Author: Abigail Morici

La Cage aux Folles

Post author By Abigail Morici
Post date March 2, 2022

In 2010, Randall Hartzog and Jonathan Christian co-starred in Theatre Memphis’ La Cage aux Folles as Georges and Albin, a couple who’ve lived together happily for years in San Tropez. Twelve years later, the two actors, finally at the right age to play the middle-aged pair, have returned to these roles, now under the helm of director Cecelia Wingate.

The musical is derived from the 1973 play of the same name, turned 1978 French film, which was adapted into the 1996 American film The Birdcage, starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. In all its various forms, Georges and Albin’s son returns home with news that he is engaged. The catch: The prospective in-laws are an ultra-conservative bunch while Georges runs a drag nightclub, at which Albin is the star entertainer. As Georges and Albin try to impress their son’s love and her parents, madness and hilarity ensue.

“The fact is that it’s really funny,” Wingate says, “but at the end of the day, it’s a really beautiful and charming love story. A love story between family and who we call family.”

Though Theatre Memphis has performed this musical before, audiences can expect a fresh take, even with the same leads. The original telling is set in the ’70s, but this production is set today. “We wanted to show that things have changed a little bit since the ’70s, but there’s still [anti-LGBTQ] prejudice,” Wingate says. “We also knew it would open us up to different styles of choreography and color palette. … Visually, it’s going to be stunning. The choreography is really exciting.”

Another reason for change in era, Wingate explains, “Drag is so different today than it was in the ’70s.” From the hair to the makeup to the costuming, drag is even more elaborate these days. To that effect, the production brought on local drag performers Wednesday Moss (Austin Wood), Iris LeFluer (Joseph Grant), and Justin Allen Tate.

To purchase tickets or to view the full schedule of performances, go to theatrememphis.org or call (901) 682-8323. Evening performances will begin at 7:30 p.m., with matinees at 2 p.m.

La Cage aux Folles, Theatre Memphis, 630 Perkins Extd., opens Friday, March 4, with performances through March 27, $35.

Tags Cecelia Wingate, Iris LeFluer, Jonathan Christian, Justin Allen Tate, La Cage aux Folles, Randall Hartzog, Theatre Memphis, Wednesday Moss

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NCRM Hosts Exhibit Reflecting on St. Jude’s Legacy of Defying Racial Inequities

Post author By Abigail Morici
Post date February 23, 2022

Dr. Rudolph Jackson is featured in the Pioneer portion of the exhibit. (Photo: Courtesy St. Jude/NCRM)

In honor of Black History Month, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and ALSAC, the hospital’s fundraising and awareness organization, have partnered with the National Civil Rights Museum in an exhibit reflecting on St. Jude’s legacy of defying racial inequities within healthcare.

“St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital was founded as a beacon of inclusion and equality, and I couldn’t think of a better place to share that history than the National Civil Rights Museum,” says Richard C. Shadyac Jr., president and CEO of ALSAC. “We encourage everyone to visit this amazing museum to learn more about the connected civil rights stories of Memphis, ALSAC, and St. Jude.”

The interactive poster installation traces St. Jude’s history starting with its 1962 founding as the first fully integrated children’s hospital in the South at the height of segregation. With QR codes that direct visitors to video footage and webpages, guests can read about and hear the stories of three people: Paul Williams, the African-American architect who designed the original star-shaped hospital building; patient Courtney, whose life St. Jude’s care helped save; and Dr. Rudolph Jackson, one of the first Black doctors at the institution.

“When I first came here in ’68, I came here as part of the sickle cell program,” Jackson says in one of the exhibit’s videos. “The entire country and the world were going through the same kinds of things that we were seeing in Memphis. There was the school strike going on, the garbage strike, marches. … I wanted to do something for particularly African Americans who could not afford healthcare. The kind of healthcare people get here at St. Jude, you can’t purchase. It’s so great to find so many people who have the same ideas and work three times as hard.” Jackson has passed away since the filming of this video.

The exhibit is on display through March 8th in the guest lounge on the second floor of the museum.

“ALSAC & St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital’s Commitment To Equity And Inclusion For All Children,”

National Civil Rights Museum, 450 Mulberry, on display through March 8th.

Tags National Civil Rights Museum, NCRM, St. Jude, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

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Brooks Museum of Art Hosts Two Andy Warhol Exhibits

Post author By Abigail Morici
Post date February 16, 2022

“Silver Clouds” is an interactive exhibition. (Photo: Abigail Morici)

This past week, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art opened two exhibits, both of them centering around pop artist Andy Warhol. Even though most people recognize the artist for his Campbell’s soup cans or Marilyn Monroe in bright colorful prints, these exhibits highlight Warhol’s interest in photography and sculpture.

