Sweet Cosette is back. Her sad eyes have become synonymous with one of the most popular musical extravanganzas ever to hit the Broadway stage. Cosette and the entire cast of Les Misérables s returns to Lincoln for eight performances Sept. 23-28 at the Lied Center for Performing Arts.
Les Misérables (pronounced Lay Miz-ah-ROB) is Victor Hugo's epic tale of romance, passion, suspense and humanity. It is the story of one man, the fugitive Jean Valjean, and his struggle to evade the cruel and self-righteous police inspector Javert. Covering three turbulent decades of 19th- century France, the tale is as timeless and universal as life itself.
Like an opera, nearly all of the three-plus hour musical is sung. But it's truly a Broadway musical experience with show-stopping dance numbers and tender ballards alike. Though the title is French, Les Misérables is performed entirely in English.
Les Misérables first was presented in 1980 in Paris when writers Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil staged it in a huge arena. London producer Cameron Mackintosh (who also produced Miss Saigon, Cats and The Phantom of the Opera) was intrigued. In 1985, he and others opened the show in its current form in London's West End, where it was an immediate smash. The show opened in 1986 in the United States and has won dozens of awards worldwide while earning the love and adulation of fans everywhere.
What is the appeal of this enduring musical? It has packed the Lied Center during two previous engagements and public demand encouraged an unprecedented third run.
Perhaps it is the 400 costumes and 1,000 props used by the 36 actors in the show. Or it is the 34-foot revolving set? The stirring music certainly has appeal. But in reality, the success of Les Misérables rests solely upon the strength of Victor Hugo's soaring novel and its unflagging faith in the greater good of mankind and the triumph over evil. It explores the great moral questions of our day, comments on the treatment of the poor and homeless and asks "what is the nature of justice?"
And who is Cosette? She is the illegitimate daughter of a prostitute; Valjean promises Cosette's mother he will always look after her. He makes good on his word. The Les Misérables logo features the waif Cosette, taken from an engraving by Emile Bayard whose work illustrated Hugo's first edition. Her face has graced Times Square and, now, Lincoln's Lied Center.
Two 15-minute pre-performance talks beginning at 55 minutes and 30 minutes before curtain will occur in the Lied Center's Steinhart Room as part of Lied's ongoing education and outreach programming.
Tickets for 8 p.m. performances on Tuesday, Sept .23; Friday, Sept. 26; and Saturday, Sept. 27 are $50, $45 and $35. Tickets for the both 2 and 8 p.m. performances Wednesday, Sept. 24; 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 25; 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 27; and 2 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28 are $45, $40 and $30. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska Wesleyan University and Doane College students and youth 18 and younger with proper identification can purchase tickets at a reduced price for all but the Friday and Saturday evening performances.
Call the Lied Box Office at (402) 472-4747 or toll free, 1 (800) 432-3231 for ticket availability. Box Office hours are 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. weekdays. On performance weekdays, the Box Office is open from 11 a.m. through the first intermission. For evening performances on weekends, the Box Office opens at 3 p.m.
This Lied Center presentation of Les Misérables is made possible in part with generous support from Ameritas Life Insurance Company.
Lied Center programming is supported by the Friends of Lied and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; the Mid-America Arts Alliance; and the Nebraska Arts Council. All events in the Lied Center are made possible entirely or in part by the Lied Performance Fund, which has been established in memory of Ernst F. Lied and his parents, Ernst M. and Ida K. Lied.
Jacques Doillon's extraordinary drama, Ponette, about a child's understanding of and coping with grief, makes sorrow absolutely mesmerizing. Ponette opens at the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater on Sept. 25,
Victoire Thivisol, a nonprofessional French 4-year-old whose performance garnered her the Best Actress award at the 1996 Venice Film Festival and who has an astonishing access to her emotions, plays Ponette who survives a car crash that kills her mother. She sustains a broken arm and is eventually sent to live with cousins in the country.
Surrounded by children, who treat the subject of death and God with exquisite, casual brutality, she undertakes to summon back her dead mom with a seriousness of purpose that will break your heart.
Ponette, inconsolable after her mother's death, will not accept that her mother is gone.
With the passing of time, Ponette's grief intensifies rather than lessens, for the absence of her mother is unbearable to her. Her father's efforts to make her feel better only provide a temporary solace; soon after the accident, he leaves her in the care of her aunt.
Ponette's confusion is heightened by the conflicting theories offered her by her aunt, her cousins, and her classmates about the finality of death. These contradictory notions concerning the existence of God and His ability to bring people back from the dead only add to her belief that it may actually be possible for her mother to return.
