Charleston, South Carolina
If there's a subset of the "cultural tourist" category of traveler,
it's the "festival fan" and if you say "Charleston" to one, you'll
get a big smile. The city's Spoleto Festival USA is known worldwide
as a not-to-be missed annual summit of opera, orchestral music,
dance, theater, and visual arts. And one of the great charms of
this 17-day spectacular - this year, May 28 to June 13 - is that
it's two festivals in one: Piccolo Spoleto ("little Spoleto")
arrays the arts of the Southeast as a backdrop to the major
American, South American, European, and Asian offerings of the
"big" festival.
Not that Charleston, itself, needs any help. We're back to
Porgy
and Bess here, you know. The "Holy City," as natives call it,
is the setting for George and Ira
Gershwin's
Summertime
opera and site of a magnificent restoration of the antebellum seat
of the Great Secession of December 1860. Walk down Meeting Street
under the melting Spanish moss of live oak trees and you find
yourself in Battery Park, where centuries-old mansions face
Charleston Harbor's breezes perfumed by the city's famous
restaurants.
Spoleto, founded in Charleston in 1977, is composer Gian Carlo
Menotti's answer to an older festival based in his native
Italy, a
fact that still makes this one of the most internationally flavored
all-arts fests of any season. And last year, it set a record at the
box office, selling more than $2.5 million in tickets.
This year's lineup features ballet superstar
Mikhail Baryshnikov in
a return to the stage for Rezo Gabriadze's
The Doctor and the
Patient; a revival of the 18-hour (yes, 18 hours) Chinese
Kunju opera
The Peony Pavilion; a new production of
Vincenzo Bellini's opera
I Capuleti e I Montecchi;
environmental-and-movement theater author David Gordon's
The
Chairs, a world-première interpretation of the Eugene Ionesco
farce; and Bolshoi/American Ballet Theatre prima ballerina Nina
Ananiashvili with a specially assembled troupe called the Moscow
Ballet Theatre in the American première of
Leah, set to
Leonard Bernstein's
The Dybbuk.