“Andy Warhol: Little Red Book” contains 20 polaroids, taken by Warhol, of models, artists, and designers at social gatherings in 1972 — as well as one photo of Warhol himself, though it reveals only a sliver of his face. “These particular polaroids convey an informal, casual sort of party scene and really get across more of an intimate setting,” says Patricia Daigle, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Brooks. “Photography for Warhol was like a way of life for him. He always had a camera with him at social events.”

To him, Daigle continues, “the polaroid camera was kind of this magic machine in the sense that it could create and develop images instantly. … I think he was very much drawn to the fact that it could be so amateur in that the handheld camera allowed amateur photographers to make images themselves.”

Meanwhile, “Silver Clouds,” a show which first appeared in New York in 1966 and has been recreated in the Brooks, features large rectangular balloons made out of silver scotchpak, the kind of thin material that might be used in packaging. “It’s a fun, unpredictable show in that you don’t know how the balloons will react to your presence in the space. There are several fans in the gallery which is like the original, so the balloons are moving and floating even when no one’s around.”

When the show debuted, Daigle says, Warhol had achieved a considerable amount of fame and had grown tired of painting. “He saw these ‘silver clouds’ as a farewell to painting — as something you could inflate and that would float out into the sky and sort of disappear forever,” Daigle says. “It’s the idea that art is really not precious, that it can be made of everyday materials, and that it can just disappear.” So, Daigle encourages the viewer to reach out and touch the balloons, push them gently into a new direction, and watch them float from one end of the room to the other.

“Silver Clouds”/“Little Red Book,” Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 1934 Poplar, on display through May 15.

Tags Andy Warhol, Brooks Museum of Art, Little Red Book, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Silver Clouds

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Memphis Animal Services Offers Valentine Sleepovers

Post author By Abigail Morici
Post date February 9, 2022

Looking for a special someone to spend Valentine’s Day with? Well, look no further than Memphis Animal Services’ (MAS)Valentine Sleepovers, where you can take a dog home for the weekend and spoil them as the great valentine they are. MAS will send you home with all the supplies you need.

“It’s a great opportunity for people who have been interested in the idea of fostering but aren’t sure if it is right for them,” says Alexis Pugh, MAS director. “Any time we can get an animal out of the shelter, even if it’s to go out on a day trip, it’s a benefit for the animals. It reduces their stress levels, and we get to see how they interact with the real world.”

On Thursday or Friday between noon and 4 p.m., sleepover fosters will be able to pick up a dog that will fit best in their household. Think speed-dating: You’ll be able to meet your potential suitors and check out their needs/personalities before committing to a sleepover. Drop-off will be on Sunday or even Monday if you’d prefer, or if you can’t imagine your life without your new pal, you will be able to adopt for $20, Pugh says.

During the weekend, what you and your canine valentine do is up to you — whether that’s walking in the park, rolling through the Starbucks drive-through for a puppuccino, or curling up on the couch and watching a movie. “Just simple stuff like that will make a dog happy,” Pugh says. “Ultimately, just the relaxation of being in a home is what these guys are looking for. … Fostering is so critical to life-saving, and it’s so much better for pets than being in the shelter. ”

Sign up here. For more information, check the shelter’s socials, @Memphis Animal Services on Facebook and @adoptmas on Instagram.

Valentine Sleepovers, Memphis Animal services, Thursday-Sunday, February 10th-February 13th.

Tags Memphis Animal Services

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MoSH Hosts “Savages and Princesses” Exhibit

Post author By Abigail Morici
Post date February 2, 2022

*... But I Can’t Prove It*, Tom Farris (Photo: courtesy MoSH)

Centuries after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, harmful stereotypes about Native Americans have permeated our society and still have yet to be corrected. “All of our tropes about Native Americans come from these very static notions of what it means to be Native American,” says Raka Nandi, the Museum of Science & History’s director of exhibits and collections.

To challenge these stereotypes that pervade pop culture from sports mascots to Halloween costumes, the traveling exhibit “Savages and Princesses” has come to MoSH. It features more than 40 pieces by 12 contemporary Indigenous artists from different tribes, whose work of different mediums challenges and subverts preconceived ideas about Native-American cultures and people. “I tend to think that art is a really unique tool for having difficult conversations,” Nandi says, “and it’s a way in which you can surprise people and knock them out of their comfort zones, and so that’s what these art pieces are doing.”

