The City Where You’ll Find Ghost Stories, Gullah Rhythms, and the “Carnegie Hall of the South”

In this special four-part series, join Unpacked host Aislyn Greene as she travels to ⁠Charleston, South Carolina⁠, to unpack the city’s deeper currents.

This week: For the series finale, Charleston⁠‘s performing arts scene is nothing short of extraordinary. Aislyn explores the city’s world-class venues—from America’s first dedicated theater to a stunning apricot-colored concert hall—and meets the people bringing opera, dance, jazz, and theater to life in the Lowcountry.

Transcript

Announcer: Please put your hands together for the Gullah Collective!

Aislyn Greene, host: I’m sitting in a wooden pew at the historic Dock Street Theater in Charleston, South Carolina. And the Gullah Collective has just taken the stage.

And when I say taken, this seven-person band has commanded it. The audience is already on its feet, the Gullah Collective’s mission is to preserve and promote the sounds of the Gullah Geechee culture, and it’s one of the many bands here that explore, protect, and further Charleston’s long musical history.

I’ve been looking forward to the show all week because I’ve been here in Charleston talking to musicians and touring performance spaces, and now I’m finally getting to hear the magic myself.

I’m Aislyn Greene and this is the last in our special Unpacked series where we explore Charleston’s deeper currents. Today we’re going to meet the creative people, explore the surprising venues, and learn about the diverse programming that makes Charleston a world class destination for arts and culture,

First up, the Dock Street Theater

Donnie Newton, operations manager Dock Street Theater: The Gullah Collective is warming up.

Aislyn [at Dock Street]: Oh, that’s so cool.

Aislyn: The morning before I saw the Gullah Collective perform, I visited the venue to get a sense of its history, which is very extensive.

Donnie: The building originally opened, in 1736. We are accredited, some people say the first theater in America. It’s more so the site of the first structure in America built specifically to show theater productions. So that’s a little bit more of a mouthful, so we kind of get shortened over time.

Aislyn: This is Donnie Newton. Donnie the operations manager of the Dock Street Theater and was kind enough to give me an amazing tour. Donnie and I are standing in the drawing room, which has an ornate fireplace; candlelit chandeliers (with faux candles, of course), and it’s all very posh in kind of a southern Downton Abbey way.

It’s so well cared for, in fact, that you might not realize that it’s been through some things. Like Donnie said, Dock Street started as a working theater. Then it burned down in the 1740s and was rebuilt in the 1750s. Then it became a very fancy hotel for a while until World Wars and other hard times forced the hotel to shut its doors.

But in the 1930s, a Hail Mary came in the form of President Roosevelt and the Works Progress administration.

Donnie: We don’t know why he picked it necessarily ‘cause it was a hotel and then to turn it back into a theater. Uh, some of his family, through archival research and stuff, we found have stayed here when it was a hotel. So we think maybe, they liked it and thought, “Hey, this is kind of cool.” And so it came up on the radar. ‘Cause it was really a shell of a building. I mean, it’s just amazing that it wasn’t knocked down and, and kind of just started from scratch.

Aislyn: The city of Charleston now owns the theater.

Donnie: They acquired it in 1934—way, way back.

Aislyn: And Dock Street went through a big renovation about 15 years ago

Donnie: And so they have taken great care of it ever since then and kept it in good shape in a historic place, but also a working theater, which is really cool.

Aislyn: Between the musical acts that are warming up as we wander the grounds and the impressive diversity of performance on the calendar, “working theater” almost feels like an understatement.

Donnie: Our resident theater company, Charleston Stage, is with us for nine months out of the year. And they do, you know, dramas, they do musicals, they do straight plays. They also do family series. So two or three shows during the season are also done for families. And then they offer them during the school year to let kids come in with their class and watch it.

Aislyn: The theater also hosts shows during Charleston’s many famous festivals.

