Arts

Atlanta Ballet's Dracula

Amanda Dixon — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 13:00:00 GMT

The Atlanta Ballet staged the North American premiere of Dracula in 1998 and has reincarnated the vampiric love story every few years since. Bloodsucking counts, it seems, are crowd-pleasers on par with Sugar Plum Fairies: This is the company’s most popular and profitable production after The Nutcracker. “People just really embrace it,” says artistic director John McFall.

With choreography by Michael Pink and an original score by Philip Feeney, Dracula explores themes of immortality and romance in a lusty production that hearkens more to the gothic horror of Nosferatu than the tween-friendly sheen of Twilight.

February 8 to 16, Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, atlantaballet.com

Photograph by Kim Kenney; retouching by Patrick White.

Q&A with Virginia Hepner

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 22:28:00 GMT

Last July Virginia Hepner, a twenty-five year veteran of the corporate finance world, dove into the nonprofit sector as president and CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center. Awaiting her was a musicians’ strike that threatened to leave Atlanta, already maligned as a lukewarm arts town, without a symphony orchestra. With that crisis averted, Hepner is now banking on a more stable and accessible future for arts and culture in the city.

Are there similarities between banking and the arts world? Whether it’s a for-profit or nonprofit organization, you need to run things in a businesslike manner. To be successful, you have to be very clear on what your mission is. In this world, it’s fulfilling our artistic and cultural vision to impact this community.

What are the big differences? In the for-profit world, if you have a great idea, it will attract capital. In the nonprofit sector, you can have the greatest need and people can agree with you, you can have the greatest artistic product, but if you can’t generate enough passion for a contributed income, it won’t happen.

How do you combat that? You do all you can to make sure you make the case to different audiences in terms of what is most important to them. For example, if I’m talking to business leaders who really understand the need to invest in the community, to attract the right workers, the right tax-paying citizens, you have to make the case for why it matters.

Does it matter here? Does Atlanta appreciate the arts? I actually think it does. Here are the facts: The Woodruff Arts Center campus was built with no public money. Even in our current campaigns, we have a budget of roughly $100 million, only about $1 million is public money. What that tells you is, for whatever reason, the private funding is exceptional. What plays into the concept that Atlanta is not really an arts town is that it’s a relatively new town. If you look at older cities that have generations of family philanthropy, it makes a big difference.

You mention wealthy private and corporate funding, are the arts accessible to those who aren’t wealthy? It’s a huge personal mission of mine. If you have art and no one gets to see it, that’s elitist, and that’s the opposite of what art is to me. Art is about communication and emotionally connecting with each other. The reason I default to the funding issue and why I think public funding is so important is because only a certain percentage of people will be able to come to Woodruff because we have to charge a certain amount to support it. The High Museum would, I’m sure, love to have a lower price or love to be free.

You also have to keep the artists happy, an issue that got attention from the ASO musicians strike. It’s just one more example that we have to be financially stable to offer what we do. This time it was a musician’s contract, another time it could be supporting the technology platform or paying maintenance on a building. It’s a sensitive topic because these are the artists. We’re here through their art to impact our community. Everything has a cost. They have tremendous value. It’s an emotional situation when you have to ask people to contribute to a cost structure. It’s an industry-wide issue, not just an Atlanta issue. The symphony is very well-run. We want it to be a world-class orchestra. We want it to be accessible from a ticket price standpoint. All of that is extremely expensive. We’ve actually increased contributed income and ticket revenue. The staff on the nonmusician side has taken pay cuts and furloughs. So it’s definitely a shared effort. But the symphony was $20 million in debt. We couldn’t find any more ways to go without asking the musicians to participate. And I really appreciate the fact that they did. It was essential to ensuring that we have a symphony in the future.

