SPOLETO U.S.A. 

For 20 years, composer‐impresario Gian Carlo Menotti has made the Italian summer festival a byword for artistic excellence. Now he’s bringing the festival to Charleston‐600 performers and technicians taking part in more than 100 events over 12 days—and the beautiful, historic Old South city may never be the same again. 

By Grace Glueck 

CHARLESTON, S.C. On Wednesday, this old Southern city may have to stop calling itself “America’s best‐preserved secret.” That’s when composer impresario Gian Carlo Menotti will open the first American version of his renowned Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, an annual summer event in Spoleto, Italy. For the 12‐day run of Spoleto Festival U.S.A., some 600 actors, dancers, singers, instrumentalists and backstage helpers will perform more than 100 events (opera; theater; dance; jazz, symphonic and choral concerts; recitals; art and film shows) at various Charleston locations and nearby island resorts. 

The program includes a new production of Menotti’s “The Consul”; Simon Gray’s new play, “Molly”; a dance gala honoring Scriabin with major dance stars in world premieres of ballets by George Balanchine, Glen Telley, Sir Frederick Ashton and Anna Sokolow; Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation,” performed by the Westminster Choir; the Eliot Feld and the Ohio Ballet companies; daily chamber music concerts; a show of art for the theater; a jazz day at nearby Seabrook Island; a final windup concert with fireworks at Middleton Place, a spectacular 6,000-acre plantation. 

One municipal official groaned at the sheer cultural bulk of it all, but the civic viewpoint is, in the words of young Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., who helped bring the recent “Miss U.S.A.” beauty contest to Charleston: “It’s a wonderful opportunity for the city to be recognized as a cultural center.” 

Menotti has long wanted to bring to this country a version of the three‐week affair that this summer will celebrate its 20th anniversary in its old Umbrian city. Conceived as a showcase for Old and New World talent, young performers and old masters, Spoleto has launched such Americans as singer Shirley Verrett, cellist Jacqueline Dupre and violinist Pinchas Zukerman. 

“It was started almost as an American festival in Europe.” Menotti says. “Now it’s coming home to roost.” He adds that the Charleston festival will make it easier to introduce European artists in America, and give longer life to the often spectacular productions up to now seen only in Italy. (For example, a new production of Tchaikovsky’s opera “Queen of Spades,” staged by Filippo Sanjust, was done last year at Spoleto.) 

Charleston fits Menotti’s original prescription for the Spoleto Festival, which was “to create in a small community an artistic climate which would become essential to the welfare of the town itself … to give the artist the dignity of feeling not only welcome, but needed.” 

Although the population of Charleston proper is some 70,000, more than twice that of Spoleto, both give the same impression of age and history, and have human scale and a pleasant, small‐town air. “You need a small city for a festival,” Menotti says. “In large city it’s no longer a festival; it’s just a longer winter season.” 

Everyone agrees that the glittering Italian show is a hard act to follow. Known for its broad range, Spoleto is undoubtedly the world’s most inclusive talentfest, a mix of the old and the avant‐garde, where everybody who’s anybody in dance, theater, opera and orchestra is either onstage or in the audience. It has launched new talents and affirmed older ones: At a poetry reading in the 1960’s, even Ezra Pound turned up to read his works on a bill with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Stephen Spender and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 

Italian movie director Luchino Visconti staged Verdi’s “Macbeth” in Spoleto; film maker Roman Polanski directed his first opera, Berg’s “Lulu,” there; Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” directed by José Quintero and starring Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Kiley, surfaced in Spoleto after years of obscurity; English sculptor Henry Moore designed his first opera sets, for Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” and artists David Smith and Alexander Calder left their mark in the form of monumental sculptures that stand in the town. 

At one time or another in Spoleto, you might have seen performances by John Gielgud, Claire Bloom and the La Mama Repertory Company; also Rudolph Nureyev, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Carla Fracci and the Dance Theater of Harlem; poetry readings by Pablo Neruda, Allen Ginsberg, Octavio Paz and Salvator Quasimodo. 

The festival’s range draws not only a wide variety of performers but of people: a surreal passeggata of Roman princesses, blue‐jeaned students, chic Milanese dressed in tomorrow’s clothes, socialites from Newport and Palm Beach, international jet‐setters, film stars, press agents, Indian potentates, Greek shipping magnates, hairdressers. homosexuals, heterosexuals, the serious, the frivolous, the rich, the less rich, even the religious. And no one could possibly overlook Menotti, ensconced with an entourage at his 17th-century palazzo in the Piazza del Duomo emerging like royalty at performance times. Naturally, he is called the Duke of Spoleto.  

