Lee Greene was born & raised in a NJ family where the only religion worshipped was classical music, Leonard Bernstein was God, and the radio was constantly on and tuned to classical station WQXR (which is now always on in his Jacksonville home thanks to the miracle of the Internet). Growing up in the New York City metropolitan area and later while residing and practicing law in NYC, Lee attended oodles of Broadway and off-Broadway theater productions, as well as concerts and opera at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and other NYC venues. Lee is now a retired attorney, runs a computer support business, and has served on the boards of Rogue Opera & Siskiyou Violins. Lee also writes Performing Arts reviews published on the website, Performing Arts Reviews. 
In the lobby of the Camelot Theatre at the Monday evening, August 17 performance of Spotlight on Perry, Jerry & Dean: Classic Crooners, a couple of adults were trying to explain to the adolescent children they had brought to the show just who Perry Como, Jerry Vale and Dean Martin were. “They were BIG in […]
On Sunday evening, August 9, the Britt Festivals presented the fifth concert of the 2015 Classical Season and for the third time this weekend, the program departed from the traditional menu of past seasons of mainly standard 18th and 19th century European works from the establishment classical repertoire. The August 9 concert was billed as […]
The Britt Festivals presented the fourth concert of the 2015 Classical Season on Saturday evening, August 8, and it continued the pattern set the previous night. The program diverged from the staid classical programming of past Britt Classical seasons. Instead the program introduced new music, fresh collaborations with talented young artists, and revitalized takes on […]
The Britt Festivals presented the third concert of the 2015 Classical Season on Friday evening, August 7, and it was the first of three weekend concerts that diverged from the typical classical season fare of previous seasons. Music Director Teddy Abrams, in his sophomore season, had already begun to make his mark, and shape a […]
Every summer, Camelot Theatre’s Conservatory offers a six week program for aspiring young talents, providing morning instruction in acting, voice and dance, taught by professional artists, with afternoons dedicated to rehearsals and performances of a Summer Production. The program culminates in 6 performances by the Conservatory graduates of the Summer Production on the Camelot Theatre […]
As I described elsewhere (http://jacksonvillereview.com/britt-orchestra-delivers-an-epic-start-to-maestro-abrams-sophomore-season/), the 2015 Britt Festivals Classical Season began with an epic start on Opening Night. That was followed on Saturday, August 1 with the Second Night concert. Much was dialed down the second night: the temperature was only in the 90’s instead of 107, the forest-fire generated smoke wasn’t pea […]
Epic: – of unusually great size or extent; – spectacular; very impressive; awesome [Dictionary.com, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epic]
The Britt Orchestra opened the 2015 Classical Season Friday evening, July 31, delivering a concert that was epic in all the senses of the word listed above: The performing ensemble on stage was the largest ever to perform at the […]
Most seasons, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) presents at least one play imported from another culture and adapted so it works for a contemporary American audience (e.g. The White Snake 2012, Throne of Blood 2010). This season, OSF gives its audience Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land by bilingual U.S. born Taiwanese playwright, Stan Lai. […]
On Saturday, July 18, I attended a very curious production of the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, at Talent’s Camelot Theatre. The piece tells the story of the last seven days of the life of the Biblical Jesus of Nazareth. The music, drawn from the 1970 Broadway musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, […]
When I saw Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s (OSF) production of Pericles in the Thomas Theatre for the first time, everything about it was SO outstanding: the profound story, performances so good by ALL the actors, theater technical arts so perfect, music that so effectively heightened the emotional impact of the piece, that it defied my expectations […]
The Count of Monte Cristo was penned as an adventure novel by Frenchman Alexandre Dumas in 1844, set in the midst of the political conflicts between Napoleon and the French monarchy of that time. “The book is considered a literary classic today. . . . ‘The Count of Monte Cristo has become a fixture of […]
I went to a party the other night, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s (OSF) Allen Elizabethan Theatre. It was advertised and seats to it were sold like the rest of the plays in repertory at OSF, as the world premiere of a new musical, Head Over Heels. But it was nothing like any of the […]
Oregon Cabaret Theatre (OCT) is a small (compared to the three Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) theaters nearby, Medford’s Craterian Theatre and even the slightly larger Camelot Theatre down the road in Talent) 140 seat dinner theater in Ashland, in a converted church around the corner from OSF. It has presented 141 theatrical shows in 30 […]
