259 stories by "Chloe Veltman"
Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia 2002 trilogy of plays and Abel Gance's 1927 biopic Napoleon have a great deal in common: They both portray famous revolutionary European figures and explor…
"We're toughing it out," the young woman in the gold lamé dress said to my friend and I during intermission yesterday evening at the opening night of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker at The Cu…
It was a cold and rainy night in San Francisco and Pierre-Laurent Aimard managed to make it pour and freeze indoors.The French pianist's recital at The Herbst Theatre under the auspices of S…
Jamie Gahlon asked arts journalist Chloe Veltman to answer some questions about criticism. She kindly obliged.What is the state of arts criticism today, as compared to a decade ago?There is …
Some brief notes from a weekend of fantastic culture-vulturing...1. John Logan's Red at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Les Waters: I am going to miss Les Waters. The talented direct…
Terry Riley is a composer and performer with a taste for understatement.Halfway through a piano recital the great American composer and pianist gave on Friday night as part of San Francisco'…
Helene Whitson is a sometime guest on VoiceBox, my weekly public radio and podcast series about the art of the human voice and the best of the vocal music scene. A choral wonk par excellence…
I am in New Orleans during one of its very few "quiet" periods. Quiet is a relative concept, especially in The Big Easy, where music and booze flow every night of the week, working life be h…
Today is the final day of the SXSW Festival. If I ever attend this event again, I would do two things differently: I would come to the music festival without a badge and I would most likely …
Band, bands and more bands.Even though yesterday's rampaging around the South by Southwest Festival was full of fine music (the highlight being a lunchtime gig by the Seattle-based gypsy roc…
It's clear to me that SXSW was never meant to be a trade show packed with tech goons on iPads hawking impenetrable and useless products that allow human beings to do things like rate their c…
It's a truism that the best things in life and art often occur as a result of luck.Yesterday's galavanting around Austin during the South by Southwest Festival palpably brought this home as …
A few journalism-related ideas that stuck with me from yesterday's panel presentations here at SXSW:1. People aren't buying newspapers because that are considered to be trusted sources of in…
Certainly one of the most gorgeous pieces of body art I've seen on any man. Sighted at a bar in downtown Austin amid a throng of noisy tech-art geeks showing off their wares. The owner said …
I've only been at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, TX for two days, but I've seen enough panel discussions to know that the festival's system for running this core component of its…
Jake Shapiro, a former public radio producer and now the founder of PRX, an online marketplace for the distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming, presented a thoughtful…
I'm in Austin for my first ever visit to the South by Southwest Festival. The weather is ghastly and it's a clusterfuck. But I'm having a great time so far nevertheless. Caught an interestin…
I just saw two plays in two different towns over the course of two days which featured two actors dressed up in bear costumes. And in both plays, the bears performed dance routines. Seriousl…
We're getting beyond treating classical music performances in more causal settings like bars, art galleries, bookstores and dance clubs as if they were bold and exciting new phenomena. These…
As I watched Steven Epp and Christopher Bayes' stage adaptation of Moliere's A Doctor in Spite of Himself at Berkeley Repertory Theatre last night, tedious memories of sitting through countl…
In 2007, a group of theatre professionals in the Bay Area, me among them, decided it was time to get some rigorous, honest discussion going about the local performing arts scene beyond the d…
Beginnings and endings are very important in art, as in life. The start of something and its concluding moments are the moments in performances tend to make the greatest impact on us. What h…
The difference between camp and Camp was very much in evidence last night at the San Francisco Ballet.The crucial factor distinguishing the small version of the word from the one with the ca…
Last night's remarkable performance by Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Davies Symphony Hall as part of the San Francisco Symphony's American Orchestras series for its cen…
An informative and disturbing 2006 article about the bird smuggling in Serbia by Djordje Padejski, a colleague of mine on the Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford this year, included the…