A relaxed and permissive town where music spills out of the windows 24 hours a day, Spoleto is itself a busy show. In the heated‐up festival at atmosphere, there is plenty of intrigue, as well as simpler entertainments: people‐watching at noon over an aperitif in the Piazza del Duomo, lunching late at the cosmopolitan Tric‐Trac bar, making the rounds of the boutiques and galleries that spring up at festival time, disco‐dancing after dusk, bar‐hopping in the Corso Mazzini, snacking on salami and wine at an all‐hours trattoria, staying up all night to talk and stroll the narrow, sloping streets. 

Like a good but ephemeral Italian wine, the atmosphere of Spoleto will not travel, and staid Charleston will have to develop a festival flavor of its own. Whether it’s ready for the impact of 600 mostly young performers, festival followers and their roistering remains to be seen. “Can you imagine a great international festival plunked down in the middle of a colonial Southern city?” asked one Spoleto veteran. “It’s a hoot. There’ll be trouble at first, but Charleston is put together and will learn to cope.” 

Heavily touristed Charleston, with its old, well‐preserved buildings, expects an extra 4,000 to 5,000 visitors a day, and the festival’s sponsors hope to improve its own chronically weak financial condition. Since Spoleto has always run on deficits, the shakiness of the Italian Government, which on a national and local level contributes some $400,000 annually—most of the festival’s budget—has not improved matters. 

“Every time we get a minister to give us our check,” says Menotti. “he’s replaced by another minister and we have to start all over again. The Charleston venture will make it easier for us to raise money.” 

Money matters caused difficulties in Charleston at first. Two prominent citizens quit posts on the Charleston Coordinating Committee because at first it seemed that Charleston box‐office receipts would not go toward defraying festival costs, estimated at $820,000, which were to be borne locally. The box‐office take was to go, along with countrywide donations, toward supporting both festivals. Charleston would, in effect, be subsidizing the Italian festival. In the end, the plan was changed so that Charleston receipts would he applied only against operating expenses for Spoleto Festival U.S.A., with surpluses to be held for succeeding Charleston Festivals. 

Why Charleston? The site was originally scouted, with part of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, by Christopher Keene, conductor of the Syracuse Symphony and musical director of the festival, and Priscilla Morgan, formerly associate director of Spoleto Festival U.S.A. 

“Starting about two years ago, we looked all over New York State,” recalls Miss Morgan, “and then went South because there was so much music already in the Northeast. We went to Raleigh and Biloxi and Mobile and Montgomery, among other places, and nothing seemed quite right. Then Alison Harwood [a former editor of Vogue and a Charleston devotee] spoke with me about Charleston.” 

In the late spring of 1975, Mr. Keene and Miss Morgan made a three‐day trip here, and were shown around by civic leaders, among them Theodore Stern, dynamic president of the College of Charleston, and Frances Edmunds, executive director of the Historic Charleston Foundation. 

A burly, red‐faced man who exudes optimism, Stern is what local folk call “a real trash‐mover.” Under Stern’s aegis, the college, whose beautiful old campus is adorned by live oaks draped in Spanish moss, is currently building a huge fine‐arts center that will include the transformation of an old movie theater (called the Gloria) into an opera house. 

“We believe that plans for the Fine Arts Center helped attract the festival here,” says Stern, speaking above the din of pile drivers outside his office window. Concerned to “make things go,” Stern sought broad local support for the festival, seeing to it that “all kinds of people got involved—white, black, rich, poor, below Broad, above Broad” (in snobbish Charleston, living below Broad Street, an area where most of the old families have their houses, is considered a sign of status). Like Charleston’s other civic boosters, he is convinced that the festival will do great things for the city. “Now Charleston will definitely be established as the cultural center of the Southeastern United States,” he says. 

As for funding, Stern is also sanguine. He foresees “a minimum” of $400,000 to $500,000 in ticket sales, and he is hoping for at least $300,000 from national donors. From sources in South Carolina, he expects $250,000. 

Under Stern’s leadership, the city has geared up to a frenzy of activity. Twenty volunteer committees are taking care of such matters as local and state fund‐raising, setting up information booths and shopping tours for visitors, providing flower baskets for King Street, Charleston’s Fifth Avenue, and arranging social activities for visiting artists. One committee head, Navy Capt. Richard Curtis, has invented the official festival drink, the Palmetto Spoleto. 