What is your vision for the future? I’d love to see arts and culture much better embraced by the business community and for political leadership to really understand the value of what we are in terms of what defines a community. We feel very supported, emotionally. But it’s not a mainstream industry, not always top of mind. My goal is to make sure we are at the table with key leadership. Whether that’s working on public education, working on public funding priorities, or drawing new businesses to town. I’m a huge Atlanta fan, and I believe we can do anything we set our minds to. I’m pretty optimistic. I have to be; I work in the arts.

Photograph by Jeff Roffman. This is an extended version of the interview that originally appeared in our December 2012 issue.

Dad's Garage Cofounder Is Back

Curt Holman — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Director Sean Daniels is taking a break from the national stage to touch base with his peeps. “In American theater, your constant job is to find your people, the ones who get your work and speak your language. I have a lot of those people here,” says the former Atlantan and Dad’s Garage cofounder. Daniels is directing a couple of productions for Lawrenceville’s Aurora Theatre, which kicks off its 2012–2013 season this month.

Photograph by Mike Colletta

From 1995 through 2004, Daniels practically became the face of Atlanta’s cheeky, youthful improv scene as cofounder, performer, and then artistic director of Dad’s Garage Theatre Company in Inman Park. Daniels left there for high-profile gigs at San Francisco’s California Shakespeare Theater and the Actors Theatre of Louisville, home of the prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays. This summer Aurora coaxed him back to direct the 1966 musical Sweet Charity (August 2 to September 2) and the new rags-to-riches comedy BOB (January 17 to February 10, 2013).

“With Mad Men so popular, it’s the perfect time to do a show set in the 1960s about a woman who’s unstoppable,” Daniels says of Sweet Charity, which features a book by Neil Simon, music by Cy Coleman, and lyrics by Dorothy Fields. It’s usually staged with at least twenty performers, but Daniels’s version features just nine.

The director explains, “All of Charity’s boyfriends, normally played by four actors, are played by Trent Blanton [another former Atlantan]. Doing that reveals that people do have a ‘type’ while dating, even though they don’t realize it.” Daniels also gave dozens of one-line speaking parts, normally shared by an ensemble, to one actor.

Ever since Aurora Theatre moved to Lawrenceville from Duluth in 2006, the playhouse has diversified its lineup, presenting innovative new scripts as well as lively takes on theatrical chestnuts. Daniels applauds Aurora’s producing artistic director Anthony Rodriguez and associate producer Ann-Carol Pence for their willingness to take some risks. “The country is looking for musicals that can be reconceived with smaller casts. Everyone will do the nine-person Sweet Charity—after it’s been successful. They don’t want to be the first, but Anthony and Ann-Carol will.” Daniels’s stints at Aurora can be expected to inject some intown irreverence into the OTP playhouse.

Q&A with Kenny Leon

Felicia Feaster — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 12:00:00 GMT

There aren’t many American stage directors who can also boast of People magazine Most Beautiful status. But Kenny Leon has always had a knack for straddling two worlds. The Tony-nominated Atlantan has balanced high-art material like the MLK Jr. drama The Mountaintop with mainstream fare like a forthcoming remake of Steel Magnolias with an all-black cast. Leon’s latest project is the stage debut of the 1967 race issue film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, premiering July 10 to 29 at the Rialto Center and featuring Phylicia Rashad and Mekhi Phifer.

What’s your take on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which in its time was billed as "a love story of today"? It’s still set in the sixties, but we have the blessing of seeing it through the lens of 2012.

We’re a little more sophisticated about race . . .I don’t think we are. We still have much to learn about race relations in the country as evidenced by the experience of having a black president for the first time. You see what happened in Florida a couple of weeks ago with that kid [Trayvon Martin] being killed. I think our issues with race really go back hundreds of years and we’ve never dealt adequately with those issues. They still sort of haunt us. But the story is about more than that. It’s about how you say one thing, but you live another way. I find Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is about hypocrisy.

Do you have any opening-night rituals? Absolutely. I always have a prayer circle for whatever play I’m doing. A lot of rituals. I carry a yo-yo with me, in my left pocket, on opening night as a way of relieving stress.