Donnie: The Charleston Literary Festival is with us here at the beginning of November, and that is a festival that just continues to, to grow and to grow and get bigger and, and better and awesome. And they have authors this year, they have 50 authors that are gonna be coming and talking about recent books that are coming out. We also have Chamber Music Charleston that comes and performs classical music at least twice a year. MOJA [Arts] Festival is with us as well. They put on performances three or four times during the week. Really, really great musicians, singers, dancers. We get all kinds of stuff.

Aislyn: It’s a dizzying array. And part of the charm of seeing shows here is the mix of modern and traditional elements that feel so specific to Charleston and to this very special theater.

Donnie: We have the original old style light bulbs. We don’t have the LEDs so that we can kind of keep it looking authentic. And so those will blow if the sound, if the level gets too much in the room. And when we had a group here on Tuesday that was phenomenal. The audience was going crazy and when we put the house lights back up at the end of the show we noticed, oh, three lights over here, two lights over there, one over there [were blown out].

Aislyn: And Dock Street keeps track of the bands that top the charts when it comes to light blowouts.

Donnie: We thought it was 18, because the record for blowing lights during a performance is 19, but we actually found three more the next morning, so it went up to 21. And so that they now hold the new record for most lights blown during a performance. So I don’t know if that’s quite the record you want, but hey, a record’s a record.

Aislyn: I mean, there’s something about that, that you were so powerful. It’s like you brought the house down in a very unique way.

Donnie: Yes. Yeah. No, literally you just, you blew the roof off of it or blew the lights off of it or something.

Aislyn: Do you think tonight they’ll blow any lights out?

Donnie: Yes, I, I’m sure they will, maybe while they’re warming up. You never know. I mean, hey, that’s OK

Aislyn: That’s great.

Donnie:Yeah, we’ll beat the record again. That’s fine. All day long. We’ve got plenty of light bulbs, we can handle it. That’s one of the costs of having an awesome group in here to perform and to, to bring entertainment and to bring the community together. If that’s all we get from it, that’s fine with us.

Aislyn: Among the many festivals and shows that Donnie mentioned, there is one in particular that’s been drawing some huge performers recently. It’s called the Spoleto Festival, and I want to learn how it became an international attraction. So I head over to the festival headquarters on George Street to talk to the Spoleto expert.

Mena Mark Hanna, CEO Spoleto Festival: My name is Mena Mark Hanna. I’m the general director and CEO of the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston.

Aislyn: Spoleto is a totally interdisciplinary performing arts festival that happens each year in May and June, but even though it’s special to Charleston, the festival has its roots pretty far afield.

Mena: So, the reason why it’s called Spoleto is because it’s named after the Italian city of Spoleto in Umbria, and there was a festival founded there in 1955 by Gian Carlo Menotti called Festival dei Due Mondi, the festival of the two worlds.

Aislyn: Eventually the Italian Spoleto decided that they wanted to expand internationally,

Mena: And so he founded an American counterpart in Charleston. He wanted to found it in a city that was walkable, that was charming, that felt sort of italianate, that had all of these sort of unusual venues.

Aislyn: And Charleston has all of that in spades. Mena obviously is a fan, and his personal journey to Charleston is also deeply connected to the festival.

Mena: I was a composer as an undergraduate in Philadelphia. And I was given, effectively, a commission to write a chamber opera, Gio, the story of the cherry tree in Italian.

And that piece was performed all over Umbria, including in Spoleto, Italy. And I was maybe 21 when I first sort of went to Spoleto Italy, to conduct my premier of this chamber opera.

Aislyn: And then in graduate school, he connected with Spoleto again.

Mena: And ended up becoming friends with this kind of spectacular, matriarch of the classical music world. Her name is Marina Mahler. She’s, she’s a granddaughter of Gustav Mahler. And she owns a home in Spoleto, Italy. And so like I would go to Spoleto all the time and like use her house as a composing retreat. And so like I kind of had this idea of what Spoleto was, even though I also knew that the American counterpart festival was something that was unto itself.

