Clearly the biggest news is a new production of Porgy and Bess — the opera is set in Charleston — at the newly renovated Galliard. A few details:

Porgy and Bess in Charleston—what could be more perfect? DuBose Heywardâ€s inspiration for Catfish Row is brought to life on the new Martha and John M. Rivers Performance Hall stage, just blocks from the historical Cabbage Row. David Herskovits, whose 1998 production of Mambaâ€s Daughters by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward won an OBIE award and sold out at Spoleto Festival USA in 1999, returns to the Festival to direct this landmark production. Visual Designer Jonathan Green takes us on a journey from the streets of the Charleston we know to a Charleston that reveals the roots, strength, and character of the Gullah community.

Yes, painter Jonathan Green (whose career got an early boost through the late Savannah curator Carroll Greene, btw) has done the visual design. I expect something stunning out of that collaboration.

The schedule also features Spoleto’s usual rich mix of music (jazz, classical, and more), dance, drama, and opera. I typically buy tickets for a couple of shows and make a full day of it for at least one Saturday during the festival, but I might try to see more this year.

I would normally be super excited about Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s Play and Play: An Evening of Movement and Music, but that work was performed at the Savannah Music Festival in 2013. Also, interestingly there is no ballet on the program.

And, man, I was hoping that Laurie Anderson would come back to make up for last year’s cancellation, but no such luck.

But on the whole my first impression is that the 2016 season is a bit stronger than 2015. If anyone would like to trade comments about shows, please say something in the thread about this post on my Savannah Unplugged Facebook page.

Tickets don’t go on sale till January 14, but Spoleto does have a tiered early-purchase system for donors. I didn’t find that system an impediment to getting great seats (first row but not center) for a couple of shows last year, but I find the system off-putting. The previous year, I attended a performance at the Memminger Auditorium where ushers ended up sitting front row center in seats that had been blocked out when I made my purchase. That experience, plus a couple of others that I’ve written about over the years, have made me wary of trusting the festival’s seating charts, which shouldn’t be a typical fan reaction for a festival of such high, high quality.

Still, I’m sure I’ll be headed that way again, and I’ll be making restaurant reservation months in advance too.

While it’s tempting to want to put these historic cities in formaldehyde, to embalm them and shun anything modern, Charleston Mayor Joe Riley says that’s not a viable answer.

“A historic city should be a living place,” Riley said. “Because if you don’t have that, then it’s a former something. A former once-great city that now is pretty to see.”

Charleston has the oldest historic district in the country. It’s carefully preserved the city’s grand public buildings, as well as the mansions along the Battery, and of course, the famous Rainbow Row.

The city’s signature, however, is the Charleston “single house” — tall, slender homes with two-tiered piazzas (we’d call them porches) that often look out over a private garden. It’s an architectural fabric that new buildings have a hard time matching.

“You know, it’s like there is this beautiful painting that has been painted and you have an opportunity to paint something within that beautiful painting,” said Riley. “You’ve got to be careful that in what you paint there, you don’t detract from the overall context of what has been created.”

There are some excellent visuals in the piece, which you can watch via the embed here (take it to full-screen and it’s better; sorry if you have to wade through a 15-second commercial):

Only two Savannahians are chosen for the interviews — architect Christian Sottile and historian John Duncan. (Great choices, and both friends of mine, I’m proud to say.) The focus of the piece doesn’t extend very deep into the real world issues we’re dealing with, but the segment provides a solid overview of the general arguments about incorporating contemporary architectural styles in cities like Savannah and Charleston that still have so much historic architecture, generally from the 19th century.

I feel like the piece would have been better if it had provided quick glimpses of other buildings in Savannah that might have seemed shockingly new for their time — including Drayton Tower, the Owens-Thomas House, and the old Greyhound station that now holds The Grey. Here’s a photo of The Grey:

I’m not going to go on and on about it here, but I do think that Savannah’s historic guidelines have led contemporary architects to follow a predictable template for new construction — they end up designing buildings that they know can be approved rather than exploring boundaries.

At the end of the day, Charleston seems to have a similar problem, as noted in the segment regarding the controversy over a proposed and later scrapped contemporary design for Clemson’s School of Architecture building in Charleston.