Since more festival‐goers are expected than can be accommodated in the Charleston area, the local Chamber of Commerce has put a reserve on rooms as far away as Savannah, Ga. and Myrtle Beach, S.C. (each a two-hour drive from Charleston). And, taking a cue from Augusta, Ga., which draws huge crowds every year for the Masters Golf Tournament, chamber officials have launched a highly successful campaign to encourage Charlestonians to offer rooms for rent. “The Mayor has even listed his beach house anonymously,” says a chamber official. 

At the festival office downtown, a nondescript but spacious one‐story brick building at 91 Wentworth Street lent by the College of Charleston, director of operations Christine Reed presides over a paid staff of five and some 125 volunteers, who help sell tickets, get out mailings, run the Xerox machines, answer inquiries and meet VIP’s at the airport. “All kinds of people are helping us,” says Miss Reed. “The other day I called a Charlestonian and got 56,000 yards of fabric for banners, donated by an old friend of his who happened to be with Dan River Mills.” 

Andrea Anson, a European who has worked with the Spoleto Festival in Italy for the last four years, and is also in charge of technical arrangements for the Charleston Festival office, says he is “flabbergasted” by the efficiency here, as opposed to the “chaos” of Italy. “There’s a funny atmosphere in Spoleto—they realize how much in tourist trade the festival brings but the Spoletini take it for granted. Once the festival starts, they go wild, but they’re nowhere near as enthusiastic about pitching in as the people in Charleston. Here they’re willing to work at anything, no matter how nebulous.” 

Festival authorities have taken care to see that besides local input into the provision of services, there is also local participation in artistic events. The College of Charleston Choir will sing in “The Creation,” six dancers from the Charleston Ballet and a chorus of local children will perform in “The Queen of Spades,” and the Left Bank Jazz Society of Charleston will stage jazz concerts. A musical, “Green Pond,” written by Mel Marvin, the South Carolina born Broadway composer, and the New York playwright Robert Montgomery, about life in the Carolina low country will be performed by Stage South, the South Carolina state theater, at nearby Kiawah Island. 

Churches will serve as sites for afternoon concerts and social suppers, and local groups will also be involved in “minifestivals,” a group of outdoor activities taking place in various parks and gardens that will feature South Carolina storytellers, gospel and blues singers, puppets, mimes, crafts and instant theater. The South Carolina Art Commission is sending a representative selection of 50 works by South Carolina artists. “Even local painters and sculptors who want to hang up their art and sell it can get a booth for $1 at the City Market,” says Andrea Anson. 

Everyone concerned with Spoleto Festival U.S.A. seems optimistic, perhaps no one more so than Menotti. “I’m rather Teutonic in my determination,” he says. “I seldom undertake things in a spirit of adventure, and that applies to Charleston as well. I wouldn’t have started with it unless I thought it would go.” 

In Charleston, the high hopes for the festival are part of a general glow among civic leaders about the prospects for the city, which in the last decade or so has made encouraging strides toward recovery from the 100‐year slump brought about by the Civil War, fire and earthquake, and the decline of rice and cotton planting. With a cluster of colleges in or near the city, they see Charleston’s future as an educational and cultural center, with tourism (which increased by 38 percent last year) as an important side industry. 

“Charleston used to be a city you passed through,” says David Rawle, a young publicist and adviser to local politicians. “But Spoleto and even the ‘Miss U.S.A.’ contest [which brought Charleston national television exposure] are part of a long string of things happening here that are drawing people to the area and helping to build the economy.” 

Nevertheless, there is some ambivalence among the town’s older leaders, who have worked very hard for the festival, but confess to a concern about the additional tourists it will attract and whether the city will be able to “handle” them. “We have about the right amount of people here right now,” says Frances Edmunds, whose roots in Charleston go back to the 18th century. “If the visiting becomes destructive to our way of life, people won’t want to live here.” 

“Yes, we’re apprehensive about tourists, concerned with the problems of success,” says Joseph H. McGee, president of the Historic Charleston Foundation, who also worked to bring the Festival here. “We’ve been looking for tourism all these years and we may be approaching the time when we say, ‘Hold. Enough!’ “ 

“But on the other hand,” he adds, “won’t it be nice to have the policeman on the corner whistling arias?” ■