Category: Arts & Humanities

Over the past six years, University of Wisconsin piano virtuoso and artist-in-residence Christopher Taylor has developed a very loyal, and very large, local following.

Small wonder that Ralph Russo, who directs the Wisconsin Union Theater, recalls how when he goes to national booking conferences, other presenters can’t believe that Madison has the good fortune to have Taylor here at home on the UW faculty and to hear him for next to nothing compared to what big cities get. And it’s not just hype.

Rainer Maria played a lot of places around town when its members lived in Madison. But Union South, the site of the literary-minded rock band’s homecoming show this weekend, was rarely if ever one of them.

A review of Alfred W. McCoy’s new book “A Question of Torture.”

….The art of the obit is celebrated in a book, just published, “The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries,” by Marilyn Johnson, herself a former obituary writer.

The book is a delight, and my only quibble is that Johnson gives relatively short shrift to the man who, in my view, was the best obituary writer of them all….I recommend her book, but once you’ve finished it, see if you can’t track down a slim volume published a few years ago under the unusual title “52 McGs.”

It collects the best obituaries of New York Times obit writer Robert McG. Thomas, and as I say, it doesn’t get any better than that. (Obituaries mentioned include those of former UW president Fred Harvey Harrington and UW Law School professor Frank Remington.)

Three men forced another man bound with duct tape into the trunk of a car at gunpoint Thursday and drove off. Then the cameras stopped rolling.

The “kidnapping” turned out to be a film project, undertaken by several men in their early 20s. A stunned witness, unaware the event was staged, called police to the scene of the apparent abduction.

….Almost exactly a year ago five men, one of whom had a fake gun, found themselves staring at real firearms when police interrupted their UW film class project on the top level of a downtown parking ramp. They were each cited for disorderly conduct and fined $412.

Reviewed: Restoring Free Speech and Liberty on Campus” by Donald Alexander Downs.

Even as women moved into factory jobs during World War II, it was still news when someone found a job where no woman had gone before.

In 1943, Jean Larson made headlines as the first woman projectionist in the Play Circle movie house at the University of Wisconsin Student Union in Madison.

“With men, my lady, you always twist and turn, but in the end you’ll give in,” sings the fair Susanna (soprano Kerianne Carlton) to the Countess Almaviva (soprano Seong Shin Ra) in the University Opera’s production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro,” or “The Marriage of Figaro.”

But as with all good opera, the men also do their share of giving in, much to the delight of the capacity crowd filling the Rennebohm Auditorium in Music Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus for Friday’s soldout performance. The University Opera’s three-hour production mixes humor with stellar performances that, despite an odd stage set, succeeds with a great deal of style and wit.

Madison�s art scene achieved a new level of class this past month with the opening of the Slingshot Gallery, 330 W. Lakeside St. Slingshot opened its doors Feb. 17 drawing local collectors, students and art fans alike to view the gallery�s inaugural exhibition.

…the opera fun starts Friday when University Opera opens its three-performance run of its production of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” which will be sung in Italian with English surtitles.

(Several other UW-Madison music events are also mentioned.)

Movies starring Luke Wilson and Cate Blanchett and another made by the producer of “Chronicles of Narnia” rank among the most noteworthy screenings at the eighth-annual Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison March 30 to April 2.
But, judging from past fests, the event’s treats also will be found among the other 160- plus films, ranging from a blink-and-you-miss one- minute short to a weighty Romanian epic.

As Hollywood screenwriters, University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis are island-hoppers.

Their first job as TV writers was on a short-lived remake of the 1970s show “Fantasy Island.” But their most recent has landed them on a very different isle, the mysterious tropical locale (actually filmed on Oahu, Hawaii) of the hit ABC show “Lost.”

….Horowitz and Kitsis will be back in Madison next week as part of the Jewish Cultural Collective and UW-Hillel’s “Entertainment Spotlight Series.”

It is not itself an art or a craft. But it is certainly where a lot of each has been created.

I’m speaking of the Wisconsin Union Craftshop, and this week marks its 75th anniversary.

….When it opened, the craft shop was the first of its kind for a university in the country, according to Wisconsin Union publicity. What is unquestionable is that countless photographs, silkscreen prints, pieces of wood furniture and metal sculpture have come out of this shop, which also taught classes and mini-courses in how to create art and craft.

The Vietnam War has been discussed and debated for decades, and now two University of Wisconsin authors are beginning to look at it through a different lens � music.

He’s not exactly a seasoned comic, but professor Marc Galanter knows so many lawyer jokes, he even has a joke about lawyer jokes.

“A colleague asked me how many lawyer jokes there are. I told him just three ââ?¬â? the rest are documented case histories,” Galanter told an audience Tuesday at Vanderbilt Law School.

In the hands of playwright Thornton Wilder, ordinary moments become extraordinary treasures, a factor that propelled his 1938 play “Our Town” on to popular acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize.

