Matt Smith News

Today, 8 September 2016, Andrew Lloyd Webber announces David Fynn is to lead the London cast of School of Rock - The Musical as wannabe rock star Dewey Finn. Lloyd Webber's West End production will begin previews at the New London Theatre on 24 October 2016 with opening night on 14 November 2016, School of Rock - The Musical is initially booking to 12 February 2017.

Andrew Lloyd Webber announces David Fynn is to lead the London cast of School of Rock - The Musical as wannabe rock star Dewey Finn.  Lloyd Webber's West End production will begin previews at the New London Theatre on 24 October 2016 with opening night on 14 November 2016, School of Rock - The Musical is initially booking to 12 February 2017.

Education, education, education - it's an inescapable topic in theatre. Recent years have seen Future Conditional (kicking off Matthew Warchus's Old Vic tenure), Matilda the Musical, The Brink, Kin, Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, and, of course, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. To celebrate back to school week, here are 10 of the best plays set in school. Get studying!

Paul Roseby, Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain (NYT) has today announced the initial line-up of alumni who will join current members on stage in London's West End on 18th September for the company's Diamond Anniversary Gala.  Taking to the stage at the Shaftesbury Theatre in celebration of the company's 60th birthday will be former members including: Matt Smith (Doctor Who), Daisy Lewis (Downton Abbey), Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey, Twenty Twelve, W1A), Timothy Dalton (James Bond), Jessica Hynes (Twenty Twelve, W1A) and Gina McKee (Our Friends in the North). More names are still to be announced.

sweetFrog has announced that it will join the national movement to fight childhood cancer by hosting Alex's Lemonade Stands in shops nationwide from August 20-31. sweetFrog locations will serve strawberry lemonade sorbet in their own unique version of a lemonade stand and collect donations to fund research projects searching for better treatments and cures for all childhood cancers.

From 7 September, Japanese/American violin star Shunske Sato will lead the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra into some rarely visited territory - historically informed Romantic music, performed on gut strings.

New York, NY, August 8, 2016 – The GrahamDeconstructed series brings audiences behind the scenes for an intimate view of Martha Graham's masterworks. On September 13 and 14, the Martha Graham Dance Company will present a rehearsal showing of Dark Meadow Suite, an arrangement of highlights from Dark Meadow (1946). 

Carnegie Hall today announced the all-star lineup for A Night of Inspiration, an evening of spiritually uplifting music on Tuesday, December 6 at 8:00 p.m. in Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage. Under the direction of multi-faceted producer, composer, and music director Ray Chew, the special guest artists will include Yolanda Adams, Dionne Warwick, Shirley Caesar, Donnie McClurkin, Richard Smallwood, Cantor Azi Schwartz, and singers from the New Faith Church from Cape Town, South Africa. Additional guest artists are to be announced. This show is being presented in partnership with Chew Entertainment – a full service production company owned by Ray and Vivian Chew.

Nashville, TN — As The Arts Company continues to celebrate its 20th Anniversary, the gallery is pleased to exhibit longtime artistic collaborator Bill Steber, by showing his classic work in Southern Blues Photography + Music. His photography explores the culture of Mississippi, and offers dynamic and insightful images of an artistic and musical world that is distinctive and vibrant. As a preview to the exhibit, Fresh Art Friday, September 2, 5:30-7pm, will feature an art talk and performance with Bill Steber and Nashville Arts Magazine Editor Paul Polycarpou. The next night, the exhibit will officially open during the First Saturday Art Crawl Downtown, September 3, 6-9pm; and Steber's band, The Jake Leg Stompers, will be performing during the Art Crawl on the Downtown Partnership Platform stage located on 5th Avenue of the Arts. The exhibit will continue through September 22, during regular gallery hours, 11-5:00 pm, Tuesday-Saturday at 215 5th Avenue of the Arts, North. For more information, visit www.theartscompany.com.

New York, NY - Sir Simon Rattle will conduct The Saint Thomas Choir of Men and Boys and Orchestra of St. Luke's in a special benefit concert to include Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughn Williams and Edward Elgar's Serenade for Strings on Sunday, September 18 at 7:00pm. The concert will be the last in a yearlong series of performances that have been offered at St Thomas Church Fifth Avenue in honor of Maestro John Scott who served as Organist and Director of Music for eleven years, and who died unexpectedly in August 2015.  Proceeds from the concert will be used to create a Saint Thomas Choir School scholarship to assist choristers in need which will be established in John Scott's memory.

