The Mobile Rundown

In my own eyes, Mobile, Alabama is not as sleepy a town as the citizens think. In terms of culture, perhaps we have a little of everything (but could do well with much more). Whenever I travel to New York and meet the usual gaggle of arts critics, they always ask, “What’s in Mobile?” And I give them the rundown.

Mobile has it’s own ballet company, a 20 year old organization that runs 3 performances a season, including “The Nutcracker.”Almost all of their performances are choreographed by their artistic director, Winthrop Corey who has performed with Rudolf Nureyev.

The Mobile Opera performs on average, three performances a year, and I say “performances” because one Is usually an American musical (and sadly so, not that I have anything against American Musicals, but Mobile is rife with them…which leads me to my next point…) Mobile has about 4 or 5 theatre groups which do a little of everything–drama, comedy, musicals– and one Children’s theatre. The university group Theatre USA puts on, what I think to be, the best season of shows each year, and I am always in attendance. Jumping back to the opera, their music director and conductor Jerome Shannon was recently asked to leave his position (the press kept calling it the “ten year itch”).

The Mobile Symphony gives a concert a month, excluding three months during the summer. 3 pops concerts, one in August, one in June and one in December (for Christmas), and the rest is their normal programming. They used to have a very cool chamber music series, which has since been cancelled. I take violin lessons with their co-concertmaster, and have interviewed a lot of the players in some way for articles. Their music director, Scott Speck, is a super enthusiastic Boston-native who talks a lot during performances (it’s a good thing) and shares his time with the West Shore Symphony in Muskegon, Michigan. Last spring, Itzhak Perlman took the stage with the group and next year Joshua Bell will be performing.

Where visual arts stand, Mobile has a host of tiny galleries, and two big ones that get the most attention, Space 301 a contemporary gallery downtown and the Mobile Museum of Art (MMOA). The director at MMOA happens to the be the husband of a good friend of mine, and they have the most delightful family. He and his wife absolutely love art, their house is full of it, and supposedly they have the largest collection of pottery in the whole southeast.

Space 301 is very chic, and housed in a temporary space as they prepare a state-of-the-art gallery in their original location. Their interim curator Mr. McCann, passed away early this summer, which was sad news for me, I had just met him that spring and we sat around the empty gallery talking about arts criticism and he gave me a grand tour of their temporary space. In addition to those two, we have some privately owned galleries that participate in a monthly art walk, recently slammed in the Press-Register for being “free food and bad art.”

I’m going on my fifth year of covering the arts in Mobile, and part of this blog will be asking questions about the Mobile arts climate, and elsewhere. One topic that greatly interests me is the “death of classical music debate” spinning itself like a broken record and getting far less press than it deserves. The dance worlds’ struggle interests me too, and you can bet I’ll be devoting a lot of internet space to both topics.