In the hands of the Madison Repertory Theatre and in the showcase of The Playhouse, the Rep’s new home in the Overture Center, Wilder’s seminal work takes on its own extraordinary timbre….

The evening’s true star was the performance, with an extended cast of local and guest actors headed by Broadway star and UW alumnus Andre De Shields as the Stage Manager.

The subject is to be kept in drug-induced artificial coma for period of approximately 12 weeks. Follow this with three electroshock sessions per day for one month. Next, subject is to wear football helmet-like device, so that no escape is possible from headphones playing tape loop of voice that says, “My mother hates me.” Continue this protocol for three weeks – approximately one half-million repetitions of message.

Review: A Question of Torture, by Alfred McCoy.

Dressed in a blazing red Bucky Badger baseball cap and a neck-to-toe purple jump suit, Andre De Shields is the thinking man’s cheerleader.

“When in Rome do as the Romans do,” he quips. Pivoting smartly, he leads a reporter into the Concourse Hotel’s darkened jazz bar and you detect the dancer in his stride.

But what many people can’t see under the hat is the philosopher in his brain. That’s what he counts on revealing in the next few months — the Bucky hat will fly off to reveal the universal mind of the Stage Manager, the omniscient narrator in Madison-native Thornton Wilder’s famous 1937 play, “Our Town.”

These troubled times call for a fresh understanding of what America means. That’s the intended effect of “Visions of America,” a multimedia program created by UW-Madison professor and trombonist Mark Hetzler and Madison photographer Katrin Talbot at 8 p.m. Friday in Mills Hall.

Friday is the busy night of this classical music week, and Friday is also the night when one of the most unusual events of the season will take place.

On Friday in Mills Hall at 8 p.m. (though early arrival for the preconcert show at 7:30 is strongly suggested) the UW Faculty Concert Series will present “Visions of America,” a multimedia program created by UW trombonist Mark Hetzler, who tours with the Empire Brass and performs in the Wisconsin Brass Quintet, and Madison photographer Katrin Talbot.

“Mozart sure brings them out,” one University of Wisconsin piano teacher quipped while looking at the crowd eating cake during an intermission.

He wasn’t kidding.

By just about any standard you care to choose — attendance, artistic quality, money — the six-hour Mozart piano sonata marathon, held Sunday afternoon to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, was an unqualified success.

Madison’s third-annual Teen Spoken Word Finals will feature winners from tournaments this week in four area high schools, as well as the college-prep People Program and the Warner Community Center. The 7 p.m. show will be followed by a performance of the Senegalese hip-hop group Daara J, with an after- show dance party.

It’s the culminating event this year for Youth Speaks Wisconsin, an organization designed to integrate the art of spoken word into the classroom and into young people’s lives. Tonight’s winners will receive an expenses-paid trip to the Brave New Voices International Poetry Festival in New York in April, where they’ll compete with teens from more than 40 cities in the United States and England.

If you had to pick one week to designate as “Mozart Week in Madison,” this would have to be it. It is centered around Jan. 27, the actual 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, which falls on Friday.

Curiously no Mozart concert is taking place that particular night. Still, this week there will be no shortage of Mozart in Madison:

ââ?¬Â¢ Tonight at 7:30 in Mills Hall, eight faculty members of the University of Wisconsin School of Music will join in various ensembles to perform some lesser known chamber music. (One wonders: Wouldn’t a weekend booking have brought in a bigger audience?)

It doesn’t take much: A single note can turn a major key into a minor key, or vice versa.

These days, Baoli Liu, the head piano tuner at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is hoping to hear the one note that could turn his sad story into a happy one.

A native of mainland China, Liu first came to the United States sponsored by the Chinese government and received a U.S. visa that required him to return to his homeland for two years if he ever chose to stay and apply for green card. That day has arrived, but with a Catch-22: Going home to keep his job will mean losing his job.

A Q&A interview with Tomislav Longinovic, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of Slavic and comparative literature, who is offering a course called “The Vampire in Literature and Film.”

“Tandem Press Highlights: 1995-2005” is at the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave. It opens today and runs through April 9, and features selections from more than 200 prints. The printmaking workshop, located on Madison’s near east side, is a teaching facility associated with the UW-Madison and is directed by Paula McCarthy Panczenko.

“Tandem Press Highlights: 1995-2005” is at the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, 800 University Ave. It opened Friday and runs through April 9, and features selections from more than 200 prints. The printmaking workshop, located on Madison’s near east side, is a teaching facility associated with the UW-Madison and is directed by Paula McCarthy Panczenko.

Here are 10 of the most intriguing films that the UW Cinematheque will be screening this spring.

Sometimes, if you want to get something done, you have to go to the top. That’s what happened when the UW Cinematheque film series tried to secure a copy of “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” the acclaimed animated feature by legendary Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, for its spring season.