You were raised by your grandmother, who was employed in service to white families in Tallahassee. Did The Help resonate with you? I thought The Help was okay. I just wish there was more variety in what we do. That’s one story to tell. I wish there were more stories . . . I’m looking forward to Quentin Tarantino’s movie Django Unchained. It’s a slave revenge story.

What’s the Southern thing you miss the most when you’re in New York? Our restaurants, our golf courses, our churches.

Illustration by David Despau

Felicia Feaster is one of our editorial contributors.
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The Orly Crash Forced Atlanta's Art Scene to Grow Up Fast

Felicia Feaster — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Like the alkaline dust that coated lower Manhattan for months after the Twin Towers crumbled, the 1962 disaster at Orly Field near Paris hung in Atlanta’s atmosphere for years afterward. On June 3 of that year, a Boeing 707 carrying 106Atlantans—some of the city’s most passionate arts patrons, returning from an art tour of Europe—crashed on takeoff, killing everyone aboard except for two flight attendants. Gone were Atlanta’s cultural elite—its artists, collectors, and those who sustained the still-embryonic High Museum and its school, the Atlanta Art Institute.

Grief over the deaths at Orly affected generations. The tragedy entered the room alongside the families—including thirty-three orphaned children and young adults—changed by their losses. It became part of an identity that followed them to board meetings and cocktail parties. Orly signaled the loss of Atlanta Art Association members who would have served as role models.

“With the Orly crash, we lost that important time period of the fifties and sixties when masterworks were readily available and affordable,” says Buckhead gallery owner Alan Avery. “And our big philanthropists did not get to teach their families what true philanthropy meant.”

But instead of devastating Atlanta’s arts landscape, the disaster became a tipping point for the city. In the months and years to follow, Atlanta had a choice: It could either mourn the loss, not only of its arts patrons, but of its future as an arts city, or it could prove to the world and to itself that that future did not perish as well. Orly “spurred us to think bigger,” says Larry Gellerstedt, chair of the Woodruff Arts Center’s Board of Trustees and CEO of Cousins Properties. Suddenly art was central to Atlanta’s identity.

Within weeks of the crash, Life magazine’s cover story proclaiming “the enduring art legacy the plane victims left behind” hinted at what was to come. As Ann Uhry Abrams recounted in her 2002 book, Explosion at Orly: The Disaster That Transformed Atlanta, “Atlantans, who had previously ignored the arts, were beginning to take notice.” Plans were launched for a new arts center. City leaders and benefactors who might not have given a whit about Picasso or Pissarro saw the need to honor the people who did. Coca-Cola magnate Robert W. Woodruff donated $6.5 million to establish the Memorial Arts Center in 1968. The center—which would grow into the Woodruff Arts Center and encompass the High Museum, the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and Young Audiences—helped lure Robert Shaw as conductor. “Atlanta took on an image nationwide of a city that was developing rapidly in the arts and enabled us to recruit tremendous talent,” says Beauchamp Carr, executive vice president of the Woodruff Arts Center.

For Rickey Bevington, the Woodruff Arts Center is a monument to her grandmother and great-grandmother, who both perished at Orly. “Knowing that beauty came from the pain and tragedy that we went through and that Atlanta went through is so healing,” she says.

Like Bevington, who is board chair at the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, many of the Orly heirs have carried on their relatives’ legacies.

Atlanta attorney Baxter Jones and his brother and sister lost their parents in the crash. Jones was only five. But his mother’s passion for art and his father’s love of modernist music live on in their son, who inherited his father’s record collection. Jones is an avid collector of work by local artists as well as surrealist works and is a tireless advocate for Atlanta nonprofits. Currently serving on the High Museum and the Théâtre du Rêve boards, Jones sees a simple takeaway from Orly: “Find your favorite arts group and support it.”

