Monthly Archives: February 2016

Black History Month Spotlight – Central High School Neighborhood

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CHS neighborhoodThe new Arkansas Civil Rights History Audio Tour was launched in November 2015. Produced by the City of Little Rock and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock allows the many places and stories of the City’s Civil Rights history to come to life an interactive tour.  This month, during Black History Month, the Culture Vulture looks at some of the stops on this tour which focus on African American history.

The Central High School Neighborhood Historic District developed in the late 1880s, after a streetcar company built West End Park there in 1885. The area was a middle-class, interracial, mixed-use neighborhood with large homes and cottages and several schools and churches. Union and Capitol Hill schools educated the African American residents. St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church and school served an African American congregation. African American and white residents worked as clergymen, barbers, chauffeurs, mail carriers, clerks, and with the railroad and service industries. The neighborhood was also home to white and black lawyers, doctors, teachers and businessmen.

By 1894, West End Park included a baseball field, becoming home to the city’s first minor league baseball team, the Little Rock Travelers. Negro League teams, including the Little Rock Reds, Cadets, and Greys, also played there. In the late 1920s, the park site was chosen for the new Little Rock High School for white students. Quigley Stadium, the school’s football field, was built in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), replacing Kavanaugh Baseball Field. The neighborhood continues to have a vibrant mix of working class blacks and whites.

The app, funded by a generous grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council, was a collaboration among UALR’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the City of Little Rock, the Mayor’s Tourism Commission, and KUAR, UALR’s public radio station, with assistance from the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau.

This weekend – Lanterns festival at Wildwood Park

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Lanterns_07-1500x630Wildwood’s annual deep-winter festival celebrates the first full moon of the lunar new year. Held over three magical evenings – February 19 – 21, 2016 – guests are transported to far away lands and times as they stroll through the beautifully lit pathways of Wildwood’s gardens.

Cultural vistas feature live entertainment, food, drink, games and more throughout the Park’s Butler Arboretum and inside the Lucy Lockett Cabe Festival Theatre. This year’s featured locations are Australia, Brazil, China, Greece, Hawaii and the UK.

Shuttles run from the Kroger on Chenal Parkway beginning at 6 pm nightly until 30 minutes past the Festival’s closing. Limited parking is also available at Wildwood.

Tickets are $8 for adults online and $10 at the gate. For children ages 6-12 tickets are $4 online and $5 at the gate, and children 5 and under attend FREE!

Arf – Celebrity Attractions brings ANNIE here this weekend

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AnnieCelebrity Attractions is proud to present the new U.S. National Tour of ANNIE February 19-21 at the Maumelle Performing Arts Center.   Directed by original lyricist and director Martin Charnin for the 19th time, this production of ANNIE is a brand new physical incarnation of the iconic Tony Award®-winning original.

ANNIE has a book by Thomas Meehan, music by Charles Strouse and lyrics by Martin Charnin. All three authors received 1977 Tony Awards® for their work.   Choreography is by Liza Gennaro, who will incorporate selections from her father Peter Gennaro’s 1977 Tony Award®-winning choreography.

The production features a 25 member company: in the title role of Annie is Heidi Gray, an 11-year-old actress from the Augusta, GA area, making her tour debut. Gilgamesh Taggett stars as Oliver Warbucks.  In the role of Miss Hannigan is Lynn Andrews.  Also starring in the tour are Chloe Tiso as Grace, Garrett Deagon as Rooster, Lucy Werner as Lily and Jeffrey B. Duncan as FDR.  Macy and Sunny, rescue terriers, star as Sandy.

The orphans are Sage Bentley as Tessie, Bridget Carly Marsh as July, Molly Rose Meredith as Pepper, Emily Moreland as Kate, Annabelle Wachtel as Molly and Casey Watkins as Duffy.

The original production of ANNIE opened April 21, 1977 at the Alvin Theatre and went on to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical, seven Drama Desk Awards including Best Musical, the Grammy for Best Cast Show Album and seven Tony Awards®, including Best Musical, Best Book (Thomas Meehan) and Best Score (Charles Strouse, Martin Charnin).  The show remains one of the biggest Broadway musical hits ever.  It ran for 2,377 performances after it first opened, and has been performed in 28 languages and has been running somewhere around the world for 37 years.

The beloved score for ANNIE includes “Maybe,” “It’s the Hard Knock Life,” “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile,” “Easy Street,” “I Don’t Need Anything But You” and the eternal anthem of optimism, “Tomorrow.”

Welcomed by the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau, ANNIE takes the stage February 19-21 at the Maumelle Performing Arts Center, located on the campus of Maumelle High School.  The performance schedule is Friday at 8 pm, Saturday at 2 pm and 8 pm, and Sunday at 2 pm. Tickets are now on sale and are priced $32, $52, and $67.  Tickets are available by phone at (501) 244-8800 or (800) 982-ARTS (2787) or online at www.ticketmaster.com.  Discounts are available for groups of 10 or more by calling (501) 492-3312.

Get social with Celebrity Attractions by becoming a fan on Facebook.com/BWayLR.  Follow the Little Rock engagement of ANNIE on Twitter.com/BwayLittleRock or join the conversation using #AnnieLR.  ANNIE is a part of the 2015-2016 Broadway Season which concludes with RAGTIME.   Celebrity Attractions is proud to have KATV and the Maumelle Area Chamber of Commerce as sponsors for this spectacular season.  For more information, visit www.CelebrityAttractions.com.

Tonight on the South on Main stage – Nora Jane Struthers & The Party Line

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som nora janeTonight (February 18) at 8:00 PM, the Oxford American magazine is excited to welcome Nora Jane Struthers & The Party Line to the South on Main stage!