Ironically, the film is available at the corner video store on video or DVD, having been distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. But finding an actual film print to screen was much harder, and it ended up that Miyazaki himself had to personally approve a Madison screening, Cinematheque programmer Tom Yoshikami says.

MILWAUKEE — The critically-acclaimed movie “Brokeback Mountain” about a homosexual romance has a Wisconsin connection.

Milwaukee writer Will Fellows said that he recently learned that a book that he wrote in 1996 was suggested reading for the stars of the film, to help them develop their characters.

Canadian-born, Wisconsin-based artist Jennifer Angus (she teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Textile Art and Design), has used thousands of insects from her own vast collection.

For a city this size, Madison’s offering of indie and foreign films is absurd. For a much bigger city, it still would be surprising.

Currently, there are eight screens showing non-mainstream movies — two at Hilldale Theatre, four at Westgate Art Cinemas, and two at the Orpheum Theatre.

Then there is UW-Madison’s Cinematheque, which holds retrospectives of film makers, and in its words, showcases “films which would otherwise never reach Madison screens.” And Madison has a fabulous DVD rental store, Four Star Video.

If that weren’t enough, there is the annual Wisconsin Film Festival.

That’s right, Governor Doyle has agreed to appear in a movie that starts shooting at the end of January in Madison. It’s called “Winter Of Frozen Dreams”. The independent film is based on the true story of Barbara Hoffman a UW student who was convicted of murdering at least one man with cyanide in the 1970’s

Among Kevin Lynch’s top 10 picks for the best performing arts events of 2005 are the Nov. 18 UW-Madison Faculty Dance Concert and “The Music of Gunther Schuller” on Oct. 27.

Madison visual arts felt depleted in 2005 with the transitional limbo of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (waiting for its new home in Overture to open in the spring), and the losses of Spaightwood Galleries, Wendy Cooper Gallery and Art Beat Gallery & Studio.

Then came the astonishing gift of the Chazens (prompting the controversial renaming of the Elvehjem), which projected a bright future for the city’s cramped public art museum, to more than double gallery size and add a dazzling collection of contemporary art, among other enhancements. The sudden renaming is ultimately appropriate: The Chazens have allowed a very good museum to court greatness….

From “Bambi” to “Free Willy” to “March of the Penguins,” movies about animals have historically been a big hit at the box office. The latest creature to capture the hearts of movie-goers is King Kong – who stars in the latest remake of the 1933 classic film. University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Gregg Mitman, author of the book, “Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film,” was interviewed via e-mail by the Journal Sentinel’s Mark Maley about the giant ape and how animals are depicted on the silver screen. Mitman is a professor of the history of science at UW-Madison.

For five years, Meg Hamel has been running hard as a volunteer for the Wisconsin Film Festival. This year, she’ll run the event.

Art has a long history of putting into images what escapes words. One of the greatest of those expressions is in Madison right now.

On the third floor of the University of Wisconsin’s Chazen Museum of Art, you will find Robert Motherwell’s “Homage to the Spanish Republic No. 125,” on loan from the collection of UW alumni Simona and Jerome A. Chazen of New York.

For the 44-year-old Jennifer Angus, now teaching textile art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the pairing of insects with Victorian toile-de-jouy patterns taps into the world of childhood wonder, another very Victorian place to be.

For five years, Meg Hamel has been running hard as a volunteer for the Wisconsin Film Festival. This year, she’ll run the event.

THE MOVIE of “Winter of Frozen Dreams,” Karl Harter’s 1990 book on the Barbara Hoffman murder case, is heating up.

….Hoffman was a brilliant and beautiful UW student who inexplicably took a job at a massage parlor and wound up accused of the cyanide murders of two of her customers, Gerald Davies and Harry Berge, who left her money in their wills.

Here are five gift ideas that deal with classical music, the visual arts and the theater. Of course, all of them can be, and should be, customized to your financial resources as a giver and to the taste of the recipient.

All these suggestions have one thing in common: The notion, which grows deeper as I age, that the ultimate gift is companionship.

(The UW-Madison School of Music, Cinematheque, Memorial Union and Chazen Museum of Art are among several recommended sources of gifts involving the university.)

Writer-director Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau’s didn’t follow a traditional path to a film career. She grew up in Ladysmith, earned a degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then, for the next decade, worked in the pharmaceutical industry. Q&A interview.

One of the great lessons of the must-see show “Dual Vision” at the University of Wisconsin Chazen Museum of Art is that there are so many ways to approach it and appreciate it.

This big and beautiful blockbuster show includes works by some of the biggest names in 20th century art: George Grosz, Robert Motherwell, Dale Chihuly, Larry Rivers, David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein.

Appropriately, Matthew Slaats was hoping to install his final art exhibit as a UW-Madison graduate art student in the Field House – but the logistics didn’t quite work out. Instead, his short-term show “1v1” is tucked way up in the seventh-floor student art gallery in the Humanities Building, 455 N. Park St.