history at the Wisconsin Film Festival this year, you had to be quick.

And if you were one of the many thousands of film festival-goers who couldn’t get in to see Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert on Friday night, don’t blame the critic. Blame the movie.

If you didn’t get advance tickets to this year’s Wisconsin Film Festival or haven’t even looked at the schedule yet, don’t worry. There’s plenty of fest left.

Today’s the second day of the eighth annual festival, typically the day when the festival really gets going, with screenings beginning at 5 p.m. at numerous screens around town, including the Orpheum, Hilldale, University Square and the UW-Cinematheque.

Manny Kirchheimer has a crucial piece of advice for any aspiring filmmakers out there: Don’t throw anything good away.

Case in point: Kirchheimer’s lovely and impressionistic documentary “Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan,” which had its Madison premiere Thursday at the opening night of the eighth annual Wisconsin Film Festival. Cinephiles turned out in droves to see this year’s slate of films, everything from horror movies to indie comedies to socially relevant documentaries.

Sifting through the Wisconsin Film Festival offerings – from “Beauty Academy of Kabul” to “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey” – isn’t as easy as deciding whether you’d like butter with that popcorn.

Because of an illness in her family, the internationally renowned violinist Midori has canceled her second weeklong residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The residency was to start Monday and culminate in two concerts: a free concerto appearance with the UW Symphony Orchestra on Thursday, April 6; and a recital at the Wisconsin Union Theater on Friday, April 7.

The music of the Vietnam War era left deep imprints on the more than 8 million American troops who were actively engaged in the decade-long war. A book being written by two Madison men examines that impact. Its working title is “We Gotta Get Outa This Place: Music and the Experience of the Vietnam War.”

Craig Werner is a music historian and teaches Afro-American studies at UW-Madison. Doug Bradley is university relations director of communications for the UW System and an Army draftee who served in Long Binh, Vietnam, in 1970-71 as an information specialist….The men answered questions from The Capital Times about their book.

What is it that makes the Tandem Press prints — now on show at the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art through April 9 — so appealing and yet so safe? That’s the question I found myself asking as I toured this exhibition, which is an eye-pleaser, to be sure.

You will find a lot of art you like. But, I suspect, you will find relatively little to really love and absolutely nothing to really hate. In short, the art seems not so much middle-brow as mainstream.