Tagged: Arts

On our audio diary series “The Big Break,” understudies and apprentices take us behind the curtain at the Kentucky Opera, Actors Theatre of Louisville and the Louisville Ballet. The season is almost over for the actors and dancers. Her time in Louisville is almost up, so Actors Theater apprentice Samantha Beach has to decide where she wants to build the next phase of her career. Louisville Ballet trainee Claire Horrocks makes plans for her summer that will help her prepare for a possibility every dancer fears -- the day she can't dance anymore.

In post-World War II Tennessee, radio stations were just as segregated as restaurants and hotels. The award-winning musical “Memphis” is loosely based on the life of Dewey Phillips, the white DJ who integrated the Memphis airwaves in the early days of rock and roll. In "Memphis," Phillips is re-imagined as fast-talking DJ Huey Calhoun, who falls in love with an African American nightclub singer. 

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.”