Southern Season: Charleston’s Spoleto Festival USA

Charleston, South Carolina, is situated on a peninsula between the slow-moving Ashley and Cooper Rivers, on land lush with mossy live oak trees, spiky palmettos, and bougainvillea vines. Before the violent disruption of the Civil War, Charleston’s deep-dredged harbor made it by far the richest city in America. It was awash with cash from the trade in cotton, rice, and, most profitably, enslaved Africans. The leading Charlestonians were plantation-owners who lavished their fortunes on elaborate townhouses where they spent the high social season each steamy summer escaping the even more steamy malarial swamps of their country homes.

Following the war, emancipation, and the resulting collapse of the plantation system, the city experienced a severe economic decline lasting decades. The historic houses that lined the picturesque Bowery and most wealthy areas south of Broad Street faced neither improvements nor the wrecking ball. As a consequence, Charleston remained one of the most extraordinary examples of period architecture in America—a charming, second-tier town in need of economic development—when, in the 1970s, composer Gian Carlo Menotti came searching for a place to locate a new international arts festival. He was hoping to create a new world counterpart to his successful Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, which he had started in 1958.

In Charleston, Menotti found a walkable downtown with abundant charm, a balmy climate, a welcoming social set, and gloriously unspoiled great houses. He also found the College of Charleston, centrally located, where dorm rooms could be had on the cheap during the off season for orchestra musicians and chorus members. The Spoleto USA Festival was launched in 1977 during the short period in May and June, just after the dorms emptied and before the onset of the oppressive summer heat.

This was the festival’s thirty-fourth season. Like Charleston, the festival has gone through its own lavish times with new works by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Martha Clarke, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg. The festival also had its own protracted and nasty civil war: after ousting the general manager, Nigel Redden, in 1991, Menotti resigned bitterly in 1993. And after a couple of difficult years the talented Redden returned and led the festival through a reconstruction period to fiscal stability. Now, like the rest of the country, Spoleto is being tested by the economic downturn, at the same time that it is redefining itself in order to appeal to the changing demands of younger audiences. Despite those challenges, the 2010 festival proved to be a remarkably resilient and creative assemblage of worthy performances—operatic, theatrical, dance, musical—along with exhibitions and lectures. It is one of the most lively and engaging festivals in the world.

The focus this year was on the twenty-million-dollar renovation of the historic Dock Street Theatre, reputedly the oldest theater in continuous operation in the U.S. (the current theater is a 1937 version on the site of the 1736 original structure). Three years in the making and overseen by architect Joe Schmidt, the restoration basically added sound-proof windows, hurricane-proofed the structure, and spiffed up the surfaces. For the theater’s re-opening, the festival presented Flora: Or Hob in the Well, a ballad opera that had been performed in the theater in 1736, the year of its opening. Composer Neely Bruce was commissioned to complete the fragmented score. While not an operatic masterpiece for the ages, Flora was the perfect vehicle for this re-opening, bringing to mind the rebellious spirit of the eighteenth century.

Ballad operas were constructed of popular songs loosely strung together with spoken dialogue. They were subversive entertainment during the pivotal Enlightenment years, as the public dialogue and culture increasingly reflected the outrage that would lead to revolution in the American colonies and the bloodier, less conclusive overthrow of the Bourbons in France. It is impossible to overstate what an unsettling time it was, as the previously unquestioned privileges of the aristocracy gave way to the newly-conceived rights of every man. As with many...