Looking back at the best of the Corridor arts scene in 2024

What a year. While COVID likely is here to stay, like variations of the flu, events finally felt back to normal crowd-wise. Here’s a glance at my personal favorites, from theater and music to dance and art.

1. “To Kill a Mockingbird”: Jan. 19 to 21, 2024, Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City. I’m just going to quote my review: “To Kill a Mockingbird” is a masterpiece in any era, in any medium.

Aaron Sorkin’s 2018 stage adaptation is a profound indictment of hatred and prejudice, and Tony-winning director Bartlett Sher brilliantly directs that toward the audience, using the youngest player to intone: “All rise.” So many meanings out of two simple words.

Richard Thomas is incendiary as lawyer Atticus Finch, moving Friday’s opening night audience to audible gasps and an immediate standing ovation at Hancher Auditorium.

This is must-see theater. It is a pointed reminder that the racial prejudice that led to the arrest of an innocent Black man accused of raping a young white woman in the Deep South during the Depression, remains largely unchanged 90 years later.

In a preview interview with The Gazette, Thomas said: “I want people when they leave the theater, rather than congratulating themselves for not being racist, for being on the right side of the story, I’d like them to actually interrogate their own experience in terms of where they sit in the matrix of social justice — through their family history, or their own prejudices or what they have or haven’t done in their lives.

“Because everybody’s a part of the story, and you shouldn’t walk out of the theater feeling self-congratulatory,” he said. “You should walk out (asking) ‘OK, what have I done, what can I do?’ ”

Mission accomplished.

2. Orchestra Iowa: “Rhapsody in Blue”: Sept. 14, 2024, Paramount Theatre, Cedar Rapids (also Sept. 15, Coralville Center for the Performing Arts). Pianist Stewart Goodyear made a dazzling return to the Orchestra Iowa spotlight with a jaw-dropping performance of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” I sat down front to see his fingers blazing over the keyboards in my favorite piece of music.

The rest of the program, titled “A Night on the Town,” was fabulous, too, with Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town”; “I’ve Got Rhythm,” featuring The Menefield/Phillips Quartet; and William Grant Still, Symphony No. 1, “Afro-American.”

3. “Alphonse Mucha: Master of Art Nouveau”: May 4 to Sept. 1, 2024, National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, Cedar Rapids. The Czech artist, born July 24, 1860, in Moravia, is considered the father of Art Nouveau, originally deemed “Mucha style,” popular at the turn of the 20th century. He found his biggest fame from designing posters advertising artists and productions in Paris, with gorgeous, intricate swoops of muted colors framing the central figure.

But that’s not all he did. This gorgeous touring exhibit from the Dhawan Collection in Los Angeles also displayed Mucha’s artistry on everything from currency and advertisements for cigarette papers to book illustrations, and images on a Whitman’s chocolates tin and an eau de toilette bottle.

This was a lovely bookend from the huge Mucha exhibit that reopened the museum in 2012, after the 2008 flood necessitated moving the massive structure to higher ground in Czech Village. This smaller, but equally impressive exhibit celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Czech Fine Arts Foundation in Cedar Rapids, which would evolve into today’s museum, recently becoming home to the only Prague-style astronomical clock, known as an orloj, in the United States.

4. GRAHAM100: March 29, 2024, Hancher Auditorium, Iowa City. This celebration of a century of artistry from the Martha Graham Dance Company was nothing short of exquisite.

One of the highlights was seeing University of Iowa students showcased in “Panorama,” a piece Graham choreographed in 1935, incorporating students in the cast then as now.

“She wanted to create a work of social activism, about the power of people to make change — the power of numbers, if you will,” Janet Eilber, the company’s artistic director since 2005, told The Gazette in a preview interview.

The other pieces presented at Hancher swept through the decades, showing the ways Graham propelled modern dance and ballet into new realms of possibilities.

5. “The Mountaintop”: Feb. 23 to March 20, 2024, Riverside Theatre, Iowa City. I knew this was going to be a magical production, but I didn’t realize it would be full of theatrical magic.

Playwright Katori Hall has woven fact with fiction into this two-person play imagining the last night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, after he delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968.

The action revolves around a fictional conversation sparked when a hotel maid brings him a cup of coffee and challenges him to confront his destiny.

As director Curtis M. Jackson said in our preview interview, “There’s still a lot of work to do. It’s showing that we have come so far. It’s reminding us of the goods and the bads, dealing with our own African American group in society. It’s saying that we’re still continuing to work. The baton still is passing on, it’s still passing on.”

6. “Something Rotten”: Feb. 9 to March 3, 2024, Theatre Cedar Rapids. This was the knock-me-over-with-a-feather show in TCR’s stellar mainstage 2024 lineup. I didn’t know much about this one, but TCR has been ramping up its musicals in recent years, so I snatched a ticket. Best $25 I’ve spent in a loooooong time.

It’s the story of the Bottom brothers duo, desperately trying to write a hit play in the 1590s. But wily “rock star” Shakespeare keeps getting all the love. Along comes a soothsayer, who predicts the next big thing will be a play that combines words, music and dance. The Bottoms bite, and wow, did TCR pull out all the stops to make this a go. The singing, the dancing (tapping, the likes of which I’ve never seen from local troupes), the acting, the costumes, the scenery, the lighting, the everything. All so good that I went back for more.

7. Terry Farrell at TrekFest: June 29, 2024, Riverside. At the 2023 TrekFest, I told one of the organizers that since I’ve spoken with several of the major players from the “Star Trek” of my youth — including William Shatner — I was really hoping they’d make Cedar Rapids native Terry Farrell the celebrity guest before I retire, so I finally could interview her.

Ask and ye shall receive. She was, indeed, the 2024 celebrity guest, and was just as Iowa nice in our phone interview as I knew she would be. And I got to meet her face-to-face for a lovely hug at the festival in Riverside, the future birthplace of James T. Kirk.

May she and the festival live long and prosper.

8. “Scalia/Ginsberg”: Sept. 5 to 15, 2024, Riverside Theatre, Iowa City. This wasn’t Riverside Theatre’s first musical — who could forget the spring 2022 production of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” — but “Scalia/Ginsberg” was the professional troupe’s first opera. And it was magnificent.

The late Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia sat on opposite sides of the political divide, but liberal RBG and “fierce” conservative Scalia found their common ground in their love of good food and great opera. They even performed as supernumeraries (crowd scene “extras”) in a 1994 production of “Ariadne auf Naxos” in Washington, D.C.

Ginsburg saw several productions of the opera before she died in 2020, and declared it “a dream come true.” Judging from the reactions of the audience around me, I’d say the local cast, production crew and viewers would agree.

9. Red Cedar with the Cedar Rapids Municipal Band: July 31, 2024, Noelridge Park, Cedar Rapids. These summer (mostly) outdoor concerts are always delightful, but Red Cedar Chamber Music classed up the repertoire as the guest musicians for a pair of concerts bringing the season to a close. What a treat, adding violin and cello to the mix of Broadway, marches, movie themes and more under a setting sun.

10. Pipe Screams: Spooktacular Concert: Oct. 27, 2024, FaithLife Lutheran Church, Marion. Here’s a little gem most of you didn’t know about. I didn’t either, until a college friend who was participating told me about it.

Programmers took a little “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” a dash of “Phantom of the Opera,” stirred in some Pumpkin Carols (changing up the lyrics to familiar carols) and added more musical moments and some spooky special effects to come up with a brew that is true. Musicians from about six churches across Eastern Iowa made the restored 1928 Skinner pipe organ sing a rumbling new tune.

If this becomes an annual event, don a costume and go.