Bevington’s and Jones’s desires to carry the memory of Orly into the present are instructive. There is much talk in contemporary city-building of the importance of the arts in creating a modern, destination city. It’s on the minds of business leaders like Gellerstedt when they recruit new talent to Atlanta. “It’s proven to create a sense of vitality in the community,” says Gellerstedt. “The arts do generate jobs and do generate economic development and quality of life, so it’s very important.”

>> JUNE 3: On the fiftieth anniversary of the Orly crash, the Woodruff Arts Center will host a free, daylong commemoration from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Community Day at the Woodruff will feature an instrument “petting zoo” at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra; free High Museum admission; an Alliance Theatre reading of a memorial poem, “Wish You Were Here” by Pearl Cleage; acting workshops; and a Theatre for the Very Young performance of Waiting for Balloon. The High will also exhibit a Jean-Pierre Franque painting, on loan from the Louvre for the Orly anniversary.

In the decades following Orly, the city has proven its commitment to the arts in numerous ways, from the Richard Meier–designed High Museum in 1983 to the construction of the $178 million Renzo Piano expansion in 2005—bolstered by a significant gift from Atlanta arts patrons. And the post-Orly rise has continued. A recent Americans for the Arts research project ranked Atlanta number one out of the 100 largest American cities for its per capita number of arts-related businesses.

“We have come leaps and bounds in the last three or four years,” says Avery, whose gallery just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. “I attribute that to a greater working relationship and greater presence and collaboration between the High Museum—finally—and local galleries. That is a major breakthrough.” Avery identifies previous High Museum modern and contemporary art curator Jeffrey Grove and current modern and contemporary curator Michael Rooks as being involved in the local arts scene in a way previous High curators have not been.

What could be considered a rebirth in Atlanta’s cultural life is traceable to the Woodruff Arts Center’s renewed engagement with the city itself. Much of Atlanta’s national arts exposure emanates from the Woodruff, including the recent premiere of the Stephen King and John Mellencamp musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County and the debut of Twyla Tharp’s Come Fly with Me in 2009, both at the Alliance Theatre. The Grammy-winning Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the success of events like the hipster Culture Shock parties, in conjunction with High Museum exhibits on Salvador Dalí, Picasso, Andy Warhol, and KAWS, have turned the Woodruff from an impenetrable citadel on the hill to an institution enmeshed in the life of the city.

When so much of the local arts community was wiped out, the city might have taken a step backward. But Atlanta has always thrived when reinvention beckons. Neither Sherman’s armies, nor the horror of the devastating plane crash at Orly, nor a dismal economy will wipe out this resilient and evergreen cultural center.

Arts patrons, from left, Ruth McMillan, Lydia Black, and Raiford Ragdale on the European tour days befor the crash; photograph courtesy of the Woodruff Arts Center

Felicia Feaster is one of our editorial contributors.
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The Dance Movement

Felicia Feaster — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Atlanta dance is having a moment. Performers are suddenly undulating through parks, cemeteries, churches, and art museums—even stopping traffic at Midtown intersections. Funded by a hodgepodge of grants, commissions, donations, and income, Atlanta’s dance scene is as intertwined as a game of Twister, with players moving back and forth between companies—not to mention thriving programs at Emory, Kennesaw State, and Spelman. Here’s how some connect.

Beacon Dance
When started 1953, as the Decatur Civic Ballet/beacondance.org By whom Artistic director D. Patton White has been the driving force since 1990 Where they perform Atlanta BeltLine, Baker Woodlands at Emory, West End’s B Complex, Decatur Cemetery What’s unique Site-specific work, often about social issues Biggest hit In 2011 White performed part of his The Elemental Project series at Emory. Where to see them next At the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, July to October Key players and connections White collaborates with Core. Dancer Onur Topal Sumer works with Full Radius Dance (fullradiusdance.org), which includes disabled dancers; Juana Farfan works with Moving in the Spirit (movinginthespirit.org).