The greatest French follower of Caravaggio (1571–1610), Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632) was also one of the outstanding artists in 17th-century Europe. In the years following Caravaggio's death, he emerged as one of the most original protagonists of the new, naturalistic painting. Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio will be the first monographic exhibition devoted to this artist who is little known because his career was short-lived—he died at age 41—and his works are so rare. Around 60 paintings by Valentin survive, and this exhibition will bring together 45 of them, with works coming from Rome, Vienna, Munich, Madrid, London, and Paris. Exceptionally, the Musée du Louvre, which possesses the most important and extensive body of Valentin's works, will lend all of its paintings by the artist. The exhibition is made possible by the Hata Stichting Foundation, the Placido Arango Fund, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Frank E. Richardson, and Alice Cary Brown and W.L. Lyons Brown. It is supported by an Indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée du Louvre. Not since 1973, when an exhibition of the French followers of Caravaggio was held at the French Academy in Rome and at the Grand Palais in Paris, has there been an attempt to bring the achievements of this extraordinary painter before a large public. Therefore, this exhibition will be a landmark event not only for scholars and students, but also for art lovers, who will discover one of the giants of French painting. Although he is not well known to the general public, Valentin has long been admired by those with a passion for Caravaggesque painting. His work was a reference point for the great realists of the 19th century, from Courbet to Manet, and his startlingly vibrant staging of dramatic events and the deep humanity of his figures, who seem touched by a pervasive melancholy, make his work unforgettable. In the early years of the 17th century, Rome was the cultural capital of Europe, where aspiring artists from France, Spain, Germany, and the Lowlands flocked to experience the great monuments of the Roman past as well as the masterpieces of Raphael and Michelangelo. But once there it was the novel art of Caravaggio—one of the great revolutionaries of Western art—that attracted them. Caravaggio famously rejected the grand tradition that looked to the past, espousing instead a new kind of art based on painting directly from the posed model observed under a raking light that enhanced its dramatic impact—a lighting effect that was emulated by filmmakers in the 1930s. Caravaggio's revolution redrafted the artistic landscape of Europe and when he suddenly died in 1610 of malaria, the void he left was filled by two painters of genius. One was the famous Spaniard Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652) who in 1616 moved from Rome to Naples, where he spent the rest of his life; the other was the Frenchman Valentin de Boulogne who spent the whole of his short career in Rome. There is scant information about Valentin's life before he arrived in Italy, although it is known that he was born on January 3, 1591, not far from Paris, in the small town of Coulommiers. He was the son of a painter and glazier and he had a brother, 10 years his junior, who was also a painter. It is likely that Valentin first apprenticed with his father, but nothing is known about his career before he arrived in Rome, where he is documented by 1614. Like so many young artists from the north of Europe and Spain, Valentin arrived in Rome with little training but a strong desire to make a name for himself. Caravaggio's practice of painting directly from the model, eliminating the intervening training that had been thought essential to the artist, opened a new dynamic for aspiring artists, as did the emergence of the art market. Artists no longer necessarily required the connections provided by a well-established master. And their realistic vocabulary was no longer aimed only at erudite connoisseurs—it appealed to the masses, thereby challenging the authority of Antiquity, Raphael, and Michelangelo. It also introduced an existential subtext to conventional images, such as Valentin's Samson with the Jawbone of an Ass (Cleveland Museum of Art). Painted for Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the nephew of Pope Urban VIII, the picture incorporates a self-portrait of the artist. Valentin's most frequent subjects are scenes of merriment, with music-making, drinking, and fortune-telling—themes associated with Caravaggesque painting, but treated in a hauntingly reflective fashion, as though meditations on the transience of the pleasures of life. But Valentin's greatest achievements were in the field of dramatic narratives and among the exhibition's highlights are the monumental Allegory of Italy (Finnish Institute, Rome), perhaps the most extreme statement of naturalism before Courbet; and the prestigious altarpiece commissioned from Valentin for Saint Peter's Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome). Much admired by contemporaries, the latter must have been studied by Velázquez, who visited Rome shortly after the painting was installed. In The Judgment of Solomon (Musée du Louvre), Valentin presents the Biblical story of the young Solomon, deciding the fate of a baby claimed by two women, as an unfolding drama, with the viewer as active participant. Valentin's life was cut short when, following a night of tavern-hopping, he contracted a fatal fever. The exhibition is organized by Keith Christiansen, the John Pope-Hennessy Chairman of the Department of European Paintings at The Met, and Annick Lemoine, author of an authoritative book on Valentin's contemporary Nicholas Régnier. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The catalogue is made possible by the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund. Related programs include a Sunday at the Met, a Friday Focus lecture, exhibition tours, and an interdisciplinary gallery conversation. Also planned are a Picture This! program for visitors with vision loss, a Met Escapes for visitors with dementia and their care companions, and an Evening of Art and ASL. Keith Christiansen will discuss Valentin de Boulogne in a series of two ticketed talks on October 19 and 26 in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. An audio tour, part of the Museum's Audio Guide program, is available for rental ($7, $6 for Members, $5 for children under 12). The Audio Guide is sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The exhibition will be featured on The Met website, as well as on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter via the hashtag #ValentindeBoulogne. After its presentation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio will be on view at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, from February 20 through May 22, 2017.