A) solve a Rubik’s cube in a couple of minutes,
AND
B) do the last few moves behind their backs,
AND
C) accomplish those tasks while standing on their heads on a small pedestal in front of a couple hundred incredulous people,
AND
D) do all that after half an hour of ridiculous jumps, falls, throws, and flips, under the glare of a handful of tiny spotlights.

Daniel Liddiard falls into that narrow subset of human beings, and his amazing trick was just one of the highlights of A Simple Space, the thrilling American debut by the Australian acrobatics troupe Gravity & Other Myths at Spoleto USA in Charleston this week. (Performances continue through Tuesday, May 27 — highly recommended, if you can snag a ticket.)

The Emmett Robinson Theatre at the College of Charleston has been transformed into a theater-in-the-round for this show. The 8-member troupe — 5 male acrobats, 2 female acrobats, 1 excellent percussionist — performed in a space that’s even smaller and simpler than the name A Simple Space implies. The performance area is no more than a couple hundred square feet (smaller than the front parlor in many modest historic homes here in Savannah) with audience seating pulled up almost right to the edge.

There’s plenty of humor along the way — I especially loved the idea of raising my hand and saying “Falling” under the expectation that someone would catch me, but I resisted the temptation to try it in the lobby after the show.

The fast-paced performance included a wonderful game of “strip jumprope” as three of the male acrobats tried to outdo each other. When one particularly hunky performer was forced to strip to his boxer briefs, a woman behind me, who kept up a vaguely hysterical running commentary throughout, said, “I hope he loses again.”

Without a trace of irony, one of her companions replied, “Why do you say that?”

I would be irritated by so much talk in the audience at most shows, but not this one — the intimacy of the space and the winning personalities of the performers encouraged audience involvement, and we’d probably all just had a few drinks with dinner anyway.

I’ve seen some other physical theatre at Spoleto over the years — and it’s pretty much always excellent. But those shows have been on larger stages and have felt a little less spontaneous than A Simple Space.

It’s hard to beat solving a Rubik’s cube while doing a headstand and a game of strip jumprope (anyone?), but there were plenty of other fine moments, including various combinations that resulted in the female acrobats standing atop the shoulders — or even head — of a male acrobat standing on another’s shoulders, some spectacular throws and catches, a few wince-inducing contortions, a melee with even the audience throwing plastic balls at the performers, and a manic contest to see which of the acrobats with Gravity & Other Myths could do the most standing back flips.

And sweat. There was a lot of sweat, which the women behind me seemed especially fascinated by.

And did I mention that all of this took just under an hour?

Afterward, the troupe was scattered in the lobby to greet the audience — a personal touch that brought the evening to an emotionally satisfying end.

Spoleto 2014 runs from May 23rd to June 8th in a variety of venues — most of them excellent — in downtown Charleston.

Once again this year, there’s some overlap with the 17-day Savannah Music Festival. I’ve already bought tickets to see Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn at the SMF, so I won’t be going to that June 1st gig at the TD Arena at the College of Charleston (a problematically cavernous venue for an act like this). Jazz vocalist Rene Marie returns to Spoleto in 2014 (also, bizarrely, at the arena); she performed in 2013 at the SMF.

Regrettably, the TD Arena is also being used for a couple of promising dance performances. I thought the arena was a really terrible venue for Compagnie Käfig in 2013, so I’ll have to think hard about going to either of those shows.

But there’s one show that I know I’ll be attending: Laurie Anderson at the Sottile Theatre.

I’ve seen Anderson twice at Spoleto, and both were memorable shows. Anderson’s late husband Lou Reed even sat in with Anderson in one performance of Homeland back in 2008. I was lucky to be there.

The show by Lucinda Williams looks mighty tempting too. Charleston’s own Shovels and Rope is also in the lineup.

Here’s the embedded digital program:

If the embed isn’t working, you can check out the schedule here or here.

I highly recommend at least heading up to Charleston for one day — for a couple of shows and a great meal or two. If you want to try some place popular like Husk, be advised to make reservations very early.

Tickets go on sale to the general public on Dec. 9th.

Harrington notes a variety of reasons why smaller markets like Savannah should beware of cruise ships. Interestingly, on the day that Savannah ended its flirtation with the cruise industry, Carnival announced that it was pulling ships from Norfolk, Baltimore, and Boston.

