Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Some of the area’s most talented young vocalists have organized a cabaret on Saturday, March 19th, at 3 pm, to raise scholarship money for aspiring young singers. The event, at the Unitarian Church in Ithaca, will feature popular musical theater numbers and desserts donated from local businesses.

The cabaret’s theme is “A Musical Theatre Geek’s Guide to History,” a journey through time told through the Broadway musical. Songs like “Glamorous Life” from Little Night Music and “All the Wasted Time” from Parade will bring history alive, while pieces like “When You’re Home” from In The Heights will highlight the world today.

For more than 200 years, tales of a giant serpent living in Cayuga Lake have been told and documented. Now, Wells College students studying Book Arts have created the first book that brings together historical information and stories of the legendary serpent named "Old Greeny."

The limited edition book, which took more than a year for students to produce, features letterpress printing, linoleum cut artwork, and a fold-out map of Cayuga Lake. The book also includes reproductions of newspaper articles, plus a "book within a book" which draws the reader deeper into the mystery of the legend.

The Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, with support from the Department of Music and Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, presents a spring 2016 symposium, Keyboard Networks: Interrogating the Cultures and Technologies of the Keyboard, on Friday and Saturday, March 4-5, 2016.  Events are free and open to the public.

Keyboard Networks explores the technological guises of the musical keyboard, from the French Revolution to the present day. The metaphor of “networks” brings together recent inquires into the embodiment, performance, and discipline of keyboard-playing on the one hand, with scholarly analyses of music’s roles in politics on the other. This two-day series of lectures, performances, papers and discussion will consider how the keyboard enabled mediations and connections across disparate cultural, historical, and social spaces.

The ReEntry Theatre Program is once again underway at Civic Ensemble. Following the success of last year's program, with a final performance to a sold-out house at the Hangar Theatre, ReEntry returns for a second year. The 2016 iteration is an opportunity for participants, who have been incarcerated at some point in their lives, to collaborate and create theatre over an eight-week span. The program gives participants an opportunity to gain skills in writing, collaboration, theatrical expression, and leadership.

New this year is Civic Ensemble's engagement with the Ultimate ReEntry Opportunity (URO), a collective impact process in Tompkins County coordinated by the Multicultural Resource Center. The URO was established in 2014 as a partnership movement between private and public sectors to transform and optimize the process of reentry and reduce the risk of rearrest and reincarceration.

Director Jeff Guyton can't remember the first time he heard the saying, but believes it's the perfect way to describe his upcoming production, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [revised] (Feb. 25-March 5). "If you love Shakespeare, you will love this play. If you hate Shakespeare, you will love this play."

As the name suggests, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [revised], is a theatrical whirlwind, taking all of Shakespeare's 37 plays and cramming them into one 97-minute performance. The pacing is fun and frantic with the cast of five student actors (Sam Morrison '17, Jacob Kuhn '18, Ezioma Asionte '16, Julie Locker '16, and Christian Kelly '16) alternating between improvised bits, high-brow theatre jokes, pop culture references like Miley Cyrus and Downtown Abbey, and melodramatic acting.

"One little letter can save a million lives!" That's the call from advocates around the world and here in Ithaca and Cortland for Hollywood to slap an "R" rating on all movies that show smoking. To get the message out to local teens and parents, the youth-based anti-tobacco group Reality Check is sponsoring a free showing of the hit movie, Jurassic World, on Saturday morning, February 20, at Cinemapolis. Doors open at 10:30 a.m. with free popcorn and a drink to the first 100 in. The movie starts at 11:15. All are welcome.

Smoking in PG-13 movies is common, showing up in nearly half of the PG-13 movies released in 2014, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In a 2012 report, the U.S. Surgeon General concluded that smoking in movies is a cause of youth smoking, and that getting smoking and tobacco use out of youth rated films would prevent a million future tobacco deaths among American youth.

2x JUNO (Canada's Grammy) nominees & SiriusXM Award winners SULTANS OF STRING make a much anticipated stop at music hotspot HANGAR THEATRE on Thursday, March 31st, 2016 to release their new CD, 'Subcontinental Drift'.  Known for spotlighting treasured special guests from around the world, including The Chieftains' Paddy Moloney on their last CD, Sultans of String are particularly excited about this east-meets-west offering.