One of the artists, Zach Presley of the Chickasaw tribe, was inspired after being rejected from Native-American art shows because his work was not “Native enough.” In response, Presley, who works in collage and digital art, created images with stereotypical imagery of tepees, leaders in headdresses, and the like, with superimposed lettering that pokes holes in what is expected of Native-American art, like Nandi’s favorite of Presley’s, which reads, “Here is yet another goddamn southwest painting to go above your couch.”

Other pieces are much darker. Micah Wesley’s examines the disturbing history of scalping. “There was a time when Native Americans’ scalps were taken and collected as artifacts,” says Nandi. “Hair, bones, and skin of Native-American people were displayed as curiosities, and this piece is examining the brutality that Native-American bodies have been subjected to.”

But by including artists of different points of view, Nandi says, “I hope when people come to see this exhibit that they realize the Native-American communities are incredibly diverse and the stereotypes these artists are confronting have a real impact on how Indigenous people are viewed today.”

“Savages and Princesses: The Persistence of Native American Stereotypes,” Museum of Science & History, 3050 Central, on display through March 16th.

Tags Memphis Museum of Science & History, MoSH, Savages and Princesses: The Persistence of Native American Stereotypes

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Playhouse on the Square Hosts Florida Georgia Line-Produced Musical “May We All”

Post author By Abigail Morici
Post date January 26, 2022

*May We All* on stage (Photo: Bill Simmers)

Late summer 2020, Bligh Voth agreed to do a Zoom reading as the protagonist of a new musical, produced by country duo Florida Georgia Line. “There is something that Zoom does not capture,” she says. “We did our first in-person reading in September of this past year in New York City, and it was so nice to hear everyone singing and performing together.” Now the musical, titled May We All, is in its developmental production phase in Memphis, which Voth describes as “utilizing all this insane local talent and getting this show on its feet [in front of an audience].”

The musical centers around Jenna Coates, a young woman returning to her Tennessee hometown after trying to make it big in the Nashville music scene. “She comes back in a state of frantic energy, and is also met by the frantic energy of this town that has pinned a lot of its hopes on her success in Nashville and are doubling down on it as she comes back to visit because they are in such a state of panic for the longevity of their home, as small businesses are being pushed out by Walmart types.”

And of course, the musical includes a “shit-ton of great music” with country favorites and two new songs by Florida Georgia Line. “We kind of run the gamut of country music stylings,” Voth says. “For every Kenny Chesney song, there’s a more contemporary Kacey Musgraves song that balances it out.”

“In my opinion,” Voth adds, “beginning to end, this musical should feel like a great Hallmark movie. You sit down and you want to enjoy yourself and listen to some awesome music and follow a great story and know that two hours later you’re going to feel a little revived.”

May We All, Playhouse on the Square, 66 S. Cooper, performances run through February 20th, $27.

Tags Florida Georgia Line, May We All, Playhouse on the Square

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Tad Lauritzen Wright’s “Poetics of Gesture” on View at David Lusk Gallery

Post author By Abigail Morici
Post date January 26, 2022

*Repeating It Perfectly (Undone) Again 4*, acrylic on canvas (Photo: Tad Lauritzen Wright

At the onset of lockdown, Memphis artist Tad Lauritzen Wright began a series of single-line drawings about the political and social unrest that followed. “They were very narrative,” Wright says. “They were almost like documentary drawings.” But after this collection of drawings, which was featured at the Brooks, Wright, like many, became exhausted with the inundation of bad news and problems to solve.

“The work I made, while I was making it, felt pretty poignant,” he says, “but then it started to feel like a scene in Groundhog Day, you know, where it just kept repeating itself over and over in so many ways. I went into the studio and I had no idea what I was going to do. And that was a good thing.”

And so he took a 6-foot-by-9-foot drop cloth and tacked it to the wall. “So I’m sitting in a chair staring at this big blank drop cloth and this [tangled 100-foot] extension cord is on the floor. I haven’t picked it up yet. And I started thinking about the possibilities of this thing and what it actually represented. And it was much more than the extension cord. It was this idea of problems that I could easily solve when I couldn’t solve any of the ones going on around me. It was going to take a little bit of time to figure it out and untangle this thing, and so I decided I would make a painting about that and I did.”

The subsequent paintings are now a part of his “Poetics of Gesture” show at David Lusk Gallery, where they will be on display through February 5th. The gallery is hosting an open house January 30th, where guests will be able to speak with the artist.