The 2015 Britt Festivals season got off to an auspicious start Saturday, June 6 with its annual Taste of Summer Celebration in downtown Jacksonville. This year’s event was HOT in every sense of the word. The celebration this year featured some torrid music by bands such as Salsa Brava and the Talking Heads cover band […]
Rogue Valley classical music fans are most fortunate to enjoy exemplary musicians of a superior quality far beyond what one would expect to find in a rural, remote area off the beaten track, year round, including the world class Britt Classical Orchestra in the summer, and the Maestro Martin Majkut led Rogue Valley Symphony, both […]
A question for you: what performance space has the finest musical instrument piano in the world? One might suppose the answer ought to be Carnegie Hall, or Vienna’s Musikverein or Konzerthaus, perhaps Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, Boston’s Symphony Hall or Sydney’s Opera House. Well, you may be surprised to learn that a claim […]
Christopheren Nomura, at age 51, is perhaps the preeminent baritone singer of his generation. The Japanese-American prodigy was raised in the San Francisco Bay area and began his singing career early as a boy soprano. He made his professional operatic debut in the boys’ choir of the San Francisco Opera at age 6 and performed […]
One of the 11 plays the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is presenting in repertory this season is the classical American musical, Guys and Dolls. I saw it at OSF’s Angus Bowmer Theater in Ashland on Sunday, April 19, 2015. I’ve been asked by numerous inquirers, both before, and after, seeing the OSF production, “is it […]
Those two phrases were uttered by Britt President and CEO Donna Briggs to describe the 2015 Summer Season that was announced on Thursday evening, April 9, 2015, at the Britt Festivals Season Announcement Party in the Britt Pavilion in Jacksonville. But both phrases were borrowed from […]
Have you ever had one of those eerie, exhilarating experiences of feeling “unstuck” in time and space, like the characters in a Kurt Vonnegut novel (e.g., Slaughterhouse-Five, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, etc.)? That’s what it was like attending my first concert at the Artistic Piano Gallery showroom on Biddle Rd. in Medford, a […]
The musical, Sunset Boulevard has a checkered history. Various productions of the musical have received very mixed reviews. When it’s been good, it’s very, very good, and when it’s not, it’s landed like a thud. The musical owes its roots to the 1950 film by Billy Wilder that tells the story of the relationship between […]
On Saturday, March 14, 2015, I had the great pleasure of viewing an absolutely stunning, magical Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) original stage adaptation of Sarah Waters’ critically acclaimed best-selling Victorian crime thriller novel, Fingersmith. The 2002 novel had been hailed as brilliant, portraying the seedy life of a Dickensian Victorian London, incorporating some surprising plot […]
Chamber Music Concerts (CMC) has been entertaining classical music audiences in the Rogue Valley with performances of chamber music for 31 seasons. The majority of the concerts, like most composed chamber music, have featured trios or string quartets (usually a pair of violins, a viola, and a cello). On the first weekend in March 2015, […]
The Rogue Valley Symphony (RVS) presented its current season’s Masterworks 4 concert in performances on February 27 (Ashland),28 (Medford) and March 1 (Grants Pass), offering an “Orchestra Showcase” – i.e., the focus was on the orchestra itself and its own musicians; there wasn’t a featured soloist for this concert. Music Director Martin Majkut chose two […]
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) officially kicked off its 2015 Season on Friday evening, Feb. 27 with the opening performance of a new production of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in the Angus Bowmer Theatre. Much Ado was written by Shakespeare around 1598, in the middle of his career as a playwright, and right […]
Since when, you might wonder, is the Symphony in the business of predicting the weather? Well, it’s NOT really. What the Rogue Valley Symphony was up to, specifically at their Season Preview event at the Ashland Springs Hotel on a balmy Sunday afternoon in late February, is providing a glimpse of what’s in store for […]
As practically everyone is aware, Sunday, February 22, 2015 was the night of the Academy Award ceremony and broadcast from Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre where this year’s Oscar winners were announced. Locally, the event was celebrated in a big way by the Ashland Independent Film Festival (AIFF) which filled the Historic Ashland Armory with a black […]
On Sunday, February 8, 2015, the Southern Oregon Repertory Singers, under the direction of Dr. Paul French, took their audience at the SOU Music Recital Hall in Ashland on a musical journey reflecting on the seasons of life in The Passing of Time concert. I’ve written about Dr. French in these pages before (“His is […]
Music
February 1, 7:30pm: Jesse Cook, Guitar Concert; flamenco music. CRATE;
Tix: CRATE
February 6, 7:30pm: Tutunov Piano Series Concert III, piano duo Ivona Kaminska and Christopher Bowlby; works by Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Debussy, Junkinsmith and Milhaud. SOUMRH; Tix: OCASOU