"There is something really magical about joining world music rhythms that we often play, but with pop sensibilities and forms and lengths, and blending that with the music of the East", says bandleader/fiddler Chris McKhool.  Yet, Subcontinental Drift is more than a genre-hopping passport - it is a musical promise that embraces differences while finding common ground across culture, land, and time.

Aurora — The Wells College Arts and Lecture Series presents a performance of Eugene's O'Neill's "A Moon for the Misbegotten" by Walnut Street Theatre. The performance will take place at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, February 23, in Phipps Auditorium of Macmillan Hall. This event is free, and the public is welcome to attend.

"A Moon for the Misbegotten" is a touching and heartbreaking classic set on a Connecticut tenant farm in 1923. One of theater's most important and complex female characters, Josie Hogan, is a boisterous Irish woman with a quick tongue and a tarnished reputation who leads a hard and lonely life working the Tyrone farm with her bullying father. When James Tyrone Jr.'s mother dies, he returns to the farm to settle the estate and attempts to navigate his complicated relationship with Josie and her father.

Aurora, New York— The Wells College Visual Arts Department announces the opening of the 2016 Annual Student Exhibition in the school’s String Room Gallery. The public is cordially invited to celebrate the student artists’ work at a reception on Thursday, February 4 from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will be on view from February 4 through March 3, 2016.

Wells’ Visual Arts Faculty organizes this annual exhibition, selecting pieces from introductory to advanced courses in a range of disciplines. This year's iteration includes work made in the new Wells College Book Arts Center paper-making studio, as well as selections of letterpress printing, handmade books, photography, ceramics, drawing, calligraphy, and mixed-media work. Over 60 student artists are represented in this show.

Kitchen Theatre Company announced that an exhibition of paintings by Sally Ryan, 'OPEN DOORS,' is on display in the Judith Holliday Lobby Gallery at 417 West MLK/State Street. The opening reception is on Friday, February 5 from 5:30-7:00pm.

Sally Ryan, originally from Rye Brook, NY, has been living in the Ithaca area for over 25 years. She is a self taught artist who has explored many mediums, including glass, metal sculpture and ceramics. For the last 3 years, she has focused on abstract expressionist painting using acrylics and mixed media. She is a clinical Social Worker at the Tompkins County Mental Health Clinic, receiving her MSW at Binghamton University and BSW at Cornell University.

The East Shore Arts Council will heat up your Valentine's Day celebration with some hot Latin Jazz. The Concerts in the Courtroom series will be in full swing with the bold and exciting rhythms of Jorge T. Cuevas and the Caribe Jazz Allstars at the Lansing Town Hall on Sunday, February 14th at 3pm.

Jorge T. Cuevas is a 30 year veteran percussionist, singer, composer, studio musician & bandleader.  He created the Caribe Jazz Allstars and features the area's finest jazz musicians playing a wide variety of global, Latin jazz styles and songs.

Aurora, New York—The Wells College Theatre & Dance Department is proud to present the Spring Faculty production, "An Appeal to the Woman of the House," written by Christie Perfetti Williams and directed by Associate Professor of Theatre Siouxsie Easter. 'An Appeal to the Woman of the House' is a new play about the Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It will be performed in Barler Auditorium on the Wells College campus on Friday, February 12, and Saturday, February 13, 2016. The house will open at 7:00 p.m. and the show will begin at 7:30 p.m.

'An Appeal to the Woman of the House' takes place on one fateful night in 1961 in the farmhouse of Rose and Gideon Walker on the Alabama-Tennessee border. It is just after midnight when David and his fellow lost Freedom Riders knock on the door seeking assistance in the form of a phone and a place to stay until daylight. But Gideon, who knows this is Klan country, is reluctant to let in this band of mixed race college kids until Rose forces him to open the door with the acknowledgement that "they're just babies." What follows is a touching story of race, love, acceptance and learning how to stand up for what you believe.