Greek Fest and more things to do in New Orleans
🇬🇷 New Orleans Greek Fest celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend.
It's Friday through Sunday on the grounds of the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral.
Look for Greek food, dancing, music and shopping, along with cathedral tours. More info.
🪁 Learn to fly a kite at NORD's annual Kite & Drone Day at Milne Playground on Saturday. Details.
👙 Party at the pool. The Rib Room is having a free rooftop shindig on Saturday. Details.
🎤 Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons are at the Saenger on Saturday. Tickets.
🎉 Rave with Shrek at The Fillmore on Saturday night. Tickets.
🎶 " Billy vs. Elton," a tribute to Billy Joel and Elton John, is at the Jefferson Performing Arts Center on Sunday. Tickets.
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Chicago Tribune
5 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Review: ‘Kimberly Akimbo' arrives in Chicago, a moving musical about a teenager facing mortality
At the Tony Awards this year, a delightfully quirky little musical called 'Maybe Happy Ending' beat out big competitors and walked off with the big prize. Although it's about family dynamics rather than robotic romance, 'Kimberly Akimbo,' a similarly small and unusual show that won best musical in 2023, paved its way. Nearly three years after its Broadway bow, the touring version of director Jessica Stone's original production of that Jeanine Tesori tuner has finally reached downtown Chicago. Carolee Carmello, who has graced this city's stage several times with outstanding success in Stephen Sondheim musicals and elsewhere, is on the road in the title role originally played by Victoria Clark. And the rest of the nine-person cast includes at least two long-standing romantic couples, which might explain why much of the cast seems to be so close up there. 'Kimberly Akimbo,' the musical, is based on a play of the same name by David Lindsay-Abaire, which I first reviewed at A Red Orchid Theatre back in 2005, with Roslyn Alexander playing the lead. As Broadway fans will know, the show is about a teenager with progeria, a rare medical condition that causes the human body to age at over four times its normal rate. When she is 16, as she is in this show, Kimberly's appearance suggests a woman in her 60s. And, as logic would suggest, life also blossoms and expires for Kimberly at a far accelerated rate. Most of us, of course, don't know our likelihood of dying early so the play, and thus the musical, with book and lyrics by its original author, allows us to see life through the eyes of someone who knows more than most of its unavoidable brevity and the importance of living in the present, rather than the past or the future. In the musical, Kimberly's schoolmates (played by Grace Capeless, Skye Alyssa Friedman, Darron Hayes and Pierce Wheeler) become a little Greek chorus of show-choir nerds, trying to reconcile their adolescent angst with the problems faced by the young woman aging before their eyes. Kimberly has yet more to deal with, too. Her family is composed of narcissists: a mostly clueless mom, Pattie (Laura Woyasz), an alcoholic dad, Buddy (Jim Hogan) and a whack-a-doodle aunt, Debra (Emily Koch), who interjects a criminal caper plot into the days around Kimberly's Sweet 16 birthday. I greatly enjoyed 'Kimberly Akimbo' on Broadway and this first national tour is in excellent shape. It's never especially helpful to most people to compare performances, but if you were to twist my arm, I'd say that whereas Clark focused intently on achieving the inner life and spirit of a teenager in her portrayal, Carmello leans more into the character's sense of her own mortality. Both takes strike me as legitimate, although they are quite different. Carmello's Kimberly is a little sadder and more careworn, although she certainly also makes the final carpe diem number work quite beautifully and, as her perhaps boyfriend, Seth, Miguel Gil is a true, thoroughly guileless delight. I'm a big Tesori fan. Lyric Opera audiences heard her extraordinarily potent music quite recently in the opera 'Blue,' with the stirring Tazewell Thompson libretto. Although she clearly remembers what it is like to be young and have fun, Tesori's 'Kimberly Akimbo' score makes no easy choices; it focus intently on the show's complex emotional landscape as Kimberly strives to teach those far older than herself, and wishes for that one great adventure we'd all like to have before we go. Review: 'Kimberly Akimbo' (3.5 stars) When: Through June 22 Where: CIBC Theatre, 18 W. Monroe St. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes Tickets: $35-$125 at
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
This painting survived the Beirut explosion. Here's how conservators restored it
After a long-forgotten painting of Hercules and Omphale was punctured by glass and coated in debris during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, the monumental oil-on-canvas, painstakingly restored over more than three years, has gone on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In the wake of the tragedy, the painting, dated to the 1630s, was finally properly attributed to the great Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter who has become one of the few female artists of her era to be recognized today. Having passed only between three private collections over four centuries, the 'Artemisia's Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece' exhibition marks the first time the painting has ever been on public display. The canvas depicts the Greek mythological hero Hercules, who was enslaved by the Queen of Lydia, Omphale, and made to do tasks traditionally associated with women, such as weaving — in Gentileschi's composition he raises a spindle of wool — before they fall in love. Gentileschi often gave her mythological and Biblical female figures a striking sense of agency, such as her most widely known scene of the widow Judith violently beheading Assyrian general Holofernes. In the newly attributed painting, she toys with subverted gender roles as her lovelorn protagonists close the gap between them, their pearlescent skin adorned in sumptuous draped fabrics. For decades, 'Hercules and Omphale' hung in the Sursock Palace, a private and opulent mid-19th century townhouse owned by Beirut's Sursock family for five generations. The explosion in the Lebanese capital, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands, caused devastation to the building and its owners, with the matriarch of the family, 98-year-old Yvonne Sursock Cochrane, eventually succumbing to her injuries. A receipt from the family showed that the painting entered the Sursock collection from an art dealer in Naples, where Gentileschi lived the later years of her life. At the time of the explosion, the artist's then-unknown masterpiece was hanging in front of a window, according to the Getty, which exploded through the canvas. The broken glass riddled it with holes and a wide, L-shaped tear through Hercules' knee. 'It was really severe. It's probably the worst damage I've ever seen,' said Ulrich Birkmaier, the Getty Museum's senior conservator of painting, in a phone call with CNN. Beyond the sudden violence to the painting and its frame, the artwork had already suffered flaking paint, cracks and cupping from humid conditions, Birkmaier said He added that Gentileschi's vision had been further marred by discolored varnish and overpainting from a previous restoration attempt centuries earlier. When Birkmaier saw it for the first time in Beirut, one year after the explosion, he gathered debris that had collected behind its surface in case the miniscule paint fragments clinging to the glass could be puzzled back together in Los Angeles. Though mended, cleaned, and carefully restored with analysis from X-rays and XRF mapping, the painting has been rehabilitated into its luminous and poetic intent, though, in Birkamaier's view, it will never look quite as it did. 'You'll always see some scars of the damage,' he said. If not for the explosion, 'Hercules and Omphale' may have continued to be an unidentified work, only considered a Gentileschi painting by a Lebanese art historian who had seen it decades earlier. In the early 1990s, Gregory Buchakjian was a graduate student at Sorbonne University in Paris and writing his thesis the Sursock collection. It was then that he made the connection between 'Hercules and Omphale' and another painting, 'Penitent Magdalene,' to Gentileschi, but he didn't pursue publishing his research more widely, according to the arts publication Hyperallergic. In an article for Apollo magazine in September 2020, Buchakjian attributed both paintings to the Italian artist, leading to wider acknowledgement of his research and consensus over her authorship. Over the course of her career, Gentileschi, the daughter of the Mannerist painter Orazio Gentileschi, was commissioned by top artistic patrons — the Medici family in Italy as well as monarchs Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England — before being lost to history following her death in 1653. Some 60 paintings or more exist today, though a few have been contested as copies or collaborations. 'She was very, very famous during her day, but all but forgotten in the centuries after, which is true for many Baroque painters, but for women, of course, particularly,' Birkmaier said. Rediscovered in the 20th century and amplified by the 1970s feminist movement, Gentileschi's resurgence helped pave the way for researching and foregrounding female artists of the past. Still, there are too few technical studies of her work, according to Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, compared to her male counterparts. The Getty's report provides insight into her techniques and materials and how she revised the composition over time, such as altering the position of Hercules' head and gaze to strengthen the emotional charge, which is 'very much Artemisia,' Gasparotto said. 'We are gradually building better knowledge of her way of painting, but I think we need more, especially because she's a painter that changes quite a lot in terms of stylistic development over the course of her career,' he explained. 'She's an artist who looks a lot at what is going on around her, and she absorbs (it).' Gentileschi trained with her father, but was also influenced by her Baroque peers and predecessors, such as Caravaggio and Guercino. She traveled widely in Europe, trained in Venetian techniques and adopted other skills from Naples, where she took up residency later in life and set up a workshop. Her time in Naples in the 1630s has been considered 'less interesting' by scholars, Gasparotto said, but he disagrees — and can now cite 'Hercules and Omphale' as further proof. 'Her paintings grow in size. They are monumental paintings, ambitious compositions, multi-figure compositions,' Gasparotto said. He believes Hercules in this work is her most accomplished male figure — 'especially for a painter who couldn't study male nudes after a living model, because being a woman, she wasn't allowed to do that.' When the glass tore through Gentileschi's painting, it missed many of the painting's focal points, though part of Hercules' nose and eye suffered damage. That was the trickiest area to reconstruct, Birkmaier said, but he was able to see Gentileschi's earlier draft of Hercules' head in the X-ray to aid in reconstruction. He called in help from a friend: Federico Castelluccio, the Italian American actor best known for his role as Furio in 'The Sopranos,' who is also a painter and collector of Baroque art (and who once discovered a $10 million Guercino painting). (The TV series aired on HBO, which shares Warner Bros. Discovery as a parent company with CNN.) 