“Poetics of Gesture” Open House, David Lusk Gallery, 97 Tillman, Saturday, January 30th, noon-3 p.m.

Tags David Lusk Gallery, Poetics of Gesture, Tad Lauritzen Wright

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Hattiloo’s “The Mountaintop” Reimagines MLK’s Final Night

Post author By Abigail Morici
Post date January 19, 2022
No Comments on Hattiloo’s “The Mountaintop” Reimagines MLK’s Final Night

For the next four weeks, Hattiloo Theatre is putting on a production of The Mountaintop, written by Memphis native and Pulitzer-winning playwright, Katori Hall.

“The Mountaintop is a reimagining of what was it like for Martin Luther King Jr. in his room the night before his assassination. It is — without giving anything away — a supernatural reimagining,” says Ekundayo Bandele, founder and CEO of Hattiloo. In a stripped-down version of Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel, King, played by Emmanuel McKinney, orders room service, and a mysterious waitress Camae, played by Bianca McMillian, brings him coffee, and the two delve into a deep conversation about King’s life and legacy. “At the end of the day, you have a man who was constantly putting himself in harm’s way. And he possibly knew at some point that his time was going to come, so how is it in that room by himself the night before he is called home to God? It is the same night he delivered his ‘Mountaintop’ speech, and that’s where you get the title.

“The supernatural element adds to the question of martyrs and how they feel,” Bandele continues. “Sometimes, we see figures like Malcolm X and so on as super-beings, but at the same time they’re human and they have fears and premonitions, so this play really shows the humanity of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

As for the impression the play leaves on the audience, Bandele says, “I think they’ll take away the courage that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had to exhibit to continue the civil rights path that he was on, despite the constant threat of assassination. That’s what they’ll take away — that this was a man, he was a flawed man. Sometimes, we fictionalize individuals who are martyrs and who are superstars and think about them one way. Well, he was a lot more complicated than that.”

The one-act play will run for an hour and 15 minutes, and performances will continue Thursdays through Sundays until February 13th, with matinees at 2 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at hattiloo.org or by calling (901) 525-0009.

The Mountaintop, Hattiloo Theatre, 37 S. Cooper, Opens Friday, January 21st, 7:30 p.m., $30.

Tags Ekundayo Bandele, Hattiloo Theatre, Katori Hall, Martin Luther King Jr., MLK, The Mountaintop

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Authors Discuss Book of Short Stories Based in Memphis

Post author By Abigail Morici
Post date January 12, 2022

A few years ago, eight local writers who knew each other through writers groups and events — Xia L. Cox, Rikki Boyce, April Jones, Rae Harding, Daniel Reece, Justin Siebert, Susan Hopson, and Kathryn Skinner — came up with the idea to collaborate on an anthology of short stories, all of them set in Memphis. Out of this concept came Malfunction Junction, 15 stories covering a range of genres, from horror to romance and pretty much everything in between.

“Hopefully, there’s something for everyone,” says one of authors, Justin Siebert. “The stories are unrelated to each other, except for the fact that they all take place in Memphis and the surrounding areas, and all deal with some sort of junction in life, whether that’s a literal road junction or a metaphorical junction in someone’s journey.”

Siebert has written two stories for the collection: “First Day of Practice” and “Forever and Ever in Both Directions.” The first follows a high school student, recently injured and new to using a wheelchair, as he witnesses his first wheelchair basketball game. “I personally use a wheelchair,” Siebert says. “I was injured in a car wreck when I was 9. It’s not autobiographical, but I incorporated a lot of the feelings and emotions of being newly injured and attending an adaptive sports event for the first time and just seeing that there are other people with disabilities who have normal productive lives and are competing in sports.”

“The main character is somebody that I made up,” he continues. “But a lot of the characters actually play on the Memphis Rollin’ Grizzlies basketball team. I play on the team. There’s a group of us that travel and compete.”

Siebert’s other story also taps into his personal life. This story of three adopted siblings, who meet a magical creature while traveling along the Greenline, channels the writer’s own reflections on his fears and anxieties of going through the adoption process with his wife.

Siebert and his fellow writers will be at Novel this Saturday. Contributor Daniel Reece will moderate a panel discussion, and a book signing will follow. Malfunction Junction is available to purchase at Novel or novelmemphis.com.

Malfunction Junction: Meet the Authors, Novel, 387 Perkins, Saturday, January 15th, 2 p.m.

Tags April Jones, Daniel Reece, Justin Siebert, Kathryn Skinner, Malfunction Junction, Novel, Rae Harding, Rikki Boyce, Susan Hopson, Xia L. Cox