From Harrington’s op-ed:

For Charleston, the analysis that led to Savannahâ€s “no” vote is worth a look. The challenges facing terminals like Charlestonâ€s are growing. In addition to Norfolk, five similar terminals built since 2000 — Philadelphia, Mobile, Houston, San Diego and Honolulu — are either closed or operating deep in the red. Itâ€s not just the cruise corporations†tactics — their habit of pulling out with little notice as they follow shifts in the market — that should cause worry. Trends in the cruise industry suggest that strategic business risks for such terminals are rising as well.

Cruise corporations are building bigger ships, making those in the 2000-plus passenger range like the Carnival Fantasy a shrinking share of their fleets. Terminals that service older, smaller ships are going to compete for fewer vessels.

Marketing will focus increasingly on cities with mega-ship terminals such as Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Port Everglades. These ports already handle over 70 percent of all East coast cruise passengers; ports with smaller ships in the Southeast — Norfolk, Charleston, Mobile, and Jacksonville — together embark barely 5 percent.

The entire piece is well worth a read, especially a later passage about “the displacement of destination visitors” and damage to “unique historic values.”

But the College of Charleston’s TD Arena is a deeply flawed venue. The problematic staging and the awkward pacing of the dances resulted in a show that I found several notches below the expectations I have for Spoleto productions.

First, let me rant about the arena. The seating chart on the festival website gives a simply terrible impression of the actual layout. Thinking that it would be good to be slightly elevated rather to sit in the middle of the floor, I purchased seats in row A of the Concourse level. But the floor seats, about half of which were empty, extended much further than the chart illustrates, and the seats to the left and right didn’t even come close to the front of the stage as shown. As a result, even in what should have been very good seats, we could barely see the dancers’ expressions. Stunningly, the most expensive seats for the performance were 10 rows behind us — if I had paid $20 more to be that far from the stage, I’d likely be complaining for a refund.

The combination of the venue itself and the sheer physical demands of hip hop dance led to another regrettable problem: some patrons thought that the audience should applaud every time a dancer pulled off a difficult move. But Compagnie Käfig is a dance troupe; we were not watching Disney on Ice. Even one of the ushers started clapping loudly and somewhat maniacally to the beat of one Latin folk tune.

Good for Compagnie Käfig to have risen to such prominence that it can command venues of that scale, but I can’t recommend that anyone see them in an arena unless you get tickets as close to the stage as possible. Hip hop is all about sudden tension and sinewy muscularity; if you can’t get close enough to feel that energy, you probably ought to just stay home. The only really great seats for this Spoleto production were probably those in the front row center on the floor.

Of the two dances, Agwa was by far the more ambitious, with clear plastic cups and water used as props, with the shirtless dancers trying to combine, conserve, and finally drink. But an extended segment with the dancers in clear rain ponchos seemed a little too cute, and the dance as a whole was practically overwhelmed by the sheer physical perfection of one dancer’s head-spinning.

The music, too, varied in ways that contributed to an uneven pace. Rather than feeling like a symphony with distinct movements, each dance felt more like a collage of styles. The whole was certainly not as good as the sum of the parts.

After the company took their bow at the program’s end, they came back on stage to keep dancing in a kind of freestyle, semi-improvised street dancing. And I guess that closing exemplified the problem that Compagnie Käfig faces from an artistic standpoint: do we turn these incredibly talented dancers loose or try to contain their skills within tightly defined choreography?

I wish I could say that at least the sound was good in the arena, but it wasn’t. We were seated not all that far off center, but I was pretty much only hearing music from one bank of speakers.

Here’s a screenshot of the deceiving TD arena seating chart that comes up when you try to buy tickets online. There’s a more detailed and somewhat more accurate graphic elsewhere on the Spoleto site, but there are errors there too and the floor seating takes up a good deal more area than pictured there — which means the concourse seating is even farther away. The festival has other shows scheduled for the space, which will likely have the same issues.

I’ll have another post up soon with a much more favorable review of the Spoleto production of Le Grand C.

“Not in My Port, Charlestonâ€s Cruise Ship Opponents Say”

In this Southern coastal city that runs on history and hospitality, a raucous civic debate belies a genteel veneer.

Like several communities that hug the nationâ€s coastline, Charleston is struggling to balance the economic benefits of cruise ships against their cultural and environmental impact.

