Sean Ulmer, executive director of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, and board member for the Iowa Cultural Corridor Alliance (ICCA), has some suggestions for fun activities for all ages. Most take place in the cool comfort of air conditioning. He also reminds us that his organization, the Museum of Art has free admission all …
Category: Culture Crawl
Culture Crawl 265 “The Last Festival”
2017 will be the final year for the Irish District Music and Arts Festival in Northeast Cedar Rapids, but that doesn’t mean the festival is ending. Next year, it will be renamed in honor of the new College District neighborhood that now encompasses the area. Perry and the Pumpers and New Orleans’ Honey Swamp Band …
Culture Crawl 264 “She Writes How Many Books a Year?”
The public libraries in Cedar Rapids, Marion, and Hiawatha present bestselling authors in a free reading and signing event each year in the “Out Loud” author series. June 16, it’s poet and Newbury Award-winner Kwame Alexander. June 23, Debbie Macomber, whose books have spent 990 weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists. Admission is …
Culture Crawl 261 “Puffy Sleeves Bigger Than Human Heads”
The University of Iowa Theatre program presents Oscar Wilde’s classic farce, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” June 15-25. A comedy set against the backdrop of the rigid social structures of Nineteenth Century Britain, the play is both social commentary but also set up many of the comedic rules and structures that we see in plays, …
Culture Crawl 263 “Say His Name!”
Riverside Theatre Summer in Lower City Park opens June 9, with two plays. “Macbeth,” the well-known Shakespearean tragedy (which theatre folk do not refer to by title, because it’s supposed to be bad luck), is the first of two plays being staged. The setting and costumes for the show are inspired by World War I, …
Culture Crawl 262 “We Can Ask The Composer, Because He’s Alive!”
Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre performs “Speed Dating Tonight!” a new comic opera. Composed by Michael Ching, who coincidentally recently moved to Ames, Iowa, it’s a series of vignettes set against the backdrop of… you guessed it, speed dating. Stage director Marina Bergenstock says Ching also worked with the production on some changes that make this …
Culture Crawl 260 “A Play That’s Also a Rock Concert”
“Million Dollar Quartet” is the story of a December night at Sun Studios in Memphis, when the legendary Sam Phillips and his proteges Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins gathered for a night of music, laughter and tears, before the four musicians became the legends we know them as today. The …
Culture Crawl 259 “3 Centuries, 28 Years, 3 Months”
Tim Hankewich has waited his entire career to conduct Bach’s B Minor Mass, and when it was added to the 2016-2017 Orchestra Iowa season, he spent nearly the entirety of the summer of 2016 studying every note of the score to get it just right. Chorale Midwest joins Orchestra Iowa for “Epic Bach” June 3 …