On Thursday, September 22, 2016 at 8:00PM at Alice Tully Hall, the American Classical Orchestra, a 50-piece period instrument orchestra devoted to preserving and performing the repertoire of 17th, 18th and 19th century composers, presents its opening night concert of its 32nd Season. The program, which will be conducted by Thomas Crawford, will include Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3  'Scottish', Berlioz's Les nuits d'été with mezzo-soprano Avery Amereau, and Cipriani Potter's Symphony No. 10. Artistic Director and Founder Thomas Crawford says of this program, 'In Mendelssohn's stormy Scottish Symphony, period instruments enliven the thrilling orchestration and memorable tunes for which the composer is so beloved. In Berlioz's evocative Les nuits d'été, the ACO proudly introduces the extraordinary young American mezzo-soprano Avery Amereau. A rarely heard symphony by British composer Cipriani Potter completes a concert that takes the audience back into the luxurious sonorities of the Romantic Era.'

In partnership with Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities (http://www.inclusiveva.org/), a state-wide organization, Virginia Stage Company's Department of Education & Community Engagement will present “The Line: Art for Social Change” at Slover Public Library in downtown Norfolk on August 21, 2016 at 3PM.

WALNUT CREEK, CA (August 9, 2016) – The California Symphony and Music Director Donato Cabrera open the Orchestra's 30th season on Sunday, September 18 at 4 pm at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, with an early work by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts, written when he was a Young American Composer-in-Residence there, a performance of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2, and flutist Annie Wu, an East Bay native and SF Symphony Youth Orchestra alumna, as soloist in Mozart's Flute Concerto in G. 

New York, NY (August 10, 2016) -- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One and Two script book, the eighth Harry Potter story by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne, published in the U.S. and Canada by Scholastic has sold more than 3.3 million copies in North America to date.  

New York, August 9, 2016—Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Silence of the Music, the Brazilian artist duo OSGEMEOS' first New York solo show with the gallery. Twin brothers Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo will transform multiple rooms into an immersive installation that combines drawing, painting, collage, mixed media sculpture, and kinetic and audio elements. These newest works represent an evolution of the style OSGEMEOS has honed over decades, while also returning to their early experimentation with diverse mediums, including new oil paintings. This exhibition will offer a heightened multi-sensory experience that embraces the power of human imagination and the vast possibilities in visually interpreting the subconscious. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, September 8, from 6-8PM.

(Houston, TX, August 11, 2016) – DiverseWorks is pleased to announce the exhibition, Pablo Helguera: The Fable Is to Be Retold, on view in the gallery at the MATCH, 3400 Main Street, September 17 – November 19, 2016. There will be an opening reception withthe artist on Saturday, September 17, from 7 – 9 pm. Also on Saturday, September 17, at 6 pm in the Matchbox 1 theater, DiverseWorks presents The Fable of the Ancient Children and Other Stories: A Performance Recital with Pablo Helguera. This event is free, but tickets are required and may be reserved online at www.matchouston.org.

Individual tickets to all concerts in the 2016-17 Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra season will be available on Saturday, Aug. 13. After a well-received summer season, the BPO is looking forward to a regular season full of highlights.

Brill, the international scholarly publisher, is pleased to announce a pilot with research network ScienceOpen.