With a troubled economy forcing cutbacks and layoffs among Atlanta institutions from the High Museum of Art to Atlanta Ballet, there’s been backstage dramas aplenty during the planning of the 2009-’10 arts season.
Despite that, the city’s major cultural institutions have managed to orchestrate seasons of ambition. Some programs are wrapped around national names sure to help deliver patrons through the door. Countering that trend, others are stretching in surprising directions.
When the Alliance Theatre’s season was announced in April — including a Twyla Tharp world premiere, “Come Fly With Me,” danced to the music of Frank Sinatra — the slate was notable for including several leaner, more intimate works.
“It was really important to me that we be mindful of what everyone is going through but still deliver what people expect us to deliver,” Alliance artistic director Susan V. Booth said. That was not long after her associate artistic director departed (not to be replaced), but before the announcement that the Tony-winning troupe’s managing director position was being eliminated.
But to focus on the coming instead of the going, Robert Spano will conduct Yo-Yo Ma and the Atlanta Symphony in a program that the orchestra will take to New York’s Carnegie Hall. The High Museum explores da Vinci sculpture but also “The Allure of the Automobile,” a design exhibit of custom-built cars from the 1930s to ’60s. The Atlanta Ballet celebrates 80 years with a season that includes a 50th anniversary production of “The Nutcracker.”
As ever, smaller performing troupes and visual arts spaces, unburdened by overheads quite so high, may pull off the biggest adventures.
– Howard Pousner
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Don’t miss
Atlanta Opera performs Gluck’s “Orfeo and Euridice”
The most anticipated event of the season is the happy-ending tragedy based on Greek mythology. Gluck’s music straddles the florid formality of Handel with the supple elegance of Mozart, a sublime mix. Atlanta’s own star countertenor, David Daniels, makes his Atlanta Opera debut as the hero who descends into Hades to retrieve his love but must overcome his own emotions to complete the rescue. With esteemed early music conductor Harry Bicket in the pit, this show has the ingredients to prove Atlanta Opera is up to national standards.
Nov. 14, 17, 20, 22. Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, 2800 Cobb Galleria Parkway, Atlanta. 404-881-8885, www.atlantaopera.org.
Also consider
ASO explores the Orient
The orchestra prepares for the prestigious China Festival at New York’s Carnegie Hall with the same program here at home a few weeks earlier. Yo-Yo Ma plays the world premiere of the cello concerto “Awakening from a Disappearing Garden” by Angel Lam, a young female composer born in Hong Kong. Stravinsky’s gorgeous fairy tale opera “The Nightingale” comes with a fabulous cast.
Oct. 15-16. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org.
Under the radar
Contemporary classical music
Sonic Generator, Georgia Tech’s new-music group with a sense of fun, performs a concert of electronic music called “The French-American Connection.”
Nov. 16. Georgia Tech's Alumni House, 190 North Ave. N.W. 404-385-7257, www.sonicgenerator.gatech.edu.
– Pierre Ruhe blogs about the arts at www.ArtscriticATL.com.
DANCE
Don’t miss
Glowing at “Le Flash”
The event called “Le Flash-Atlanta,” an experimental photography jamboree, has added a dance component that’s now the talk of the town. Choreographer Lauri Stallings’ modern-ballet troupe named gloATL seized the Woodruff Arts Center plaza for an outdoor dance-music-def poetry happening, and it felt like a cultural watershed. Stallings’ troupe will headline Le Flash’s Oct. 2 gala in the Castleberry Hill district in downtown Atlanta.
Details and locations will be announced just before the event. www.gloATL.com, www.leflash-atlanta.com.
Also consider
Americana in Marietta
Georgia Ballet, based in Marietta, revisits “A Sleepy Hollow Story” as its main fall attraction, based on Washington Irving’s classic tale and originally choreographed in 2006 by Janusz Mazon, the company’s ballet master.
Oct. 24-25. Cobb County Civic Center, 548 S. Marietta Parkway, Marietta. 770-528-0881, www.georgiaballet.org
Under the radar
Temporary dance
New York’s Parsons Dance performs “Remember Me” with the East Village Opera Company, a rock band that sometimes sounds like Queen.
Oct. 23. Ferst Center for the Arts, 349 Ferst Drive N.W., Atlanta. 404-894-2787, www.ferstcenter.org.
– Pierre Ruhe blogs about the arts at www.ArtscriticATL.com.
THEATER
Don’t miss
“In the Heights”
Atlanta audiences will be among the first outside New York to see the 2008 Tony Award winner for best new musical. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s love letter to his Washington Heights, N.Y., barrio is, in its way, a kinder, gentler “West Side Story” — a salsa-and-meringue-driven tale of immigrants who discover the meaning of home and family in a complicated and challenging New World. The book is by Pulitzer Prize nominee Quiara Alegria Hudes, who Alliance Theatre patrons know from this year’s “26 Miles” and the eloquent “Elliot, A Soldier’s Fuge.” After opening in Tampa in October, the Broadway Across America-Atlanta production heads directly to the Fox Theatre.
Nov. 3-8. $19-$55. Fox Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Midtown. 1-800-278-4447. www.ticketmaster.com
Also consider
“Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical”
How cool that the definitive ’60s musical about peace, love and racial harmony is coming to Atlanta’s epicenter of herb and tie-dye. As a celebrated Broadway revival plays on, Little Five Points’ 7 Stages will stage its own rendition of the prescient and trippy rock anthem, featuring a black character who calls himself “the president of the United States of Love.” Let the sun shine in.
Sept. 11-Oct. 10. $20-$25. 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647, 7stages.org
Under the radar
“Hominid”
Theater Emory and Out of Hand Theater’s dextrous physical comedians explore the connections between chimpanzee and human politics in a new play by Ken Weitzman. Sponsored by Emory’s Program in Science and Society and the Yerkes National Primate Center.
7 p.m. Nov. 12-14, 18-21; 2 p.m. Nov. 15, 22. $6-$18 (at 7 p.m. Nov. 18 is a Pay-What-You-Can Performance, tickets only available at the door). Mary Gray Munroe Theatre, Dobbs University Center, Coca-Cola Commons, 605 Asbury Circle, Atlanta, Emory University
– Wendell Brock
VISUAL ART
Don’t miss
“Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius”
Leonardo cast a long shadow. In the case of sculpture, the subject of the latest High Museum project about the Italian Renaissance, shadows are about all we have left from the master himself. His own sculpture survives mostly in sketches and studies, some 20 of which are in the exhibit.
One section is devoted to his plan to create the world’s largest and most complex statue, the 24-foot-tall “Sforza Horse.” Look for a life-size re-creation on the plaza.
The rest of the 50 works represent those he influenced, an honor roll of artists such as Donatello, Rubens and Verrocchio.
Among the highlights: “John the Baptist Preaching to a Levite and a Pharisee,” three monumental bronzes by Giovanni Francesco Rustici from the façade of the Baptistery of Florence and a relief by Verrocchio from the silver altar inside the baptistery, whose recent conservation the High helped fund. Neither of these tableaux has ever left Florence.
More tantalizing still, curator Gary Radke has proposed that two of the small figures from the altar are actually the hand of the young Leonardo himself.
Oct. 6, 2009–Feb. 21, 2010. $18; $15, seniors and students; $11, 6-17; free for children under 5 and members. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Thursdays; noon-5 p.m. Sundays. High Museum of Art, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E. 404-733-4444, www.high.org.
Also consider
“Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century” brings 80 engravings and woodcuts by 16th-century Dutch and Flemish masters to the Michael C. Carlos Museum. The exhibit shows that these images were much more than illustrations of the Bible’s stories. They were also propaganda from both sides of the Reformation battle.
Oct. 17, 2009-Jan. 24, 2010. $7 donation. 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; noon-4 p.m. Sundays. Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University, 571 S. Kilgo Circle. 404-727-4282, www.carlos.emory.edu.
Under the radar
Now in its second year, Le Flash-Atlanta, a one-night extravaganza of art, performance, poetry, video and general merriment, is the opening event for Atlanta Celebrates Photography.
Oct 2. Dusk to midnight throughout the Castleberry Hill District. leflash-atlanta.com.
– Catherine Fox blogs about art and architecture at www.ArtscriticATL.com.
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