Core Performance Company
When started 1980/coredance.org By whom Sue Schroeder Where they perform Decatur High School Performing Arts Center, the High Museum of Art, Callanwolde Fine Arts Center What’s unique Has a second studio in Houston; delves into social issues Biggest hit 2011’s The Point and The Moment Between to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary Where to see them next Decatur High School, September 15 to 16, including choreography by Emory’s Lori Teague Key players and connections Member Blake Dalton’s own company, Crossover Movement Arts (crossovermovementarts.com), has collaborated with Dance Truck; Alisa Mittin and Corian Ellisor work with Dance Truck and the Lucky Penny.

The Lucky Penny
When started 2011 By whom Blake Beckham and Malina Rodriguez Where they perform The Arts Exchange in Reynoldstown and Georgia Tech What’s unique Risky, experimental work Biggest hit Spectacular! Spectacular!, which melded film, dance, and even a tea last November at the Arts Exchange Where to see them next Threshold, a collaboration with Atlanta architects Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam, August 16 to 19 at Georgia Tech Key players and connections Beckham has performed with Decatur’s Gardenhouse (gardenhousedance.org) and Dance Truck. Dancer Alisa Mittin performs with Core.

Dance Truck
When started 2009/dancetruck.org By whom Malina Rodriguez, Danny Davis, and Vii Kelly Where they perform Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Goat Farm Arts Center, the Museum of Design Atlanta, the High Museum of Art, and the Decatur Arts Festival What’s unique Performs in rental trucks and on pickup flatbeds Biggest hit A meditation on life and death at the Goat Farm Where to see them next The group is looking for funding and a venue to put on its dream production, Dance Truck: Double Wide, which will include two trucks and six choreographers. Key players and connections Choreographers and dancers include the Lucky Penny’s Blake Beckham; Corian Ellisor and Alisa Mittin of Core; and Onur Topal Sumer, a member of Beacon Dance and Full Radius.

The Atlanta Ballet’s Wabi Sabi
When started 2011 By whom Company member John Welker directs this new chamber performance group within the Atlanta Ballet, dedicated to providing a platform for young choreographers and new works. Wabi sabi is a Japanese term for the beauty in imperfection and transience. Where they perform The Michael C. Carlos Dance Centre, the Atlanta Botanical Garden What’s unique Has helped keep Atlanta’s old-school institution fresh. Biggest hit Yet to come Where to see them next Atlanta Botanical Garden, June 21 Key players and connections Welker is also a student-performer at KSU (kennesaw.edu/theatre/dance).

gloATL
When started 2009/gloatl.com By whom Founder Lauri Stallings came here as an artist-in-residence at the Atlanta Ballet, where her Big Boi collaboration Big generated national buzz. Where they perform Lenox Square, Woodruff Park, Little Five Points, Castleberry Hill What’s unique Site-specific engagements with the cityscape and collaborations with creatives like filmmaker Micah Stansell and conductor Robert Spano. Most programming is free. Biggest hit Performances during Castleberry Hill’s Flux event every October Where to see them next From June 1 to 3 in Pupil—in which dancers will interact virtually via Wi-Fi with remote audiences. From June 29 to July 23, Liquid Culture will be performed at four sites. Key players and connections In January, Stallings organized the Off the Edge contemporary dance event based at the Rialto, which mixed national and international companies with local groups. Stallings is an artist-in-residence at KSU.

Illustration by Chris Whetzel

Felicia Feaster is one of our editorial contributors.
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Mourning the Loss of Theatre in the Square

Tue, 01 May 2012 17:34:00 GMT

In 1982 michael horne and Palmer Wells opened Theatre in the Square in the former banquet hall of the old Marietta Depot restaurant. IBM employees by day, they soon realized why the word "depot" was part of the name. The C&S locomotives would rumble down the tracks bordering downtown Marietta so often, they probably could have qualified for membership in the actors’ union. The train noise would sometimes distract from a comedic or tender moment, but I always remember the times when the thundering roars would embellish a scene of high tension, as if the elements were lending a soundtrack.

