The Spoleto Festival USA is whole again.
For two years, the festival has done without one of its most powerful attractions: the Dock Street Theatre, whose wood-paneled coziness lends performances an air of 18th-century Charleston. It has had a long and extensive renovation. Friday, when the festival opens, audiences will return to it.
To commemorate the reopening, the festival will revive a long-neglected opera that was performed at the site in 1736. A longtime Spoleto favorite, the Gate Theatre from Ireland, will perform Noel Coward's "Present Laughter." Another milestone for the theater: Its daily chamber-music concerts, Spoleto's most-attended component, will have a new leader.
From Friday through June 13, Spoleto will blanket locations across Charleston with music, theater, dance and art.
Opera
To welcome back the Dock Street Theater, Charleston's homage to 18th-century theaters, Spoleto will revive a hit from 18th-century Charleston. In England, a spoof of highbrow Italian opera was packing audiences in 1735, and in Charleston, "Flora, An Opera" became the first opera performed in the U.S. - representing ballad opera, a mix of common-folk characters, double-entendre lyrics and tunes borrowed from 18th-century pop culture. "Flora" was so popular that it was reprised the next year in a just-built venue: the theater on Dock Street.
Spoleto is bringing "Flora" back. Neely Bruce, a composer and specialist in early American music, has fleshed out the lyrics and melodies from the 1700s. He thinks "Flora" and today's audiences are ready for each other.
"Early 21st-century theater is more like early 18th-century theater than most people realize," Bruce says. "You can be as bawdy as you like. You can present all kinds of questionable things on the stage, and people will laugh and have a good time."
Teenage Flora has just been orphaned. She wants to marry her sweetheart, but her guardian, who wants to get his hands on the money her parents left for her, has his own designs. And high jinks ensue.
Spoleto will present two other operas.
"Proserpina" by Wolfgang Rihm is an hourlong opera centered on the mythological goddess of the underworld, called Persephone by the Greeks. Rihm, who has been one of Germany's most prominent composers since the 1960s, based the opera on a drama by the poet Goethe. Spoleto will give the American premiere.
"Philemon and Baucis" is by Joseph Haydn, the composer of the "Surprise" Symphony. Besides creating traditional operas, he created this for the puppet theater in his royal employer's castle. The gods Jupiter and Mercury come to earth in disguise. Asking for help, they're rejected until they meet an elderly couple who don't possess much, but share what little they have. The gods reward them. The Colla Marionettes from Italy, a Spoleto favorite, will perform.
Theater
He's an famous actor. Self-centered. A womanizer. Takes nothing seriously. Then his liaisons start going awry. That's all the plot that Noel Coward's "Present Laughter" needs. Its central character may not have much to laugh about, but audiences do.
As a playwright, songwriter and performer, Coward personified British sophistication and dry-martini wit. He cut an urbane figure on stages from 1920s London to 1960s Las Vegas. Coward designed "Present Laughter" as a starring vehicle for himself, playing a circa-1940 matinee idol, Gary Essendine. Gary, like Coward, is the star of his own show.
"Cinderella" will be performed by the Colla Marionettes, the Italian puppet theater, after it finishes its performances of the Haydn opera a few days into the festival.
"This is What Happens Next" is being performed by the Necessary Angel Theatre Company. Canadian actor and writer Daniel MacIvor returns for this solo show, billed . as a combination of autobiography and philosophical musing that embraces topics including "divorce, addiction and the life of John Denver."
Music
Taking over for Charles Wadsworth, the pianist-storyteller-jokester who had hosted Spoleto's chamber-music concert since Day 1, might be a hopeless task except for one thing: No sane person could expect the new artistic director to be another Wadsworth.
Geoff Nuttall, the new leader, had the benefit of watching Wadsworth in close proximity. As first violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Spoleto's resident quartet for more than a decade, Nuttall has been at Wadsworth's side.
At the daily chamber concerts, Spoleto's most-attended component, audiences have long been familiar with Nuttall and the quartet's zesty performances - and with Nuttall's live-wire presence as first fiddle, all but dancing in his chair. Now, in the Wadsworth tradition, he'll be introducing the music and performers at each of the 33 concerts.
The roster for the chamber series includes the silver-toned soprano Dawn Upshaw, one of the best-known performers to take part. There will be an even more prominent guest: Johannes Brahms.
Musician-technicians have gone to work with a brief, primitive recording Brahms made in the 1890s, playing one of his own Hungarian dances. They've cleared away the background noise and patterned a performance of the whole dance after Brahms' playing style in the excerpt. A digital mechanism enables a piano to perform it with no one at the keyboard.
The Spoleto Festival Orchestra conductor, Emmanuel Villaume will lead two concerts. May 31, the group will pair the Richard Strauss showpiece "Also Sprach Zarathustra" - whose first 90 seconds were used in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" - with Ravel's "La Valse." June 6, the serenity of Richard Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll" will counterpoint the vigor of Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony and the rowdiness of Beethoven's Symphony No. 8.
Jazz, world and popular music will also be represented. The Ebony Hillbillies, who preserve the African-American tradition of string band music, will perform June 3. Bassekou Kouyate, a specialist in the ngoni - a centuries-old West African relative of the lute - will bring his band to Spoleto on June 9. The jazz roster includes Georgia-born singer Lizz Wright, British singer Norma Winstone, Brazilian singer Fabiana Cozza and Polish pianist Leszek Mozdzer. The German duo Die Roten Punke will give punk a comic twist.
Dance
For decades, the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo has simultaneously spoofed and honored the heroic, poetic world of ballet - with men playing all the roles, right up to the (usually) most fragile heroines. On the festival's opening weekend, the company will make its Spoleto debut.
The Trocks, as their fans call them, will perform some of their classics, including "Swan Lake" and the George Balanchine homage "Go for Barocco."
Yes, the style includes slapstick and silliness, but there's more to it, artistic director Tory Dobrin says via e-mail. "The company is very rooted in serious ballet history and technique," he says. "The audience expects to laugh when they walk into the theater. The audience walks away with an appreciation of how talented the dancers are as both comedy and ballet artists."
"Giselle" by the National Ballet of Georgia will be shown. Ballerina Nina Ananiashvili, who starred in "Swan Lake" at Spoleto in 2007, returns as another ballet heroine, Giselle - who comes back from the grave to save her sweetheart from evil spirits.
"Dance" by choreographer Lucina Childs gets a showing, as a specially assembled troupe revives Childs' 1979 collaboration with composer Philip Glass. The work combines the onstage dancers with a filmed version of the original cast by visual artist Sol LeWitt.