Consequently, Ponette continues to talk to her mother, to wait, and to look for her with growing determination and single-mindedness.
No one is able to convince her that she will not be able to find her mother.
On the advice of her peers, Ponette explores several different "solutions" which she hopes will bring her mother back. Ultimately her love for her mother helps her realize that her death is indeed irrevocable. She is then able to honor the memory of her mother, and finally continue her own life as well.
Ponette is showing on Sept. 25 through Sept. 28 and on Oct. 2 through Oct. 4. Screenings are at 7 and 9 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays; at 1, 3, 7, and 9 p.m. on Saturdays; and at 3, 5, 7, and 9 p.m. on Sundays. Admission is $6; $5 for students; and $4 for senior citizens, children, and members of the Friends of the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater.
The presentation of this program at the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater is made possible, in part, with the support of the Nebraska Arts Council, a state agency.
The 11th annual Sheldon Statewide exhibition he Art of Abstraction will circulate to 12 Nebraska communities through September 1998.
Drawn from the Sheldon Gallery's renowned American collection and co-curated by Sheldon Gallery Director George Neubert and Daniel Siedell, curator, 20 paintings and sculptures have been selected to survey the development of abstract art in the United States.
Works in the exhibition span a period from the early 1900s, represented by Arthur B. Carles's painting, Landscape-Garden in France, to a 1983 collage by Nebraska artist Mary Beth Fogarty. Included in the exhibition are works by American artists Josef Albers, Arthur Dove, Alfred Maurer and Augustus Vincent Tack, who was commissioned to paint the first mural in the Nebraska State Capitol.
The Nebraska Art Association, whose mission and commitment is to advance the visual arts in Nebraska, has provided principal funding for Sheldon Statewide since its inception in 1987. Additional funding has come from James and Rhonda Seacrest, North Platte. The Art of Abstraction will be exhibited in the following locations:
In these communities, tours by volunteer docents trained by the Community Programs Coordinator for Sheldon Gallery, will be offered to all students, K-12, and local citizens.
More information about The Art of Abstraction is available on the gallery's web page at http://sheldon.unl.edu.
Sheldon Statewide, conceived and implemented by the Sheldon Gallery professional staff, is designed to make the museum's exceptional fine art collection available to all Nebraskans, and fulfills the University's public service mission. In the past 10 years, the program has reached more than152,000 people in 22 Nebraska communities.
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden is presenting The Samuel H. Kress Study Collection, an exhibition of 11 European Old Master-style paintings that were donated to the Sheldon Gallery from the famous Samuel H. Kress Collection.
The exhibition runs to Nov. 23 and features artists as Sienese painter Andrea di Bartolo (active 1389-1428), the 16th century painter Jacopo da Ponte, and Giovanni Castiglione, a 17th century painter.
The exhibition offers the opportunity to view significant European painting of the 14th to 17th centuries.
The Samuel H. Kress Collection, consisting of more than 3,000 works dating from the 13th through the 18th centuries, was one of the world's most distinguished private collections of Old Master paintings. In 1961 the Kress Foundation dispersed the bulk of the original collection, but a decision was made to distribute the remaining 200 works among American college and university art collections for use in art history education.
The University of Nebraska was one of 23 institutions that were chosen as recipients of works from this Kress Study Collection. And in 1963 the Sheldon Gallery received 11 paintings to be intended for use in the art history curriculum at the University of Nebraska.
Supplementing this exhibition of those 11 paintings will be seven Northern Renaissance prints, including a work by Albrecht Durer, curated by Alison Stewart, associate professor of art and adjunct curator for European prints and drawings of the Sheldon Gallery, for use in courses that Stewart is teaching this fall.
Despite a permanent collection that has focused on 19th and 20 century American art for more than 60 years, the Sheldon Gallery also houses a significant collection of European paintings from the Kress Study Collection and an impressive collection of European prints and works on paper that offers an indispensable resource for the study of the history of western art.
The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden will present The Prints of Stuart Davis, an exhibition of 25 prints by an early champion of American Modernism, which will be on display until Nov. 30.
Organized by the University of Iowa Museum of Art and drawn largely from the collection of Harold and Patricia L. Rayburn of Bettendorf, Iowa, The Prints of Stuart Davis offers a broad survey of Davis's considerable body of work in a medium for which he was not known but which he used consistently throughout a career that spanned nearly 60 years.