This year Theatre in the Square finally ran out of steam. The 2008 economic slump dramatically reduced contributions to the company, leading to huge debts, unpaid rent, and difficulty even meeting staff payroll. On March 19 its board voted to shut down.

Pearl Cleage’s "Flyin’ West" unexpectedly became the final production of the small suburban company that maintained impressive standards for three decades. In my years as a theater critic, I saw more than ninety productions at the Marietta playhouse, from Bill Murphey playing about forty roles in the one-man comedy "Fully Committed" to Jessica Phelps West burning Suzi Bass’s hands with a hot plate in the harrowing "Beauty Queen of Leenane." In fact, it was Theatre in the Square that sparked my interest in the stage.

As a film buff in high school in 1983, I noticed that the mystery "Sleuth" was playing in Marietta, and I was curious to see a live version of such a smart, twisty movie. After years of being dragged to theaters, "Sleuth" was the first play I ever saw on my own. It was a revelation to see the action from the front row of an eighty-five-seat playhouse. And while big theaters like the Alliance or the Fox resembled museums or palaces, Theatre in the Square felt more like visiting somebody’s home.

At the time, Wells and Horne were learning by doing. “We had no strategic plan,” says Wells. “We scheduled our first season so a show would close on Sunday and the next would open the following Thursday night, so we’d have to build the sets in the space in the meantime. Sometimes we’d work on a set all night, then get up and go to work at IBM in the morning.”

In 1985 the pair moved the theater to a larger (but no less train-proof) space on nearby Whitlock Avenue. Theatre in the Square built a loyal audience, programming crowd-pleasers while also showcasing provocative but accessible new work. Unquestionably the company’s signature style belonged to sunny comedies with Southern twangs, and even its tamest and most commercial scripts drew energy from the Atlanta area’s funniest actors.

Theatre in the Square’s audience couldn’t get enough of "Smoke on the Mountain," in which the hapless Sanders Family Singers perform an accident-prone show at a depression-era Baptist church. I saw it three times. "Smoke on the Mountain" may be the opposite of edgy, but Theatre in the Square’s renditions were so warm and well-acted, they gave "wholesome" a good name. The playhouse staged hundreds of productions of "Smoke" and its sequels, "Sanders Family Christmas" and "Mount Pleasant Homecoming," using the same actors so often they felt like a real family.

Theatre in the Square might still be open if it had produced nothing but Sanders-style shows. But the company was never content to rely on the incessantly staged chestnuts that fill seats at the average community theater. Though never avant-garde by the standards of, say, 7 Stages in Little Five Points, at least once a season Theatre in the Square pushed the limits of what a Cobb County audience could expect.

In 1993 the company’s production of Terrence McNally’s "Lips Together, Teeth Apart" became a sideshow to a long-running national argument over public arts funding. The Cobb County Commission, objecting to the play’s gay themes, voted to withdraw its financial support for all arts. Given that the show takes place at a gay man’s Fire Island beach house over the Fourth of July, but features only straight characters onstage, the production seemed more like the excuse for the funding brawl rather than its cause. The international publicity led to a spike in donations, including one from Paul Newman. Still, the fallout was dire. “We lost 1,000 subscribers and really felt the impact the next season,” says Wells.

Horne died in 1996, but the company’s quality never flagged. At its peak, Theatre in the Square staged twelve productions a year on both the 225-seat main stage and the edgier 123-seat Alley Stage.

In the 1990s, "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" echoed the Cobb County controversy through a dramatization of the courtroom prosecution of the witty writer. "The Lynching of Leo Frank" explored a grim footnote in local history with the notorious murder of a Jewish businessman accused of killing young Mary Phagan.

