First Stage posts surplus

 

 

First Stage Children’s Theater finished its fiscal year ended June 30 with a surplus of $13,718. The company ended in the black for the ninth straight year. In March, First Stage was projecting a $60,000 deficit. Cuts of $30,000, better than expected ticket sales for How I Became a Pirate and a year-end push for donations erased the deficits and put the company into positive territory.

The First Stage budget was $4,445,503 covered by earned income of $2,633,405 and $1,835, 816.

Shameless Spousal Promotion: Many readers know that my wife of nearly 33 years is Lee Ann Garrison, chair of the UWM Dept. of Visual Art. She has six new paintings in the fall art faculty showat the Inova Gallery (the one above the Main Stage Theatre), 2200 E. Kenwood Blvd. The opening is 5-7 p.m. Friday (Oct. 23). I’ll be there. Do stop in and say hi. Lee Ann is one of 27 artists, of vastly varied style and media, in the show, which runs through Nov. 7.

Details about the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus’ stand-alone concerts this weekend have been hard to come by. But I do know that Lee Erickson‘s 150 voices will sing without the orchestra and will sing new works by Erickson and chorus members Joel Boyd (a former student of Daron Hagen), Tim Benson and Gela Sawall Ashcroft.

Long, narrow St. Anthony’s Church, 1711 S. 9th St. (at Mitchell Street),  is an excellent venue for choral singing. I’ve heard the MSO Chorus there before; the sound at forte sweeps through the building with palpable force.

Concert times are 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $15.

Remember Karisa Stich, the drop-dead beauty of the Milwaukee Ballet? She’s back in town, after a few years living near Washington, D.C.  Stich is now a Pilates instructor, but she’ll be back on stage as a guest artist in Michael Pink’s “Cinderella.” Stich will play the spirit of Cinderella’s mother, who in Pink’s re-telling takes the place of the Fairy Godmother.

Stich is a real-life mom, as Milwaukee Ballet fans know very well. Her last big role with the company was in February of 2005. Choreographer John Utans cast her in his “Night Falls Fast,” a dark, abstract work, when Stich was very visibly pregnant. Her sudden entrance in a white slip made audiences gasp.  Welcome back, Karisa.

Soprano Emma Kirkby, the purest of the pure voices, is a legend in early-music circles. Early Music Now will present her at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday (Oct. 27) at Wisconsin Lutheran College. She will sing a program of lute songs by John Dowland (1563-1626) and Henry Purcell (1659-1695). Naturally, a lutenist, Jakob Lindberg, will accompany.  Lindberg, as a kid growing up in Sweden, decided to take up the guitar after he heard The Beatles. By the time he was a teenager, he got interested in classical repertoire. At the Royal College of Music, London, he moved more toward the lute, and here he is. Click here to hear Lindberg play a Dowland lute song sung by Christina Hogman.

Thanks, Early Music Now, for giving me a chance to share the world’s oldest and as far as I know only lute joke, attributed to composer and keyboard virtuoso Johann Jakob Froberger (1616-1667):

“A lutenist who plays for 30 years will have spent 10 of them tuning… and the other 20 playing out of tune.”

Click here for the NY Times review of the Kirkby/Lindberg concert in NYC on Oct. 23.

The Mary L. Nohl Fellowships, the biggest prizes for artists in these parts, are coming around once again. The Greater Milwaukee Foundation holds the Nohl funds, and the UWM Peck School of the Arts administers the annual fellowships. This year, two Established Artist fellowships of $15,000 and two Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 will be awarded. The judges are artist Jennie C. Jones, of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Toby Kamps, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and Barbara Wiesen, director and curator of the Gahglbereg Gallery of the McAninch Arts Center at the College of DuPage.

One hundred sixteen area artists have applied for the fellowships. The judges will come to Milwaukee Oct. 29 and spend two days reviewing samples and artists’ statements and visiting the studios of up to seven finalists. They will announce their decisions on Nov. 9. The panelists will also give talks on their institutions and works at 6 p.m. on Oct. 29 at the UWM Inova Gallery, 2155 N. Prospect Ave. The public is invited to that free event, which includes a reception with the panelists.

The Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition and catalog in the fall of 2010.

Minh-Tam Trinh, 16, a senior at Whitefish Bay High School, won the $1,500 Grand Prize in the MacDowell Club‘s Young Composer Competition earlier this year. Public performance of a new work is also part of the prize. That performance is set for 3 p.m. Sunday (Oct. 25) at the Nancy Kendall Theater of Cardinal Stritch University, 6801 N. Yates Road, Fox Point.  Admission is free, but donations are most welcome. Trinh’s piece will be featured within a larger MacDowell Club concert.

The new piece, as per competition guidelines, is 4-6 minutes long and for four-part chorus and optional instrumental obbligato or accompaniment.  Trinh’s Gitanjali (Song Offerings) is for  S.A.T.B. choir and piano.  The text is an English translation of poems by Asia’s first Nobel laureate in literature, the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). “By my interpretation,” Trinh wrote, “ the pilgrimage these poems describe is a metaphorical one, a journey taken by the poet ending in union with eternity at the moment of death.”  Pianist Travis Reynolds, the Whitefish Bay High School Bel Canto Choir, and WFBHS choral director  Richard Kieffer will perform Trinh’s composition.

The United Performing Arts Fund has announced its 2010 campaign chairpersons. They are Ted D. Kellner, founder and portfolio manager of the $6-billion Fiduciary Management investment firm, and community volunteer Linda T. Mellowes, board chair of the Medical College of Wisconsin and immediate past chair of Columbia St. Marys Hospital.