With the big opening weekend of Spoleto Festival USA and Piccolo at our backs and another full week and a half of performances stretching out before us, it’s perhaps possible to try and get a little bit of perspective on the 29th annual arts festival.
One thing we can say for certain: it’s certainly one of the more sexually provocative festivals in recent memory. There are nearly naked midgets and fornication galore on the Dock Street stage for Mabou Mines Dollhouse (not only does it involve dwarves and tall women but solo and, during at least one performance anyway, oral versions), and Don Giovanni is chock full of lascivious behavior, still more skin, and a trunk full of pornography that gets scattered across the floor of Memminger Auditorium. If that’s not enough prurience for festival-goers, they can pop into Belle Muse Gallery on Wentworth Street for a group exhibit of erotic art or check out the work of Lucas Causey at the Humanities Center show Curious Tales – not salacious per se, but there’s no shortage of phalluses, either. Hey, I’m not judging here, just observing.
There may also have been some slight improvement in the cellphone etiquette direction this year. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part; after all, it couldn’t have gotten a hell of a lot worse after last year, and I have yet to experience a single performance in either festival that hasn’t been interrupted by some jerkoff’s twittering, ridiculous ringtone. Actually, I’m mistaken: none of the shows at the American Theater have been interrupted, because the Theatre 99 gang is intelligent enough to make an announcement before each presentation: “Ladies and gentlemen, please turn off all pagers and cellphones, because if they ring during the show they’ll be confiscated and destroyed.” People laugh because they’re expecting comedy from this crowd. But I wanna see tech booth operator and announcement man Sean Sullivan snatch somebody’s ringing cellphone from his fat fingers, hurl it to the ground and stomp on it until it’s been atomized into sand-sized shards of metal and plastic. Please, Sean? Please?
Early reports from opening weekend have two operas out in front of just about everything else in the festival for happy patron quotients. Who’da thunk it? La bella dormente nel bosco is running neck and neck with Don Giovanni as the two most popular parts of the festival to date. Sure, Savion Glover wowed ‘em last weekend at the Gaillard, but that show’s been on the road for months – their Charleston performances apparently closed out a 10-week tour – and he only did three shows. But both Don G. and La bella will play through the end of the festival, and each is a Spoleto-produced premiere. (La bella will also go on to the Lincoln Center Festival, which co-commissioned the work from director Basil Twist, later this summer.)
The Colla Marionette Company’s first program, Sheherazade and Petruschka, has also had theatre-goers gurgling with delight (sometimes literally, being a kid-friendly show), and Mike Daisey’s turn in the Solo Turns series, The Ugly American, has folks hailing it as an especially auspicious beginning to the three-play series.
What would Spoleto be without the edgier stuff? Probably a lot more profitable, but that’s not their mission. And so there’re always a couple of productions in the big festival that make even the most cultured arts diva feel like a floundering Philistine. With opening weekend behind us, that honor at this point is a toss-up: Mabou Mines DollHouse or Emio Greco \ PC’s Rimasto Orfano? They both operate on a level well above mere entertainment, but there have also been plenty of patrons who missed the higher meaning in each. (I even caught a few people I know sneaking out of DollHouse at the first intermission. Sometimes, when you’re faced with three hours of Meaningful Art, a full stomach, and an early morning the next day, it’s damn difficult to rise to the challenge of a production that asks you to work hard to understand it. Hey, we’ve all been there.)
There’s more than a week and a half of the two festivals left, and I’ll be getting to as much of it as I can and talking about all of it here in this space and in the City Paper on June 1 and June 8. I’ll also be getting to a lot more of Piccolo this week, too, so check back often.