Aislyn:  He continued to work in both academia and in productions all over the world, eventually moving into festivals. And that’s how he wound up in Charleston, where he’s shaping the future of Spoleto.

Mena: It’s kind of like a dream job. You know, there’s all this kind of hubbub about, you know, classical music audiences and audiences of the of the classical arts kind of dying away and all sorts of things. And, and I, I think a festival like Spoleto is such an antidote to that because festivals by their very nature attract people for a specific period of time with sort of activity to the point of critical mass.

I mean, Spoleto, last year we had 125 concerts in 17 days. And like 125 concerts is like the length of it—that’s the amount of concerts you would get in a year long sort of performing art series. That’s chamber music, that’s opera, that’s ballet, that’s theater, that’s experimental theater. That’s everything in between. That’s world premieres, us premieres. That’s family friendly programming and to have such a big tent uh, and sort of also reach out to some of the great artistic voices that one would not think would be rubbing up against an opera like Patti Smith, you know, who’s like to me, a, a punk rock icon and have her at Spoleto at the same time, I mean it’s a dizzying, fun playground of, of creativity. Uh, and I also think it’s like very important for Charleston.

Aislyn: The festival has been an economic and creative engine here since 1977, and the venues here are part of what make it so special.

Mena: Patti Smith performed here in the cistern and then also had a quiet free pop-up concert in a, in a local church where she also read her poetry. When Yo-Yo Ma was here two years ago, he was just playing his cello in the middle of a park. I mean, it’s the arts kind of spilling out into the street that creates that magic. And I think that only exists in Charleston.

Aislyn: And it’s not just Charleston’s outdoor venues that are immersive.

Mena: Last year we did an opera by Benjamin Britten that was written in the 1950s called The Turn of the Screw based on the Henry James novella. It’s a Victorian gothic ghost story, and we created a new production of that opera in the Dock Street Theater. And like it was, it was sold out and it was sold out because people have the opportunity to see a ghost story in a haunted venue.

Aislyn: Oh yeah. Did I forget to mention some folks believe that the Dock Street Theater is haunted? Here’s Donnie again.

Donnie: Supposedly we have two ghosts. We had a woman that worked at the hotel. Her name was Nettie Dickerson. She bought herself a red dress and put a red feather in her hair.

Aislyn: Legend goes, Nettie would come to the building when it was still a hotel and flirt with men.

Donnie: She would come up to wives and say, “Oh, your husband’s very nice, or your boyfriend’s the greatest,” or whatever. And so they started telling, you know, “Stay away from that woman.” But supposedly she came out here one night during a thunderstorm, lightning popping, all kind of noise, was yelling at people.

The priest came from up the street, begged her to come back to the church. And she either said, you know, “God can’t help me,” or “If God wants me, he can come and get me.” Or you know, some variation of that. And she grabbed the railing and lightning struck the railing and it killed her. And so some people say you see her out here pacing. Some people say she’s very pretty. Some people say she looks like a zombie. When they did the renovation, one of the foremen saw her every day when he came to work. I wouldn’t have come back the third day, you know?

Aislyn: And you worked here for how long…

Donnie: Yeah. And I haven’t seen her, so, you know, we’re fingers crossed on that.

Aislyn: The other resident ghost is someone you might see in the audience.

Donnie: Junius Brutus Booth was the father of John Wilkes Booth. He supposedly sits in the second box from the right if you’re on stage up in the balcony during dress rehearsals. He performed here. He liked Charleston or liked the area. He liked Shakespeare. He performed the big plays. You know, your King Lear. The one that starts with an “M” that you’re not supposed to say in the theater ‘cause it’s bad luck.

