Erin Keane

In the summer of 1794, Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, a period of violence against those opposing the French Revolution, claimed the lives of sixteen Carmelite nuns. The Martyrs of Compiègne, who were guillotined in Paris, are memorialized in Francis Poulenc’s opera “Dialogues of the Carmelites.”  

The national tour of the acclaimed Broadway musical “Memphis” stops in Louisville next week. It's the story of radio DJ Huey Calhoun, who becomes a sensation in 1950s Memphis for playing Black musicians on mainstream (white) commercial radio. 

I realized something during a recent conversation about social media use during live arts performances, the so-called Tweet Seats debate: what people crave isn't the soft distraction of their phone screens, not really. What they crave is the opportunity to lead and shape the conversation themselves.

This week on The Big Break, Actors Theatre of Louisville apprentice Samantha Beach reflects on tech week for "Sleep Rock Thy Brain," the apprentice play that opened last weekend in the Humana Festival of New American Plays. (The music in this week's episode is from "Sleep Rock Thy Brain," composed and performed by Scott Anthony, the show's composer and sound designer.)

Over at the Louisville Ballet, trainee Claire Horrocks, who also teaches at the ballet school, describes the joyful madness that is a spring showcase, a true community effort at the Louisville Ballet School. 

The Louisville Orchestra pays tribute to American composer Aaron Copland’s Mexican-influenced compositions this week with a multimedia program that infuses humanities content into classical music performance. Created by music scholar Joseph Horowitz, Music Unwound’s “Copland and Mexico” will span multiple events in Louisville this week, including partnerships with the Louisville Visual Art Association and the University of Louisville School of Music. 

Playwright Mallery Avidon had an unconventional upbringing. As a kid and young teen she lived, on and off, in an ashram -- the same ashram that later cropped up as a setting in Elizabeth Gilbert's nonfiction book "Eat Pray Love," later made into a movie starring Julia Roberts. Avidon mines those experiences in her engaging autobiographical play, "O Guru Guru Guru or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you," an attempt to reconcile several complicated, competing emotions about contentment, identity and spirituality.

Playwright Mallery Avidon mines her unconventional childhood for her new play, “O Guru Guru Guru, or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you.”

"Part of that unconventional upbringing has to do with the ashram that Elizabeth Gilbert goes to in the book 'Eat Pray Love,' that Julia Roberts goes to in the movie 'Eat Pray Love.' The play is an investigation of the way that unconventional spirituality affected my life," says Avidon.

This week on The Big Break, the Louisville Ballet rehearses for its upcoming mixed repertory program, Breaking Ground while trainee Claire Horrocks gets called up to the stage for a surprise bonus role. Over at Actors Theatre of Louisville, acting apprentice Samantha Beach finishes up rehearsals for "Sleep Rock Thy Brain," the apprentice anthology play that opens this weekend, and she reflects on the new play rehearsal process. 

As the curtain rises on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Appropriate," a rattling chorus of 13-year cicadas fills the Pamela Brown Auditorium. Far from a gentle nocturne, the sound swells with the pregnant heat of a southern summer night, conjuring images of rattling bones. Low lights reveal a man and a younger woman slipping through an open window into the living room of a plantation house that had, to be kind, seen better days.

Billed as a willfully unfaithful adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic picaresque tale “Peer Gynt,” Will Eno’s “Gnit” up-ends the classic man’s-search-for-meaning quest with an ambitiously absurdist self-discovery journey that stubbornly chafes against the conventions of the genre.