One of this century's great American modernists, Davis attempted to integrate European modernism, particularly the formalist aesthetics of Cubism, with vernacular American subjects. Steadfast in his faith in European modernism, Davis advocated abstraction during the 1930s when realism and regionalism came into national and nationalist favor, and, late in his career criticizing the New York School and Pop artists of the 1950s for not offering proper respect to the traditions of European modernism.
The son of a sculptor and an art editor, Davis began his artistic career at a young age and by 21 he was publishing illustrations in Harper's Weekly. He wrote numerous articles for arts publications and served as editor of Art Front, a publication of the Artists Union. In 1913, when five of his watercolors were included in the celebrated Armory Show, Davis was exposed to the work of European artists which wouId exert strong influence-on his aesthetic development.
Davis's life work includes approximately 200 paintings, innumerable drawings in sketchbooks and 27 prints. Davis's first foray into printmaking was a series of eleven lithographs showing views of Paris created during a 13-month stay in France in 1928-29. After his return to the United States, Davis produced five more lithographs, taking his subjects from New York City and his summer home, Gloucester, Mass. His next period of printmaking was at the end of the 1930s, when he produced three lithographs under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Davis's final three prints were individual works produced in 1941, 1955, and 1957.
While small in number, Davis's prints are integrally related to his quest for an American modernism. Subjects begun in sketchbook drawings were reworked in prints or paintings, often over a number of years. This evolution of a subject through various media suggests that Davis recognized in each medium unique solutions to formal problems, and that lithography and serigraphy offered him alternatives to exploration of formal problems in drawing or painting.
This exhibition of prints not only provides a broad survey of the work of one of this country's most important modernist painters, it will also provide an important interpretive framework for Arch Hotel, 1929, a major oil painting by Davis which is one of the Sheldon Gallery's most important works.
The Shenandoah Shakespeare Express returns to Lincoln on Sept. 24, for special performances of two of Shakespeare's romantic comedies. Love's Labor's Lost will be presented at 3:30 p.m. and A Midsummer Night's Dream will be staged at 8 p.m. Both can be seen, free of charge, in Kimball Recital Hall.
Based in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, the globe-trotting Express is an ensemble committed to one central idea: that Shakespeare's plays work best when performed under the conditions for which they were originally designed - with a bare stage, minimal props, and an accessible audience sharing the same light with the actors, each of whom plays several parts. These young performers' very modern acting styles and crisp delivery of the lines make for quick, lively shows.
This approach has won the acclaim of audiences and critics. The Chicago Sun-Times noted that "Like MTV's 'Unplugged' concerts, which stress vocals and lyrics over high-tech sonic effects, Shenandoah Shakespeare Express emphasizes the playwright's language and the actor's versatility."
The SSE has been praised for providing "fresh, fine theatre . . . pure Shakespeare, richly alive" ( Boston Globe). In past visits, the SSE has thrilled Lincoln audiences with its vigorous humor, its immediate rapport with theatre-goers, and its inventive links between Shakespeare's plays and 20th-century popular culture.
This year, the elegant wit of Love's Labor's Lost is complemented by the drive of popular music, while A Midsummer Night's Dream excitingly balances dreamlike fantasy with rollicking slapstick. In follow-up discussions after each performance, the actors will be joined by Jim Warren, managing director and co-founder of the company. Audience members are invited to share their questions, comments, and reactions.
Funding for this event has been provided by the UNL Foundations Program, the University Honors Program, the Textual Studies Program, and the Departments of English and Theatre Arts and Dance. For more information, call 472-1784.
The School of Music presents guest artist Denise Schmidt, clarinet, at 8 p.m. Sept. 22 in Kimball Hall. She will be assisted by UNL Professors Mark Clinton and Nicole Narboni, pianos; and Diane Cawein, clarinet. Admission is free.
For her program, Schmidt has chosen works by Leo Weiner, Sergei Prokofiev, Aleksander Goedicke, Felix Mendelssohn and Donato Lovreglio.
Schmidt is instructor of music and coordinator of music education at Mars Hill College in Mars Hill, NC. She is a member of the Asheville Symphony and the Missouri Chamber Orchestra. Schmidt is an active clarinet clinician and performer throughout North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida and Texas.
She has been a soloist with the University of North Texas Symphony Orchestra, the University of North Texas Wind Ensemble, the Leto High School Band, the Denton High School Band, the Asheville Community Band, and the Mars Hill College Wind Ensemble. She also served as clarinet specialist for the Denton Independent School District in Denton, Texas, from 1991-1993 and was a band director in Pasco County, Fla., for five years.
Schmidt earned a bachelor's degree in music education Florida State University and the master of music in clarinet performance from the University of North Texas.
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