February 6, 7:30pm: Feelin’ Groovy, Music of the ‘60’s featuring Simon & Garfunkel; starring Jim Witter. CRATE; Tix: CRATE
February […]
If you are getting on in years, as I am, you will recall a period in American music when the acoustic guitar was a vital instrument in popular music. It was played extensively by hit pop artists like Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, Bob Dylan, and many others. And there were a variety of virtuosos […]
Imagine, if you can, a large country estate, isolated, surrounded by vineyards, orchards and agrarian fields. Having a great room, with a vaulted ceiling and walls lined with original paintings, able to hold over 50 seated guests, and of course, featuring a classic baby grand piano. A venue much like the chamber room of a […]
On Saturday, November 15, a Gala Celebration Concert and reception were held, commemorating the opening of the new Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University. It’s a grand sounding institution, but don’t go searching around Ashland’s Southern Oregon University campus looking for a new building with that name etched on it – because […]
The Ashland Independent Film Festival presented two special benefit performances over Thanksgiving weekend of the new documentary film, Pelican Dreams, by Judy Irving, whose previous film, Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, won the Festival’s Audience Award in 2006. Pelican Dreams is a beautifully filmed movie, of triumph over adversity, with gorgeous camera work of pelicans […]
If you’ve been reading Jacksonville Review’s reviews of performing arts events in the Rogue Valley, you’d get the impression that our community offers top quality entertainment, performed by international touring virtuosos, skilled professional musicians, and top flight performers, to rival the quality offered in much larger metropolises in the U.S. and abroad. That certainly applies […]
On Friday evening, November 14, the Oregon Center for the Arts’ Tutunov Piano Series presented for its second concert of the season, pianist extraordinaire, Francesco Nicolosi, to a packed house at the SOU Music Recital Hall in Ashland. Nicolosi, 59 years old, born in Catania Italy and centered in Naples, is perhaps the most distinguished […]
On November 5, SOU’s Music Recital Hall hosted a concert, “West Coast Bass Clarinet Takeover”, conceived and fashioned by clarinet students in SOU’s Music Department, and featuring the unique American bass clarinet quartet, Edmund Welles, in addition to several student clarinet ensembles. (Edmund Welles is not the name of a person, but the name of […]
One would not ordinarily associate the term, “kick-ass” with a symphony concert. So how does it come to be applied to the second concert of the 2014-2015 season by the Rogue Valley Symphony? Well, the term was originally tendered to describe piano soloist, Tanya Gabrielian’s performance of Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in this concert […]
On Sunday, Oct. 26, the audience at the Bright Orb of Harmony Concert at the SOU Recital Hall in Ashland were ushered into the musically rich world of Dr. Paul French, Director of the Southern Oregon Repertory Singers. It is a world that is substantially richer and more expansive musically than that of virtually anyone […]
“What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?” sardonically cries Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (Livia Genise) in Camelot Theatre’s production of the ultimate dysfunctional family drama, The Lion in Winter by James Goldman. This is an extremely well written, intelligent, literary play exploiting true historical facts about the 12th century royal family of Henry II […]
In the November print issue of the Jacksonville Review, I describe the Rogue Valley as a “cornucopia of performing arts” for the volume and variety of performing arts events available. That point has been validated over the last two weeks, by the wide variety of available concerts which I have been able to enjoy and […]
On Friday night, October 17, a packed audience went to see the opening concert of the Tutunov Piano Series at the Music Recital Hall at Ashland’s Southern Oregon University. They purchased tickets in advance, expecting to see a concert by Grammy winning, often recorded (25 compact discs to date), internationally renowned piano soloist, recitalist and […]
The Jackson County Community Concert Association (J.C.C.C.A.) is like a hidden gem among the performing arts organizations in Oregon’s Rogue Valley. For over 75 years it has been presenting live entertainment in Jackson County: “artists . . . carefully chosen to provide the highest quality entertainment. . . .” Yet the J.C.C.C.A. doesn’t receive the […]
Five years ago when Martin Majkut took over the reigns as Music Director of the Rogue Valley Symphony, he quickly transformed a moribund little local orchestra into a top notch regional symphony orchestra, bringing high energy to the task of running the orchestra and it’s musicians, offering new pieces of music as well as a […]
Summer is over, the leaves are turning, and Britt Festival concert goers are thinking back over good times and great concerts presented this summer on the Britt hill in Jacksonville, while contemplating enduring a long, dreary winter before again getting an opportunity to enjoy some good music at the Britt Pavilion. But wait! There are […]