Tag: Arts and Humanities

Philanthropy

Ali Center to disclose ‘significant’ gift this morning

Muhammad Ali Center logoThe 10-year-old museum downtown said the contribution will “continue the special legacy of the late, great Muhammad Ali.”

The Muhammad Ali Center will announce the gift and introduce the donor at a 10:30 a.m. press conference at the 144 N. Sixth St. museum. CEO Donald Lassere and Mayor Greg Fischer will be there.

The Louisville native, prize fighter and humanitarian died June 3 in Phoenix, his primary home, after battling Parkinson’s disease for decades. He was 74. Ali was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery a week later amid a celebrity-studded memorial service.

The $80 million Ali museum has struggled at times, with frequent top staff changes, occasional budget issues, and facility setbacks that included long delays in opening an adjoining plaza and a pedway connection to the Riverfront Plaza/Belvedere, The Courier-Journal said in advance of the center’s 10th anniversary in November.

Diversions

Yo-Yo Ma’s biggest fear isn’t stage fright

Yo Yo MaThe world-renowned cellist, who’s performing with the Louisville Orchestra in October, tackles Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire today. A sampling reveals a recurring theme:

What is your greatest fear? Very large bugs.

If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be? A bird. I could travel for free and then eat the bugs.

Ma will play Oct. 30 at 4:30 p.m. at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts. Tickets are $50 to $400, for a post-concert party  at the Muhammad Ali Center with cocktails, dinner, and live entertainment to celebrate the 2016-2017 season opening.

The orchestra has been led by music director Teddy Abrams since 2014. Read more about the orchestra’s history.

Diversions

Starting Wednesday in Louisville: Phantom of the Opera, in five big numbers

No, not musical numbers — these kind:

e1933e936ff5cd965410c8e359a8ea1b_400x400U.S. tours since the blockbuster musical debuted 30 years ago in London have grossed more than $1.5 billion and played 216 engagements in Louisville and 76 other cities for more than 14,500 performances before 31 million people, according to The Voice-Tribune.

It opens at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday for a 12-day run. Tickets are $54 to $114. It’s the longest running show in Broadway history by a wide margin, and celebrated its 10,000th Broadway performance on Feb. 11, 2012 — the first production ever to do so.

Related: The U.S. tour’s Twitter feed, and the production’s worldwide site.

Philanthropy

WFPL’s Louisville Public Media announces $7 million capital campaign
Louisvillel Public Media building
Louisville Public Media’s headquarters.

Money raised by the Raise Your Voice campaign will go toward renovating the non-profit’s headquarters and studios at 619 S. Fourth St. in Louisville; technology upgrades, and programming improvements. The building was last remodeled 20 years ago. The campaign has already raised $5.3 million. Here’s the press release.

The campaign committee’s co-chairs are District 8 councilman-elect Brandon Coan and his wife, Summer Auerbach, who manages the Rainbow Blossom natural foods company started by her parents, Rob and Pumpkin Auerbach. The other co-chairs are philanthropist and former Brown-Forman executive Bill Juckett and his wife Barbara Juckett. Other committee members are Tyler Allen, Charlie Barnsley, Todd Lowe, Ron Murphy, Ben Ruiz, Lee Smith and Peter Wayne. Naming rights range from $250 for a coffee station to $500,000 for an entire studio.

Founded in 1950, Louisville Public Media also is the parent of Classical 90.5 WUOL and alternative music station 91.9 WFPK Radio Louisville.

Books

Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel chronicles the star-crossed romance between Louisville debutante Daisy Fay Buchanan and a local soldier, the future tycoon Jay Gatsby. In this passage, her friend Jordan Baker is recalling their Louisville childhood among the well-to-do gentry, living in mansions ringing verdant Cherokee Park in 1917.

Daisy Fay was just 18, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night.

She had a début after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June, she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars, and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at $350,000.*

* $4.2 million in 2016 dollars.

Related: Of the five film adaptations, Boulevard likes Baz Luhrmann’s boisterous 2013 version best.