An all-star jazz band - bassist and musical director Christian McBride, vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater, saxophonist Chris Potter, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, pianist Benny Green and drummer Lewis Nash - comprise the Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour: 55th Anniversary, performing at 8 p.m. Saturday at Walton Arts Center, 495 W. Dickson St., Fayetteville. Sponsor is Greenwood Gearhart Inc. Tickets are $18-$48. Call (479) 443-5600 or visit the website, waltonartscenter.org.
Also at the center this week: Jewish singer Francoise Atlan joins Orchestra of Fes, a Moroccan chamber ensemble directed by Mohamed Briouel to form Caravanserai, with a performance 8 p.m. Friday.The concert is part of the center’s 10x10 Art Series, in partnership with the King Fahd Center at the University of Arkansas. Tickets are $10-$25.
Caravanserai is also taking part in a spring music residency tour, using contemporary and traditional vocal and instrumental music, film and photography to promote understanding between American and Muslim societies. The tour will include public appearances, 7-8 p.m. Tuesday in the Great Room of Pomfret Hall at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and a musical workshop and question-and-answer session with the performers, 6:30-7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Fayetteville Public Library, 401 W. Mountain St., Fayetteville. Admission is free.
And under the center’s auspices, Little Big Town will headline a concert at 8 p.m. Friday at the Arkansas Music Pavilion, Washington County Fairgrounds, 2536 N. McConnell Ave., Fayetteville. Tickets are $27-$77. Call (479) 443-5600 or visit the website, amptickets.com.
Steinway quintet
The 5 Browns - Juilliard School of Music-trained siblings Ryan, Melody, Gregory, Deondra and Desirae Brown - will perform on five Steinway pianos at 7:30 p.m. Monday in the Donald W. Reynolds Performance Hall, University of Central Arkansas, 201 Donaghey Ave., Conway.
All five Browns will play Star Wars: Suite for Five Pianos by John Williams and arrangements of three movements (“Mars, The Bringer of War,” “Neptune, The Mystic” and “Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity”) from The Planets by Gustav Holst; the second half of The Rite of Spring byIgor Stravinsky; Atonement by Dario Marianelli; and Islamey by Mily Balakirev.
Deondra and Desirae Brown will play a two-piano arrangement of the Mephisto Waltz No.1 by Franz Liszt. Melody Brown will play the Concert Etude, “Toccatina,” op.40 No. 3, by Nikolai Kapustin. Gregory Brown will play the Ballade No.1 in g minor, op.23, by Frederic Chopin. And Ryan Brown will play the Toccata, op.15, by Robert Muczynski.
The concert is part of UCA Public Appearances’ Night Out Series. Tickets are $30-$40, $10 for students and children, free to UCA students with current ID. Call (501) 450-3265 or (866) 810-0012 or visit uca.edu/reynolds.
Movie music
The Fort Smith Symphony will offer a concert titled “The Musical Magic of John Williams,” 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Arkansas Best Corp. Performing Arts Center, Fort Smith Convention Center, 55 S. Seventh St., Fort Smith.
Violinist Elizabeth Lyon, the orchestra’s concertmaster, will solo in a suite from Williams’ score for Schindler’s List. The program will also include the “March” from Superman, Jaws and Star Wars suites, “The Flight to Neverland” from Hook, “Sayuri’s Theme” from Memories of a Geisha and music from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. John Jeter conducts.
Tickets are $35 and $30, $20 and $15 for students. Call(479) 452-7575 or visit the website, fortsmithsymphony. org.
The orchestra will repeat the concert at 2 p.m. April 21 at the Donald W. Reynolds Community Center in Poteau, Okla. Tickets are $20, $15 for students. Call (918) 647-4204. Vicar bicker
A liberated American actress (Brittney Sparkles), now married to a British vicar (Donavan Suitt), scandalizes the community by wearing pants in public, and that’s even before she and her former acting partner (Quinn Gasaway) really start shaking things up in See How They Run by Philip King.
Also peopling the British farce, which opens Tuesday at Murry’s Dinner Playhouse, 6323 Colonel Glenn Road, Little Rock: a cockney maid (Courtney Bennett) who has seen too many American movies; a tee-totaling church lady (Kelley Ponder); a sedate bishop (Roger M. Eaves); and four guys dressed as clergymen (one of whom is an escaped prisoner).
The show runs through May 18, with dinner at 6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Sunday and showtimes 7:45 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday (except matinees only, Wednesday and April 24 and May 1), 12:45 and 6:45 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $31-$35, $23 for children 15 and under, $25 and $15 for children show only. Call (501) 562-3131 or visit the website, murrysdinnerplayhouse.com.
Spring concert
A baker’s dozen of members of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra will close out the orchestra’s River Rhapsodies Chamber Series for this season with a performance of the suite from Aaron Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring, 7 p.m. Tuesday in the Great Hall of the Clinton Presidential Center, 1200 President Clinton Ave., Little Rock.
Also on the program: harpist Alisa Coffey, flutist Carolyn Brown and violist Katherine Reynolds will play the Sonate en trio for flute, viola and harp by Claude Debussy.Reynolds and Brown will join pianist Carl Anthony for George Crumb’s Voice of the Whale. And the orchestra’s Quapaw Quartet -Eric Hayward and Meredith Maddox Hicks, violins; Ryan Mooney, viola; and David Gerstein, cello - will play an arrangement by ASO 2012-13 Composer of the Year Jennifer Higdon of “Amazing Grace.”
Sponsor for the series is Parker Lexus. Tickets are $22, $10 for students. Call (501) 666-1761 or visit ArkansasSymphony.org.
Bard stars
Paul Menzer, director of the master’s in literature/ master of fine arts program in Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va., will trace and explore some ofthe most durable anecdotes to accompany Shakespeare’s plays in performance across the last 400 years in a lecture titled “Shakespeare, Anecdotally” at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Art Lecture Hall, McCastlain Hall, University of CentralArkansas, 201 Donaghey Ave., Conway.
Menzer will also participate in a panel discussion at 4 p.m. Saturday after a staged reading of his play Invisible Inc. by Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre actors and Arkansas writers Trenton Lee Stewart and Graham Gordy, at the Argenta Community Theatre, 405 Main St., North Little Rock, part of the Arkansas Literary Festival.
And Chicago-based director Robert Quinlan, who directed Richard III for theArkansas Shakespeare Theatre in 2012, will discuss his particular process and explorations involved in directing Shakespeare at 7 p.m. April 24 in the Brewer-Hegeman Conference Center, next to Reynolds Performance Hall, at UCA.
Admission to all events is free. Sponsors are the UCA Foundation, the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre and the Arkansas Literary Festival. Call (501) 428-4165 or e-mail [email protected].
Style, Pages 47 on 04/14/2013