Spoleto Festival USA

For the past seven years or more I have been a devoted participant in the Spoleto Festival that is held each year in Charleston. Each year during the 17 day long festival, audience members experience a broad range of artistic styles and forms, including classical ballet; modern and post-modern dance; opera; chamber, symphonic, and choral music; jazz; theater; and visual arts. Residence of Charleston are very fortunate to have so much art and culture at their door steps. This year's festival has not let me down so far.

Below are the shows I saw in the first weekend of the festival.

Paula West performed at the Cistern and was very good. I had not heard of her before but always loving a good jazz diva I took my chances and was not let down. What I really liked about her was that she took some not so standard jazz songs and put her own twist to them. I simply loved her rendition of Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone."

Between The Devil And the Deep Blue Sea was very good. It is a play to mixes film through out to make a dark homage to the silent film era. It had an Adam's Family / Tim Burton feel to it. I really enjoyed it.

MONKEY: JOURNEY TO THE WEST was Amazing. I read that it cost over one and a half million dollars to produce. It is a mix of circus meets opera all performed in Chinese. I was in awe the entire time. The play was subtitled and my only criticism is that the subtitle were at the top of the stage and it was hard to go back and forth from looking at the stage to looking up to read the subtitles. But even with that, this play was AMAZING!