Kentucky Arts and Culture

The Lexington Opera House's 2013-14 Broadway Live season will open with one of the series' greatest successes and will close with a show that is up for the Tony Award for best musical.OK, Bring it On: The Musical isn't going to win the Tony. But its inclusion marks a milestone for the series, which has edged closer to current Broadway programming each year. Opera House general manager Luanne Franklin says the stronger lineups of shows are a direct result of the series' programming strategy in recent years. Read more...

An initiative in Lexington adds meaning to the phrase ‘growing local artists.’  Learning a lesson from the agriculture community, the Lexington Art League is launching its own C-S-A.  Typically, C-S-A is short for Community Supported Agriculture.  But,  in this case it stands for “Community Supported Art.”

A gateway to summer opens this Memorial Day weekend at Shaker Village.  Rich Copley, who covers culture for the Lexington Herald Leader, says organizers hope younger fans will be drawn there for the annual Chamber Music Festival of Lexington.  Rich discussed it and the holiday’s other events with WEKU’s Charles Compton  Read more...

A far western Kentucky welcome center takes a top honor today.  The Whitehaven Welcome Center in McCracken County is being recognized as the state’s best maintained rest area for 2012.  Maintenance Foreman Ronnie Wilson has worked at the Paducah facility for some 26 years.  “I’ve got a bunch of good people working for me that works hard, you know, take pride in what they do.  That’s the only way you could win it, to do that,” said Wilson.

Frank X Walker visited The Academy Wednesday morning to brainwash a class of about 20 students. But what Kentucky’s poet laureate described as brainwashing was really a creative exercise to show the students that poetry is connected to the brain. Walker drew a rectangle with a circle in the middle of it on the whiteboard and asked the students to tell him what they saw.

Fifteen nominations to the National Register of Historic Places were approved today during a meeting of the Kentucky Historic Preservation Review Board at Metro Development Center in Louisville.

Their favorite key boardist is honored this weekend by the Lexington Singers.   Jay Flippin, who’s also well known in academic circles, often accompanies the region’s choral groups.  So, Rich Copley, who covers culture for the Lexington Herald Leader, says Flippin’s work is the focus of a Saturday afternoon concert.  Read more...

Everything is coming together financially for a major expansion of Lexington’s Living Arts and Science Center. A milestone in a fundraising effort came this week.  Director Heather Lyons says school buses are a common site outside the historic Living Arts and Science Center.  She says they drop off some of the 40-thousand children and adults who visit her center each year.

Classics will bookend the Lexington Philharmonic’s next season.  Artistic Director Scott Terrell says they’ll start in September with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.”   And then, to finish up the season, Terrell will conduct Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “The seminal work to end the year, which is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.  It will be my first Beethoven 9, so as a conductor and student of music, there are pillars that one takes on, that is one of them,” said Terrell.

Oprah Winfrey once explained this way her outlook on life after rising from a difficult childhood to a status of wealth and influence: "Though I am grateful for the blessings of wealth, it hasn't changed who I am," she said in her magazine. "My feet are still on the ground. I'm just wearing better shoes." Which brings the (maybe not obvious) question: What do those shoes look like? Louisville has something of an answer. The Muhammad Ali Center is exhibiting about a dozen pairs of shoes from famous and significant people; the Right Foot exhibit an addition to the traveling Global Shoes project of shoes worn by people from around the world meant to spotlight cultures through footwear.

When I moved to Louisville as a freshman English major, one of the first bits of trivia I learned about my new city was that Daisy’s house from “The Great Gatsby” was right down the street. Daisy Buchanan, the It Girl at the heart of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, was socialite Daisy Fay when poor soldier Jay Gatsby courted her during a brief stint at Louisville’s Camp Taylor, where Gatsby – like the author himself – trained during the first World War.

The Evan Williams Bourbon Experience, a $10 million tourism center for bourbon maker Heaven Hill, will become the eighth distillery on the Kentucky Bourbon Trail. The five-story Evan Williams center, on Main Street in downtown Louisville, is scheduled to open in October. On Thursday, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer toasted the news, alongside bourbon industry representatives.

More than 110,000 fans are expected at Churchill Downs Friday for the 139th running of the Kentucky Oaks. Oaks Day has long been considered “Louisville’s Day at the Races,” and in recent years has also become platform to heighten awareness of breast cancer and raise money for research.