These top acts were just announced for the popular 2020 Spoleto Festival USA
There’s only one way to miss none of the highlights among the 150 performances at Spoleto Festival USA: Get to Charleston the night before it starts, lodge in a hotel on the peninsula and devote the next 17 days to arts-binging, with interludes for she-crab soup, low country shrimp and naps. Unfortunately, you’d need $8,000 and an attention span of nearly infinite length.
Most of us dash down for a long weekend at best, and this guide is meant for those time-limited folks. It includes three crucial events that run the length of the 2020 festival from May 22 to June 7, plus three major productions from each of the three weekends. (Of course, performances run midweek, too.) Tickets go on sale to the general public Jan. 15, and certain items — notably the Bank of America Chamber Music Series — sell out before the season begins. Learn more at (843) 579-3100, info@spoletousa.org or spoletousa.org.
Full runs
Greensboro native Rhiannon Giddens, whose time with the Carolina Chocolate Drops won her a Grammy and induction into the N.C. Music Hall of Fame, returned to her classical roots to write the music and libretto for “Omar.” Michael Abels (who scored the films “Get Out” and “Us”) helped her shape the music for this opera about Omar Ibn Said, an enslaved Muslim African sold in Charleston in 1807. Giddens and Francesco Turrisi, who collaborated on the 2019 album “There is No Other,” will also perform outdoors May 24 at the College of Charleston’s Cistern Yard.
Writer-director Emma Rice (“The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk”) marks her fifth visit to Spoleto USA with the musical “Romantics Anonymous.” The score comes from Christopher Dimond and Michael Kooman; the plot comes from the 2010 French film of the same name, about two timid workers in a chocolate factory who overcome their inhibitions to connect with each other. It opens with a preview performance May 21 and continues through the season.
By now, the chamber music series should be self-recommending to any concertgoer: Internationally known soloists play 11 programs that get repeated three times, encompassing beloved masterpieces (e.g. Schubert’s string quintet) and challenging new works. Programmer Geoff Nuttall has invited composer-in-residence Jessica Meyer to write a world premiere for his St. Lawrence String Quartet, which celebrates its 25th year at Spoleto USA.
First weekend
Hope Muir has brought Helen Pickett’s shorter works to Charlotte Ballet. Now we’ll see what Pickett does with a full-length piece, as Scottish Ballet (where Muir worked before coming here) brings “The Crucible,” the first dance adaptation of Arthur Miller’s drama about a New England town torn apart by the frenzy to blame witches for its problems in the 1600s. (May 22-24)
Jazz, sometimes an underrated element at Spoleto USA, has a Louisiana flavor this weekend. Preservation Hall Jazz Band kicks things off on May 22, followed by “A New Orleans Jazz Celebration” led by clarinetist Michael White on May 23. The latter pays tribute to Danny Barker, who helped revive the Crescent City’s brass band traditions in the 1970s.
We go to Spoleto for things we’ll never see anywhere else, right? That’d be Meow Meow. The Australian-born chanteuse does her cabaret act May 22-26; her website says her blend of comedy and cabaret-style vocals has “hypnotized, inspired, and terrified audiences globally … from New York’s Lincoln Center and Berlin’s Bar Jeder Vernunft to London’s West End.”
Second weekend
You’ll get multiple looks at Trisha Brown Dance Company on May 28-30. Brown, a cornerstone of the postmodern movement, died three years ago, but her troupe keeps moving. “Trisha Brown: In Plain Site” presents free outdoor, site-specific renderings of Brown’s early works; the indoor repertory program offers her “Foray Forêt,” “Groove and Countermove” and “Working Title.”
Director of orchestral activities John Kennedy likes to pair the familiar and unfamiliar. Take the May 30 concert: It offers Holst’s “The Planets,” Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and “Rhapsodic Overture” by Charleston-born Edmund Thornton Jenkins. Meanwhile, on May 29 and 31, members of Westminster Choir will perform settings from Carlo Gesualdo’s 1611 “Tenebrae Responsoria” while leading audience members through Memminger Auditorium.
The reviewer from the British newspaper The Guardian asked: “Can a science journalist save the world through the power of theater?” You’ll get a chance to find out May 27-30 in “Sea Sick.” Canadian author Alanna Mitchell has adapted her book into a one-woman show, which she tours in an effort to explain how humans have altered the ocean and how they can restore it.
Third weekend
Spoleto created the category “physical theater” for stuff outside the dramatic norm. Gravity and Other Myths returns from Australia a third time for the U.S. premiere of “Out of Chaos” on May 22-26, but the novelty this year is Machine de Cirque’s “Galerie” (June 2-7). The Quebec-based company aims to boggle minds with seven circus performers and a multi-instrumentalist.
The one-man show “The Believers Are But Brothers” (June 2-6) comes from writer-performer Javaad Alipoor. He spent months exploring websites devoted to ISIS and the alt-right movement and talking to their adherents. He crafted this piece to show how social networks eat away at democracy, and he sees the rise of extremism partly as an international crisis of masculinity.
For the first time, the Festival Finale moves to the College of Charleston’s Cistern Yard on June 7. There The War and Treaty, best emerging artist at the 2019 Americana Music Awards, will play an outdoor concert. The duo of Tanya Blount and Michael Trotter Jr., an Army veteran who got his start writing songs for those fallen in battle, will send folk harmonies out into the night.
More arts coverage
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