In 2006 the Alley Stage presented Richard Greenberg’s "Take Me Out," a sharp comedy-drama about the uproar over an openly gay major league baseball player. By then the playhouse had become such a fixture that the community scarcely batted an eye at the play’s full-frontal shower scenes. While most of the Alley Stage’s shows had won acclaim in other cities, they seldom brought out younger audiences in the numbers the theater wanted. Despite Cobb County’s reputation as a conservative bastion, Theatre in the Square’s greatest audience challenge may have been generational. Like most suburban playhouses, Theatre in the Square relied on an aging contributor base. Frequently I felt like the youngest person in the audience.

Most small playhouses weather financial hardships, but I never thought I needed to worry about Theatre in the Square until last year, when the playhouse was one of three Atlanta companies—with Actor’s Express and Georgia Shakespeare—to hold save-our-theater fundraisers. The other two met their goals; Theatre in the Square fell short.

In recent years I discovered the fun of bringing my young daughter to clever children’s shows like "The Library Dragon" and "Cinderella Confidential." I’m disappointed that I won’t get the chance to take her to see "Smoke on the Mountain" as a great example of cynicism-free entertainment in an ironic age. Maybe another company will mount a version of the show, but it won’t be the same. That train has left the station.

Illustration by Leslie Herman

Curt Holman is a longtime theater critic.

Waffle House Takes the Stage

Wendell Brock — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:00:00 GMT

As longtime Atlanta playwrights Larry Larson and Eddie Levi Lee see it, the Waffle House witching hour occurs every morning around 3 a.m. That’s the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction moment when babies are born in the parking lot and cops Taser waiters just for fun. That’s precisely the mood the legendary duo hope to capture in their latest effort, "The Waffle Palace: Smothered, Covered, and Scattered 24/7/365," running May 11 to June 24 at Little Five Points’ Horizon Theatre Company.

Egged on by a 2009 AJC story chronicling outrageous, real-life events at Atlanta Waffle Houses (including both incidents mentioned above), they dish up a platter of scrambled characters whose Midtown waffle shack is jeopardized by a real estate developer wanting to build a behemoth multiuse project.

Larson and Lee’s most recent effort, "Charm School" (Horizon), won the 2007 Suzi Bass playwriting award—Atlanta theater’s equivalent of Broadway’s Tonys. Both Charm School, a satire of corporate diversity training, and "The Bench," a 2002 Alliance Theatre Christmas play, were relatively mellow comedies for writers who burst onto the local scene in the eighties with "The Blood Orgy Trilogy," a series of B-movie riffs glutted with “chain-gang Amazon women, chain saw stewardesses, and zombie assassins.” "Waffle Palace" may signal a return to their gonzo roots.

For inspiration, Larson has been sopping up atmosphere at Waffle Houses near his Marietta home. Like the raucous behavior, the food just gets better as the night wears on: “When you are kind of drunk,” he quips, finishing an omelet at a location on Roswell Road, “it really tastes good.” horizontheatre.com

Illustration by PJ Loughran

Twyla Time

Felicia Feaster — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

During the almost four months she spent in Atlanta since last spring rehearsing her new ballet, "The Princess and the Goblin," legendary choreographer Twyla Tharp didn’t see much of the city. There was too much to do: Hit the gym every morning for stretching and weight training, then on to the Atlanta Ballet studio on Marietta Boulevard for six hours of rehearsal.

"When I’m working, I’m not sightseeing," she says.

Photograph by Raftermen

Then she broke her foot. But Tharp, seventy, is not one to let either age or a walking boot slow her progress. "Physically she may not be able to jump as high," says Sarah Hillmer, a teacher at Atlanta Ballet’s Centre for Dance Education and Tharp's assistant throughout the production of "The Princess and the Goblin." "But she is out there showing everything. She’ll take off her tennis shoes and say, 'No, I want it like this.'"

Atlanta Ballet artistic director John McFall and Royal Winnipeg Ballet artistic director André Lewis first approached Tharp in 2010 with the idea of commissioning a ballet. For years Tharp had longed to create a feature-length adaptation of "The Princess and the Goblin," the nineteenth-century fairy tale by George MacDonald about a young princess who delves deep into the underworld to defeat an army of goblins who are staging a revolt against humans. Atlanta Ballet would team with Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet to split the $1.3 million price tag for the production, with an Atlanta debut on February 10 and a Winnipeg opening in fall 2012.

