[NEohioPAL] WordStage announces it 2014 Winter Spring Series of Perfromances

[Tim Tavcar]

Bloomsbury
and Word War I- A Literary Drama

Friday,
January 24, 2014 - 7PM
The
Shaker Heights Historical Society – 16740 South Park Blvd. Shaker
Heights
Presented
on the Aha Series by the Shaker Heights Arts Council  

A New Work commissioned by the Shaker
Height Arts Council takes us to Garsington, the 'Country Cottage “
of Lady Ottoline and Philip Morrell.  It is 1914 and Word War I has
begun in earnest.  Lady Ottoline discusses the ramifications for her
and her artistic and literary pacifist friends with  Leonard and
Virginia Woolf. They are in the process of launching their Hogarth
Press which would go on to publish many of the leading pacifist
writers of the day, including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Siegfried
Sassoon, Vita Sackville-West, Robert Graves and, of course, the
“Woolfs”  themselves..  The text will be accompanied with music
composed by Rebecca Clarke – a contemporary of the Bloomsberries,
whose works for solo viola, originally published under a male
pseudonym, were much celebrated in their day, providing  inspiration
for, among others, Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Admission $30 for the single event –
or contact the Shaker Arts Council for a discounted four program
subscription.

“Hush”
- The Story and Music of of Slave, Savant, Pianist and Composer –
Blind Tom Wiggins
In
Celebration of Black History Month -  
Free
performance
Saturday,
February 1, 2014
Cleveland
Public Library Main Branch– 325 Superior Road East, Cleveland, OH
Third Floor Lobby of the
Fine Arts Department
“I am astounded. I cannot account for it, no one can. No one
understands it,” a St Louis man uttered after watching Blind Tom
perform in concert in 1866. His mystification was by no means
isolated. Few other performers on the nineteenth century stage
aroused as much curiosity as “Blind Tom” Wiggins. Born a slave in
Georgia in 1848, by the time he died Hoboken in 1908, he was an
international celebrity and his name was a byword for inexplicable
genius.
From an early age, it was clear that Blind Tom possessed
extraordinary musical gifts. He could imitate, either vocally or
musically, any sound he heard. This, coupled with an encyclopedic
memory and all-encompassing passion for music, meant that by the age
of sixteen, he hovered somewhere between a respected concert pianist
and glorified sideshow freak. For the following forty years, he
toured the length and breadth of North America, soaking up the sounds
of the Civil War and Gilded Age, then baffling audiences with his
astonishing gifts.
This WordStage presentation with bring this extraordinary artist
to life through his music, biographical highlights and from excerpts
from the many observations made about him by everyone from anonymous
audience members at his concerts to authors Mark Twain and Willa
Cather.

Callas On
Callas
Free
Performance   
Sunday, February 9th, 2014 - 2PM
The
Lakewood Public Library 15425 Detroit Avenue, Lakewood, OH
 Main
Branch Auditorium
When people hear the word diva, they think Maria Callas. The Greek
soprano was one of the greatest stars of the 20th century, not only
in the opera but in the media. If her tiffs with opera management
weren’t enough, her affair with Aristotle Onassis and his
subsequent dumping of her for the widow Jacqueline Kennedy kept her
in the limelight until her untimely death at the age of 53.
Callas (1923-1977) is revered to this day for her dramatic
intensity, versatility and technical prowess in opera. Her recordings
are still in print, and are considered benchmarks of the art. After
her death some Videos of live performances in Opera and Concert were
released, and some 30 biographies and critical studies were
published, discussing, with greater or lesser success, her voice, her
life and her enduring contributions to Opera and to music in general.
In “Callas on Callas” 95 percent of the text is adapted from
the diva’s interviews and 1971 Juilliard master classes, with only
fleeting references to her personal life. This presentation will
focus on Callas, the Artist, whose gifts revolutionized the world of
Opera and influenced, and continues to influence singer, conductors
and stage directors for generations after her death. The program also
features several of the all-too- few examples of Callas captured in
live performances projections, which help to illustrate why this
woman was such a force in the development of Opera as the true
musico-dramatic art form it was created to be.
Shakespeare
In Song
Free
Performance   
Sunday, March 16, 2014 - 2PM - Cleveland
Heights / University Heights Library  
2345 Lee Rd. - Cleveland Heights, OH
Music was an integral part of Elizabethan life, as it is today.
London publishers were constantly producing broadside ballads,
madrigals, and consort pieces, and most educated people could read
music and play a tune on a recorder, lute, or viola da gamba. Not
surprisingly, Shakespeare alludes to or includes the text of well
over one hundred songs in his works.
Shakespeare’s characters are a reflection of his times and they
too depend on music for moments of comedy and poignancy, whether it
be a drunken sing-along at a crowded table, or a gloomy rhyme borne
out of love’s disillusionment. The character of Lorenzo summarizes
the importance of music and song in The Merchant of Venice:
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with
concord of sweet sounds,Is fit for treasons, stratagems and
spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his
affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the
music.


In Celebration of National Poetry
Month
Not
About Heroes - Siegfried Sassoon  and  
Wilfred
Owen - Poets of  the Trenches
Free
performance
Sunday,
April 9, 2014 - 2PM
The
Beachwood Public Library – 25501 Shaker Blve., Beachwood, OH

It was an amazing coincidence that
Britain's two strongest World War I  anti-war soldiers and literary
figures should meet at the  infamous Craiglockhart War Hospital for
those men wounded in mind, body or both.  But meet they did and
formed a lasting  creative and affectionate friendship until Owen's
tragic death in France just before the end of the fighting.  Together
they served as alternately teacher and pupil as they explored and
expanded each others literary horizons. 

The text of this performance is taken
largely from some of their most powerful poems and excerpted from
Stephen MacDonald's critically acclaimed play, “ Not About Heroes”,
written about these two comrades in arms and in life. 
The readings will be subtly underscored
by the music of British Composers of the WW I era, including Benjamin
Britten, who used Wilfred Owen's evocative poetry in the composition
of his magnificent “War Requiem.”

A Bomb In Her Bosom - The Enigma of Emily Dickinson
Free Performance    
Lakewood Public Library - 15425 Detroit Avenue Lakewood, OH 
The first word of the first poem she ever wrote was “awake.” Almost two centuries later, Emily Dickinson is still jolting us into consciousness. 
The legendary recluse in white, who spent most of her life hidden from the world in the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts, wrote poetry for 37 years and yet allowed only a handful of her poems to be published in her lifetime. It wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century, decades after her death in 1886, that all 1,789 of them were discovered and gathered into one book and published in their original, unedited form. 
But, according to recent scholarship and new biographies, the myth of the shy, virginal woman in the white dress hidden away in a room in her father’s house, writing poems on scraps of paper, is just too simplistic. The Dickinson of these books is, what would be considered in her own time as “naughty” — a fiercely passionate poetic pioneer with a withering wit and yearnings that, like a good poem, can lift the top of your head off. Dickinson’s avoidance of public life, it has been hypothesized, might have had a less romantic cause: epilepsy. She and her family knew the safest and most practical way to deal with her condition would have been for Emily to simply remain at home. 
The debate rages on, but, whatever the case, ever since her work first came to light, Dickinson and her work have never suffered from a shortage of fans and admirers; she is now widely considered one of the United States’ greatest poets. WordStage examines her life and literary legacy through her own poems, letters and diaries and the music of her time.

Please visit our Web Sire - http://www.wordstageoh.com/ for further details, contact information and maps to the individual venues  where WordStage will be performing.

Submitted by Tim Tavcar 
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