In 2014, internationally renowned playwright Suzan-Lori Parks began her much-discussed “Watch Me Work,” an occasional performance on Monday evenings in which audiences can quite literally watch Parks working on her newest writing projects on the mezzanine of the Public Theater in New York.
When Tony®-Award-nominated director and choreographer Dan Knechtges took the helm of one of Houston’s oldest and largest theater companies, Theatre Under the Stars, he knew the artistic director title might require steering the organization through some stormy times, but he likely wasn’t ready for a real hurricane.
Alecia Lawyer, the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra’s artistic director, introduced the idea discreetly last fall: She and two other musicians devoted a program on the group’s Unchambered series entirely to works by female composers.
“It is not an acropolis we want there. It is not Culture on a corner. I think of the new museum building as a stage environment to house the multimedia in which artists of today are working.”
Robert Simpson, founder and artistic director of the Houston Chamber Choir (HCC), has just brought home one of the most coveted awards in the field of choral music.
Julia Barbosa Landois and I sit under the marginally-less sweltering awning of a Houston coffee shop on one of the first truly furnace-like days of the year, discussing her fears.
The moment has arrived. This fall, Ars Lyrica Houston is set to power full steam ahead with the production of its first fully staged Baroque opera, George Frideric Handel’s sensational masterpiece Agrippina.