Catalyst well balanced at Maverick
Reviews of some recent local classical musical performances, plus a look forward.
Entertainment
R. R. Pollak exhibit of comic strip art opens August 3 at Ellenville Library
Comic strip fans of all generations will have the unique opportunity to check out the history of the genre at the Ellenville Public Library and Museum and meet our own hometown cartoonist at the opening reception on Saturday, August 3.
Phoenicia Festival of the Voice’s 10th year highlights African-American music
Maria Todaro, co-founder and executive director of the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice, has set Donizetti’s opera The Elixir of Love in an African village for the 2019 festival, which will be held Friday, August 2, to Sunday, August 4. This choice led to the theme of African-American artists and music that weaves through a number of this year’s events, including a performance of selections from a historic ragtime-influenced opera, Treemonisha, by composer Scott Joplin.
Check out the one-of-a-kind Wassaic Project
Aug. 3: The scope and density of this one-day affair defies easy description. It is full of exhibits; serious talks by serious artists; five hours of world-class international dance in and around barn; live music with a hip, global, and Bacchanalian bias; and general pageantry executed at the visual and conceptual level one would expect from an artist’s colony.
Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival delivers zesty five-actor Cyrano
Aug. 6-30: Cyrano is a truly larger-than-life character. Go make his acquaintance this summer in the theater tent perched above the finest view in the Hudson Highlands at Boscobel House and Gardens.
Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love serves up more Leonard than Marianne
The film is a poignant, lyrical and occasionally eye-opening documentary about musician Leonard Cohen and muse Marianne Ihlen that is doomed to disappoint its intended audience on one or more levels, even while they lap it up.
Midtown Arts District’s Celebration of the Arts set for Aug. 3
For its fifth annual Celebration of the Arts, to be held on Saturday, Aug. 3, the nonprofit group Midtown Arts District (MAD) is doing something different: an all-day series of interactive workshops — an expo of the arts, if you will — at the Kingston Center of SUNY Ulster, located in the former Sophie Finn elementary school at 94 Mary’s Ave.
Guster performs at Arrowood Farm Brewery
Saturday, Aug. 3: The popular earthy Boston-area college rock band known for, among other things, beating the crap out of bongos, has just released a record that is not only largely electronic, but exquisitely so.
Peter More at Levon’s
Fort Worth native Peter More is a polymath of roots rock, ultra-competent, fluent in regional dialects and sensitive to sound of the eras, observationally astute and emotionally anchored. He rocks, grooves, swoons, waltzes and whispers with the kind of offhand authority that his genre reveres. He can even turn a tune with a wonderfully rustic Samba or Afro-Cuban flair.
Woodstock 50 cancelled — for real this time
Michael Lang tossed in the towel on his Woodstock 50 dream on July 31 after a tumultuous week in which he was turned down for permits at Vernon Downs Racetrack & Casino in central New York, announced a move to the 52-year old Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C, then said the festival would be free, and finally saw most of the engaged artists pull out.