'He assisted me with another conservation treatment years ago. And so he painted the head of Hercules for me and suggested what the eye that was missing there should look like,' Birkmaier recalled. 'And so I based my reconstruction on that, and it was very helpful.' Restoring an old work doesn't mean making it like new, but maintaining the 'decay from time' that occurs with a 400-year-old painting, Birkmaier said. As he and other specialists gradually worked on the painting, it began to reveal itself. 'You have this painting in pieces, and all you see is the damage and the discolored varnish and the old restoration and the big holes, and then little by little, as you work on it… the image emerges again,' he recalled. 'It's a really interesting process of discovery. I wanted to do her justice.' Some of the identifying features of Gentileschi's work seen in 'Hercules and Omphale' include her renderings of fabrics and jewelry and the subtle gestures she repeats across canvases. 'It's very poetic the way she turns, she turns (Omphale's) head, this upright gaze,' Birkmaier said, explaining that many of her female figures mimic that tilt. 'In the other paintings that we have on loan from her, it's the same exact (position).' It can be seen, too, in 'Susanna and the Elders,' from 1638-40, another recent discovery of Gentileschi's that is in the UK's Royal Collection Trust, painted during her time at the court of Charles I with her father. In 2023, it was identified after a century in storage, deteriorating and misattributed to the 'French School,' according to Artnet. Another rediscovered Gentileschi work, a portrait of David with the head of Goliath, will headline a Sotheby's auction in July. 'There's definitely a lot of room for discovery,' Gasparotto said, though he cautioned that attribution is not always clear-cut considering her workshop is still not fully understood, and she tended to work in conjunction with landscape artists later in life. 'I don't know how many will emerge from museum storages,' he said. 'But within the market, within private collections, there might be other paintings by her that will emerge in the upcoming years.'
CNN
10 hours ago
- CNN
This painting survived the Beirut explosion. Here's how conservators restored it
After a long-forgotten painting of Hercules and Omphale was punctured by glass and coated in debris during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, the monumental oil-on-canvas, painstakingly restored over more than three years, has gone on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In the wake of the tragedy, the painting, dated to the 1630s, was finally properly attributed to the great Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter who has become one of the few female artists of her era to be recognized today. Having passed only between three private collections over four centuries, the 'Artemisia's Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece'exhibition marks the first time the painting has ever been on public display. The canvas depicts the Greek mythological hero Hercules, who was enslaved by the Queen of Lydia, Omphale, and made to do tasks traditionally associated with women, such as weaving — in Gentileschi's composition he raises a spindle of wool — before they fall in love. Gentileschi often gave her mythological and Biblical female figures a striking sense of agency, such as her most widely known scene of the widow Judith violently beheading Assyrian general Holofernes. In the newly attributed painting, she toys with subverted gender roles as her lovelorn protagonists close the gap between them, their pearlescent skin adorned in sumptuous draped fabrics. For decades, 'Hercules and Omphale' hung in the Sursock Palace, a private and opulent mid-19th century townhouse owned by Beirut's Sursock family for five generations. The explosion in the Lebanese capital, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands, caused devastation to the building and its owners, with the matriarch of the family, 98-year-old Yvonne Sursock Cochrane, eventually succumbing to her injuries. A receipt from the family showed that the painting entered the Sursock collection from an art dealer in Naples, where Gentileschi lived the later years of her life. At the time of the explosion, the artist's then-unknown masterpiece was hanging in front of a window, according to the Getty, which exploded through the canvas. The broken glass riddled it with holes and a wide, L-shaped tear through Hercules' knee. 'It was really severe. It's probably the worst damage I've ever seen,' said Ulrich Birkmaier, the Getty Museum's senior conservator of painting, in a phone call with CNN. Beyond the sudden violence to the painting and its frame, the artwork had already suffered flaking paint, cracks and cupping from humid conditions, Birkmaier said He added that Gentileschi's vision had been further marred by discolored varnish and overpainting from a previous restoration attempt centuries earlier. When Birkmaier saw it for the first time in Beirut, one year after the explosion, he gathered debris that had collected behind its surface in case the miniscule paint fragments clinging to the glass could be puzzled back together in Los Angeles. Though mended, cleaned, and carefully restored with analysis from X-rays and XRF mapping, the painting has been rehabilitated into its luminous and poetic intent, though, in Birkamaier's view, it will never look quite as it did. 