Category: Arts & Humanities

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.

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.