ArtCraft

The Slant Culture Theatre Festival opened over the weekend with a full slate of productions, workshops, special guests and events (read the overview). Five Louisville theater companies joined together to produce a repertory festival featuring five mainstage plays and about a dozen special events.

Given the sheer numbers every Christmas movie is up against, it's a wonder any of them end up in the holiday canon. We know and love "It's a Wonderful Life" and "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," and it seems as though "Love, Actually" has inched its way into new holiday classic territory, but what of "The Star Wars Holiday Special" or, indeed, most of the fourth quarter content on the Hallmark Channel? There's a lot of noise to cut through, but if a holiday movie makes it to the top with "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" and "Miracle on 34th Street," it stays there. 

The Speed Art Museum has closed its doors for a$50 million renovation and expansion project, but that doesn’t mean the institution will go to sleep for the next three years. One community outreach initiative launches this month. The "Art & Dialogues" series will bring influential curators, collectors and critics from the modern and contemporary art world to Louisville for public lectures and university visits.

Actors Theatre of Louisville has announced the lineup for the 37th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays. The festival opens February 27 and runs through April 7. With the exception of the commissioned apprentice anthology, the full-length world premieres are all written by playwrights making their Humana Festival debuts. 

For a live interview with Actors Theatre literary manager Sarah Lunnie on this year's Humana Festival selections, tune in to 89.3 FM Monday at 1:30 p.m.

This week on our audio diary series "The Big Break," Louisville Ballet trainee Claire Horrocks gets a nice surprise during her last public performance. Actors Theatre apprentice Samantha Beach closes "Dracula" without ever going on for the role she understudied, but she already knows she'll take the stage in "A Christmas Story" during student matinees. In "Cinderella," Kentucky Opera studio artist Brad Raymond learns there's no such thing as a small role. 

When Bellarmine University theater professor and playwright Carlos Chavarria decided to write a play about Frida Kahlo, he immersed himself in the celebrated surrealist painter's life and work.

“I submerged myself for a year and a half in Frida, Frida, Frida," says Chavarria, who heads up Bellarmine's theater program. "My life has been Frida ever since.” 

After opening its season with Puccini's beautiful yet tragic "Tosca" and following up with Benjamin Britten's somber "The Prodigal Son," the Kentucky Opera moves to the lighter side of the genre with Jules Massenet's "Cinderella." Directed by John de los Santos, the opera follows the storyline from the classic fairy tale most know and love from the Disney animated classic—mean stepmother and stepsisters oppress a beautiful and sweet girl who is rescued by a charming Prince with the help of a fairy godmother and a forgotten glass slipper.

Louisville author Kirby Gann's third novel "Ghosting" was named to Publisher's Weekly's 2012 top fiction book list. 

Gann is managing editor at Louisville's Sarabande Books and teaches fiction writing in the Spalding University Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. He is the author of "The Barbarian Parade" and "Our Napoleon in Rags," also set in Kentucky. 

The Bard's Town Theatre opened its production of "44 Plays for 44 Presidents" last night.