Last weekâ€s debacle aboard Carnival Cruise Lines†Triumph, in which an engine fire stranded 4,200 people in the Gulf of Mexico for five days, has done little to deter those civic leaders who believe that building a new $35 million cruise terminal will be a great boon for this port city.

But for people like Jay Williams, a homeowner in the historic district who writes a blog for Charleston Communities for Cruise Control, a preservationist group, the nightmare on the Triumph is one more piece of evidence in the case against a fast-growing form of travel.

And there, in a nutshell, is the debate that will heat up in Savannah over the next couple of years, if a study determines that we are even viable as a cruise ship terminal location. (My guess is that the heavy commercial traffic on the Savannah River — predicted to get far heavier in the coming decades — will preclude the possibility of cruise ships here, but that’s just a guess.)

The battle over cruise ships is largely one about “crowding out”.

In other words, if we devote a big stretch of riverfront to a cruise ship terminal and skew the downtown economy toward accommodating the cruise ship riders (and their cars), what other development will be pre-empted? What will happen to the downtown residential population and to quality of life? How will the cruise ship tourists — arriving in waves — impact our tourist-dependent businesses? Will an emphasis on cruise ships hurt efforts to bring higher-spending cultural tourists to town?

I posted about some of these issues a couple of weeks ago after a conference — held in Charleston — about historic seaports.

SavannahRed has a really interesting blog post up this week — “The Savannah Cruise Shake” — emphasizing the need for balanced debate about costs and benefits.

There have been a number of mentions in the press lately of Mobile, where Carnival pulled out after the city funded a terminal. As Adam Van Brimmer notes on his blog at SavannahNow, that terminal found a use this week: as the dock for the crippled cruise ship that leads off the NYT’s piece.

This is not a cruise ship, but I bet some ads for cruises will appear on this page:

Major hotel construction will begin soon at both the east and west ends of River Street. A couple of other new hotels will soon be popping up on available land along key downtown corridors.

On recent warm winter weekends, downtown has been crawling with tourists — a clear shift from the quiet days of the 20th century and from the slow pace during the recession. On Friday afternoon, I was on River Street with a visitor to the city and saw firsthand the steady stream.

The prospect of even more intense tourism has prompted a much more proactive stance from the Downtown Neighborhood Association, the Historic Savannah Foundation, and others concerned about the impacts.

The city of Savannah has commissioned a study of the viability of creating a cruise ship terminal in Savannah, but look for a major fight if that study suggests that we would be a good starting and ending point for massive cruise liners.

My guess, frankly, is that cruise ships will turn out not be viable in Savannah because of the increasing cargo traffic going to the port and the LNG tankers going to Elba Island (the latter force traffic on the Savannah River to come to a standstill). But that’s just a guess at this point.

And now this from Lesley Conn and Mary Landers at the Savannah Morning News: Charleston warns Savannah about cruise ships. From the article:

The cautionary tales came Thursday from our neighboring port city, but they were shared by others from Alaska and British Columbia and from Norway, Cozumel and Venice.

Once big cruise ships come to a city, they can overwhelm a communityâ€s resources — crowding streets, jamming sidewalks and attractions, contributing to pollution and generating far less in spending and tax dollars than is usually anticipated.

Conn and Landers were writing about last week’s conference in Charleston, Harboring Tourism. From USA Today’s preview of that conference, Are cruise ships ruining historic ports?:

The growing industry and plans by the South Carolina State Ports Authority to build a $35 million cruise terminal have brought lawsuits in state and federal courts.

Plaintiffs are concerned that pollution and congestion threaten Charleston’s historic district. City leaders say that the industry is being handled appropriately and that Charleston will never be a major cruise destination.

Concerns over the year-round industry prompted the National Trust to place Charleston on its “watch list” of endangered places and the World Monuments Fund to put the city on its Monuments Watch list.

And this:

Sam Jones, mayor of Mobile, Ala., is scheduled to speak at the conference. In his city, $20 million was invested in a cruise terminal in 2004. But later, Carnival Cruise Lines moved the liner serving the city to New Orleans. Now, Mobile has the challenge of paying for a terminal no longer used for cruises.

It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how all this plays out.

I’m going to continue to advocate for public policies (like measures to encourage greater residential density) that will create a more diversified downtown economy.