Tharp had first read "The Princess and the Goblin" twenty years ago and was captivated by the story's plucky female heroine. "She's one of the earliest female heroes in literature who remains triumphant in the end without being penalized," says Tharp. She thought nineteenth-century composer Franz Schubert would make an ideal musical companion to MacDonald's story. "There is a quality in Schubert of what we might call 'goodness,' which is something that MacDonald had in spades," Tharp says.

>> GALLERY: Watch Twyla Tharp rehearse her ballet with the company

In her forty-seven-year career, Tharp has collaborated with Milos Forman, David Byrne, and Mikhail Baryshnikov and choreographed "Movin' Out," the blockbuster Broadway show based on Billy Joel's songbook. For Atlanta Ballet executive director Arthur Jacobus, having Tharp premiere a full-length ballet in Atlanta is unprecedented, garnering national press and raising Atlanta Ballet’s profile. "It means a lot for the image of Atlanta as an arts and culture center," he says.

Hiring Tharp for "The Princess and the Goblin" is just one component of Atlanta Ballet's plan to bring edgier, contemporary choreographers to Atlanta. "We wanted to reposition the brand so that we’re viewed as a much more contemporary, energetic organization and not viewed as a staid, purely classical ballet company," Jacobus says. "We have a sense that we’re beginning to penetrate a new market," he continues, pointing to the sellout crowds for "Ignition: New Choreographic Voices" at the Alliance Theatre last May.

Some of that new, younger demographic will also be visible on "The Princess and the Goblin's" stage. Of the thirty-four-member cast, thirteen roles are played by Atlanta dancers between the ages of eight and fifteen. Tharp cast them herself from Atlanta Ballet's Centre for Dance Education.

"I was dumbfounded at their level of concentration and their level of energy. They don't take a union break every five minutes on the hour," Tharp says with a laugh. With her graying pixie cut and her owlish glasses, Tharp has the look of the world's hippest grandma, the one who takes you to rock concerts but doesn't suffer fools lightly. "They have been fantastic troupers," says Tharp. "The underworld doesn't stand a chance against these kids."

Felicia Feaster is one of our editorial contributors.
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Chip Simone's Second Coming

Felicia Feaster — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:00 GMT

The art world can be cruel. While critics and curators salivate over the fresh crop of art school grads, an older generation of artists gets lost in the shuffle.

But one of Atlanta's seminal lensmen, Chip Simone, sixty-six, whose photographs reside in the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, is finally getting his due. On the heels of a retrospective at the High in 2011, Simone is gearing up for a show at Buckhead photography gallery Jackson Fine Art (through April 7), followed by an exhibition at New York City's Steven Kasher Gallery in the spring. Of his second coming, Simone has a chuckle: "I think to have a resurgence, first you have to have a 'surgence,' and I’m not sure there was much of one of those."

When Simone arrived in Atlanta in 1972, Southern photographers were expected to shoot black-and-white images of rural landscapes, dilapidated barns, and other pastoral Southern cliches. Simone preferred photographs of urban punk rockers, the oddballs who showed up on Downtown streets, and colorful advertisements molting in the steamy weather. "I've gone out of my way to do pictures of Atlanta as an American city," says Simone, who went on to not only picture what he calls "the New South," but to secure his foothold in Atlanta's arts community as one of thirteen founding members of the influential artists cooperative Nexus (now the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center).

As a student of renowned photographer Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design, Simone learned early that photography is "a lonely job that pays badly." (Callahan would sell his prints for just $75.) So to pay the bills, Simone also works as a personal trainer. High Museum director Michael Shapiro and Jane Jackson, curator of the Elton John photographic collection, are two of his clients.

But Simone wouldn’t change a thing. "Often enough, I get a good picture," says Simone. "The work itself has always saved me."

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