'You'll always see some scars of the damage,' he said. If not for the explosion, 'Hercules and Omphale' may have continued to be an unidentified work, only considered a Gentileschi painting by a Lebanese art historian who had seen it decades earlier. In the early 1990s, Gregory Buchakjian was a graduate student at Sorbonne University in Paris and writing his thesis the Sursock collection. It was then that he made the connection between 'Hercules and Omphale' and another painting, 'Penitent Magdalene,' to Gentileschi, but he didn't pursue publishing his research more widely, according to the arts publication Hyperallergic. In an article for Apollo magazine in September 2020, Buchakjian attributed both paintings to the Italian artist, leading to wider acknowledgement of his research and consensus over her authorship. Over the course of her career, Gentileschi, the daughter of the Mannerist painter Orazio Gentileschi, was commissioned by top artistic patrons — the Medici family in Italy as well as monarchs Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England — before being lost to history following her death in 1653. Some 60 paintings or more exist today, though a few have been contested as copies or collaborations. 'She was very, very famous during her day, but all but forgotten in the centuries after, which is true for many Baroque painters, but for women, of course, particularly,' Birkmaier said. Rediscovered in the 20th century and amplified by the 1970s feminist movement, Gentileschi's resurgence helped pave the way for researching and foregrounding female artists of the past. Still, there are too few technical studies of her work, according to Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, compared to her male counterparts. The Getty's report provides insight into her techniques and materials and how she revised the composition over time, such as altering the position of Hercules' head and gaze to strengthen the emotional charge, which is 'very much Artemisia,' Gasparotto said. 'We are gradually building better knowledge of her way of painting, but I think we need more, especially because she's a painter that changes quite a lot in terms of stylistic development over the course of her career,' he explained. 'She's an artist who looks a lot at what is going on around her, and she absorbs (it).' Gentileschi trained with her father, but was also influenced by her Baroque peers and predecessors, such as Caravaggio and Guercino. She traveled widely in Europe, trained in Venetian techniques and adopted other skills from Naples, where she took up residency later in life and set up a workshop. Her time in Naples in the 1630s has been considered 'less interesting' by scholars, Gasparotto said, but he disagrees — and can now cite 'Hercules and Omphale' as further proof. 'Her paintings grow in size. They are monumental paintings, ambitious compositions, multi-figure compositions,' Gasparotto said. He believes Hercules in this work is her most accomplished male figure — 'especially for a painter who couldn't study male nudes after a living model, because being a woman, she wasn't allowed to do that.' When the glass tore through Gentileschi's painting, it missed many of the painting's focal points, though part of Hercules' nose and eye suffered damage. That was the trickiest area to reconstruct, Birkmaier said, but he was able to see Gentileschi's earlier draft of Hercules' head in the X-ray to aid in reconstruction. He called in help from a friend: Federico Castelluccio, the Italian American actor best known for his role as Furio in 'The Sopranos,' who is also a painter and collector of Baroque art (and who once discovered a $10 million Guercino painting). (The TV series aired on HBO, which shares Warner Bros. Discovery as a parent company with CNN.) 'He assisted me with another conservation treatment years ago. And so he painted the head of Hercules for me and suggested what the eye that was missing there should look like,' Birkmaier recalled. 'And so I based my reconstruction on that, and it was very helpful.' Restoring an old work doesn't mean making it like new, but maintaining the 'decay from time' that occurs with a 400-year-old painting, Birkmaier said. As he and other specialists gradually worked on the painting, it began to reveal itself. 'You have this painting in pieces, and all you see is the damage and the discolored varnish and the old restoration and the big holes, and then little by little, as you work on it… the image emerges again,' he recalled. 'It's a really interesting process of discovery. I wanted to do her justice.' Some of the identifying features of Gentileschi's work seen in 'Hercules and Omphale' include her renderings of fabrics and jewelry and the subtle gestures she repeats across canvases. 'It's very poetic the way she turns, she turns (Omphale's) head, this upright gaze,' Birkmaier said, explaining that many of her female figures mimic that tilt. 'In the other paintings that we have on loan from her, it's the same exact (position).' It can be seen, too, in 'Susanna and the Elders,' from 1638-40, another recent discovery of Gentileschi's that is in the UK's Royal Collection Trust, painted during her time at the court of Charles I with her father. In 2023, it was identified after a century in storage, deteriorating and misattributed to the 'French School,' according to Artnet. Another rediscovered Gentileschi work, a portrait of David with the head of Goliath, will headline a Sotheby's auction in July. 'There's definitely a lot of room for discovery,' Gasparotto said, though he cautioned that attribution is not always clear-cut considering her workshop is still not fully understood, and she tended to work in conjunction with landscape artists later in life. 'I don't know how many will emerge from museum storages,' he said. 'But within the market, within private collections, there might be other paintings by her that will emerge in the upcoming years.'