This is the third show of their Americana Series. Doors open at 6:00 PM, with dinner and drinks available for purchase at that time. This series is made possible by the presenting sponsor, Ben E. Keith Foods Mid-South Division, and in part by the generosity of The Summer Foundation.

Single tickets are still available. Here is the ticketing and seating information.

 

Born in Fairfax, Virginia, Nora Jane Struthers is a singer-songwriter based in Nashville. Performing with her band, The Party Line, the group has enjoyed critical acclaim since their formation in 2012. American Songwriter is calling the most recent release, Wake, “Nora Jane’s best album to date,” which speaks volumes about what’s happening on Nora Jane Struthers’ latest record. For the thirty-one year old singer-songwriter, it’s “wake” in several senses of the word. There’s the trail of a life and career behind her, the slipstream of lessons learned. There’s the quiet observance and letting go of who she has been up until now as both an artist and a person. And most of all, there’s the stirring of something new, an opening of a door and wide-eyed rush forward into a place of discovery and dizzying possibilities. And it’s all set to a soundtrack that resonates with the warm uplift of the first day of spring.

“The whole album is about strength through vulnerability,” she says. “That’s what I’ve come to as an artist, and a human being, and I think it’s the most powerful force in my life. I feel so much more like my childhood self now than I did over the past five years, than I have in my whole adult life. In my twenties, I had a tendency to compartmentalize pieces of my musical identity. For instance, how could I reconcile my love of both bluegrass and Pearl Jam? I did the same thing in my personal life, where I had this sort of idea of who I wanted to be, and ignored all these other pieces of myself, because I didn’t think they fit into some imagined big picture.”

Black History Month Spotlight – Central High School National Historic Site

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Little Rock 2011 036The new Arkansas Civil Rights History Audio Tour was launched in November 2015. Produced by the City of Little Rock and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock allows the many places and stories of the City’s Civil Rights history to come to life an interactive tour.  This month, during Black History Month, the Culture Vulture looks at some of the stops on this tour which focus on African American history.

In September 1957, Central High School was at the center of international attention when Gov. Orval E. Faubus ordered the National Guard to prevent nine black students from attending. President Dwight D. Eisenhower later federalized the National Guard and sent in federal troops to escort the students to class. The school became a crucial battleground in the struggle for civil rights. Dramatic media images of the conflict seared themselves into public memory.

The Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site and Visitor Center opened in September 2007 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the school’s desegregation. The interactive displays include interviews with the Little Rock Nine and historic video clips. The Center presents a broad view of civil and human rights struggles in the United States and around the world. Central High School is the only functioning high school in the United States to be located within the boundary of a national historic site.

The app, funded by a generous grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council, was a collaboration among UALR’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the City of Little Rock, the Mayor’s Tourism Commission, and KUAR, UALR’s public radio station, with assistance from the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Isaac Alexander takes the stage tonight at South on Main as part of Sessions series

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som isaacNext for the South on Main February Sessions, curated by Amy Garland, Isaac Alexander takes the stage!

The concert begins tonight (February 17) at 8:30 pm.

Amy Garland says, “The first person who comes to mind when I hear the word “artist” is Isaac Alexander. He’s a prolific songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, performer, graphic designer, and illustrator. And he is a great guy! I met what I lovingly refer to as the “White County crew” when I met my husband, Bart, many moons ago. He was playing with some young fellas (Big Silver) from Searcy. Led by Isaac, they were just starting to play in Little Rock, so I asked them to open for me at Juanitas. That was all she wrote.”

Isaac Alexander has been playing, writing, and recording in Little Rock since 1999 and has put out a total of twelve records under various band names—Big Silver, The Easys, Molten Lava, Greers Ferry to name a few. He’s played drums in the legendary Little Rock band, The Boondogs and has played and recorded with a number of local artists, including The Salty Dogs, Brother Andy and His Big Damn Mouth, Cosby, The Big Cats, Jonathan Wilkins, Jesse Aycock, Chris Micheals, and Jim Mize.

The last few years Alexander has been working on solo albums with his friends. He has so far released See Thru Me and Antivenin Suite and is working on a third record presently. See Thru Me was No. 6 on the Arkansas Times Music Poll’s best Arkansas albums list.

Black History Month Spotlight – Central High School

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centralentranceThe new Arkansas Civil Rights History Audio Tour was launched in November 2015. Produced by the City of Little Rock and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock allows the many places and stories of the City’s Civil Rights history to come to life an interactive tour.  This month, during Black History Month, the Culture Vulture looks at some of the stops on this tour which focus on African American history.

In September 1957 Little Rock’s Central High School made headlines around the world in a struggle over school desegregation. In its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the United States Supreme Court declared an end to segregated schools. Little Rock drew up a gradual plan for desegregation starting with Central High. The local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People opposed the plan on the grounds that it was too slow moving, but the federal courts upheld it. The night before the school was due to desegregate, Gov. Orval Faubus surrounded Central with National Guard soldiers. The next day, black students were denied entry.

Eventually, Faubus was persuaded to remove the soldiers. When nine black students attempted to desegregate the school, a white mob formed outside. The students were removed for their safety. Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to desegregate the school. Even then, the ordeal of the Little Rock Nine was not over. They suffered numerous attacks inside the school. At the end of the school year Ernest Green, the only senior in the group, became the first black student to graduate from Central in May 1958.

The app, funded by a generous grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council, was a collaboration among UALR’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the City of Little Rock, the Mayor’s Tourism Commission, and KUAR, UALR’s public radio station, with assistance from the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau.