Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
R&B’s Knight to sing in LR; Bollywood at Walton Center
Gladys Knight headlines a concert at 8 p.m. Monday at Robinson Center Performance Hall, West Markham Street and Broadway, Little Rock.
The singer has had many hits with The Pips including “Midnight Train to Georgia,” “Neither One of Us” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Tickets are $43-$68 plus handling fees. Call (501) 244-8800 or visit the website, ticketmaster.com.
Annie on the road
Troika Entertainment’s national tour of Annie (music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Martin Charnin, book by Thomas Meehan) will make two Arkansas stops this week:
■ 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Reynolds Performance Hall, University of Central Arkansas, 201 Donaghey Ave., Conway. $30-$40, $10 for children and UCA student tickets with valid ID. (501) 450-3265 or (866) 810-0012; uca.edu/reynolds.
■ 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Alma Performing Arts Center, 103 E. Main St., Alma. $25$41; $15-$31 for children 12 and younger. (479) 632-2129; almapac.org.
Bollywood and brass
This week at Fayetteville’s Walton Arts Center, 495 W. Dickson St.:
■ Taj Express: The Bollywood Musical Revue, lots of song and dance surrounding the story of an Indian composer who gets his first big break in the film business to create music for a new Bollywood movie, 7 p.m. Tuesday. $35$65.
■ Musical-comedy ensemble Mnozil Brass — three trumpets, three trombones, one tuba “and lots of laughs” — performs Cirque, 7 p.m. Wednesday. $15-$35.
Call (479) 443-5600 or visit waltonartscenter.org.
Baseball chronicle
Documentarian Larry Foley will present and discuss his 2015 film The First Boys of Spring, chronicling early 20th-century baseball spring training camps in Hot Springs, 7 p.m. Wednesday, Rogers Conference Center, University of the Ozarks, 415 N. College Ave., Clarksville. It’s part of the university’s 2016-17 Walton Arts & Ideas Series. Admission is free. Call (479) 979-1420.
Figuring out the fugue
University of Arkansas, Fort Smith, faculty member and pianist Stephen Husarik will examine a Ludwig van Beethoven piece for string quartet in “Solving Beethoven’s Rubik’s Cube: Grosse Fuge, op.133,” 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Breedlove Auditorium, UAFS, 5120 Grand Ave., Fort Smith.
The Archduke String Quartet (Elizabeth Lyon-Ballay, violin; Lori Fay, violin; Kathleen Murray, viola, Robert Bradshaw, cello) will perform the work. Husarik will discuss — based on material from the composer’s sketchbooks, manuscripts and other sources in libraries across Europe — the conditions under which he composed the work, the possible source of its main tune (and will play, with Fay, an arrangement of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits,” which he cites as a likely source), the mechanics of its construction and why it has puzzled audiences and critics for nearly two centuries.
Admission is free. Call (479) 788-7555 or email Stephen.husarik@uafs.edu.
Delta Symposium
“Caring for Community” is the theme for the 23rd annual Delta Symposium, Wednesday-Saturday at Arkansas State University at Jonesboro, bringing together scholars, students, musicians and artists from across the country to “explore and experience the Delta’s history and culture,” according to a news release.
Except as noted, events will take place in the Mockingbird Room, third floor, Carl R. Reng Student Union, 101 N. Caraway Road, Jonesboro.
John T. Wayne, grandson of the movie star, will give an opening presentation at noon Wednesday, part of the university’s concurrent Delta Flix Film and Media Festival. Panel presentations, film screenings and media projects will continue throughout the afternoon, concluding with a screening of For the Love of the Music: The Club 47 Folk Music Revival in the Reng Student Union auditorium.
Richard M. Mizelle Jr., on the faculty at the University of Houston and the author of Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination, will give the keynote address, titled “Reimagining the Limited Archive,” at 1:15 p.m. Thursday. There will be a screening at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Student Union auditorium of Norman Jewison’s 1989 film In Country, adapted from the novel by Bobbie Ann Mason, who will be the symposium’s special guest on Friday, with an interview, readings from her work, question-and-answer session and a book signing, 7 p.m. in the auditorium.
Morning events Saturday will focus on Bob Dylan’s music and life. The symposium finale, the Arkansas Roots Music Festival, 1-5:30 p.m. Saturday at Jonesboro’s City Water and Light Park, 1123 S. Culberhouse St., will feature the Vikki McGee 3 and the Natural Disasters; Jonesboro-based Sky City; Apple, Rounds, Cobb and Hees; and Memphis blues musician Sweet Angel. Pets, lawn chairs and picnic lunches allowed. In case of rain, the festival will move to Riceland Hall at ASU’s Fowler Center, 201 Olympic Blvd. Admission is free.
A symposium schedule is available at altweb.AState.edu/blues. Call (870) 9723043.
Medieval storytelling
Barbara Drake Boehm, the Paul and Jill Ruddock Senior Curator for the Met Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, will give a lecture titled “Lively Letters: Storytelling in Medieval Choir Books,” 5 p.m. Tuesday in the theater of the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith’s Windgate Art & Design, 535 N. Waldron Road, Fort Smith. A reception will follow at 6 p.m. Sponsor is the Harvey Stahl Memorial Lecture Series of the International Center of Medieval Art. Admission is free. Call (479) 788-7561 or email mary.shepard@uafs.edu.
Also at the Windgate Art & Design, “The Unstillife,” an exhibition of approximately 40 “un” still-life paintings by artists from Zeuxis, a New York-based association of still-life painters, will be on display Monday-May 31. A reception will be held 5-7 p.m. Thursday in the lobby. Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday or by appointment. Admission to the reception and gallery are free. Call (479) 788-7031 or email lisa.suggs@uafs.edu.
T2 season
Fayetteville-based TheatreSquared will open its 2017-18 season, its 12th, Aug. 23-Sept. 17 with Fun Home (music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Lisa Kron), the 2015 Tony Award-winner for Best Musical.
The rest of the lineup (all shows at the Nadine Baum Studios, Walton Arts Center, 505 W. Spring St., Fayetteville):
■ Oct. 11-Nov. 5: The Champion by Amy Evans (world premiere), inspired by previously untold, true events in the life of R&B legend Nina Simone.
■ Nov. 29-Dec. 31: It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, adapted by Joe Landry from the classic 1946 Frank Capra film.
■ Jan. 24-Feb. 18: The Humans by Stephen Karam, winner of the 2016 Tony Award for Best Play, about a dysfunctional family sharing Thanksgiving in a ramshackle pre-war basement apartment in New York’s Chinatown.
■ March 14-April 8, 2018: Vietgone by Arkansas native Qui Nguyen; boy meets girl — except this boy and girl are Vietnam War refugees newly settled in a relocation camp at Fort Chaffee.
■ April 25-May 20, 2018: The Hound of the Baskervilles, freely adapted by Steven Canny and John Nicholson from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel.
■ June 8-17, 2018: Arkansas New Play Festival, workshops and performances in Fayetteville and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville.
Season tickets are $67-$175, depending on the number of shows in the subscription packages, with discounts for students and patrons under 30. Call (479) 571-2785 or visit theatre2.org/subscribe.