Aislyn: Alas, I saw neither of these ghosts on my visit, although maybe that’s a good thing, but at the very least, the stories are a really fun way to get into Charleston’s rich history. Aside from its collaborations beyond the veil, the Spoleto Festival is working with living artists and festival organizers to grow it into a can’t-miss annual event. Here’s Mena again.

Mena: Spoleto historically has not been very locally minded. It has been about bringing companies from Asia, Europe, Africa, and artists from all over the world.

Aislyn: They’re interested in building up the local influence by working with other festivals, like one called Piccolo Spoleto.

Mena: And so we’re working with the city to figure out how to raise the profile of Piccolo Spoleto, have some more collaborative entry points between Spoleto and PLO Spoleto so that there is really this remarkable immersion, it’s a stage of the global and the proximate happening at the same time.

Aislyn?. When is the Piccolo Spoleto? Is that the same time?

Mena: Oh, it’s the same time, yeah. It’s almost like how when you go to Edinburgh and you have all these festivals happening at the same time, you have Fringe, you have the Edinburgh International Festival, et cetera.

Aislyn: It’s all part of creating this very rich, very vibrant and very bright artistic future.

Mena: It’s almost like a syncretic kind of art form that exists just in the Lowcountry, and I’m curious to know how Spoleto could, in the future, be even more enmeshed in this city. I think that’s really, really important to me. This idea of singing from the rooftops, spilling out into the streets, making Charleston in May and June when Spoleto is happening a world capital of the arts.

Aislyn: And with that, Mena offers one final piece of advice for getting tickets to the biggest shows.

Mena: If you see a big star that you want to see, you gotta get in early. I always get an email being like, “I didn’t get a chance to see Band of Horses.” And I say, “I’m so sorry.”

Aislyn:  The Spoleto headquarters, are close to the cistern yard, one of those magical venues that Mena mentioned, and it actually happens to be where the first Spoleto USA festival kicked off. So on my way to my final stop, I passed through. And I see the cistern. It’s a large stone well, or it used to be a well, and it’s framed by the stately columns of Randolph Hall, part of the College of Charleston. And in the distance there are these huge, almost otherworldly oak trees.

This is so cool. Oh my God, it must be so gorgeous here at night listening to music. It’s just, I mean, there’s something so charming. There’s all the Spanish moss dangling down. This seems like one of those spaces that you’d be lucky to get tickets to, but gosh, this is probably one of the prettiest outdoor music venues I’ve ever seen. And it’s not even a music venue, it’s just where they make a music venue happen. Wow.

I’d love to see Patti Smith here, but since she’s not here today, I decide to head over to the Gaillard Center for a look at a very different kind of venue. That’s after the break.

There’s something about the, um, the cistern that feels very romantic and almost Shakespearean. Even though that’s not quite the right era, I don’t think, but this feels more stately like a true performing arts hall.

I’m wrapping up my tour of Charleston’s performing arts scene with a final visit to a much newer space.

Lissa Frenkel, president and CEO Charleston Gaillard Center: So the Charleston Gaillard Center is, believe it or not, just 10 years old.

Aislyn: This is Lissa Frenkel.

Lissa: I’m the president and CEO at the Charleston Gaillard Center.

Aislyn: The original building was constructed in 1968 and was basically a concrete block done in the Brutalist style and used as a municipal auditorium.

Lissa: And then in 2010, a sort of visionary community member, Martha Rivers Ingram, came back to Charleston from Nashville and said to her childhood friend, the current Mayor Riley, “You know, we really need a world class performance hall in Charleston. If we’re going to elevate the arts and the way that we see is fit for this community, let’s consider rebuilding the Gaillard Performance Hall into something really stunning, with a stunning acoustic and a gorgeous space, and one that really is reflective of our commitment to the arts.”

Aislyn: Mayor Riley was of course, absolutely on board. The city raised the funds that designed the structure, and now the Gaillard is a cornerstone of the art scene.

Lissa: In the last 25 years or so, we’ve had a really burgeoning moment for the arts in Charleston. There’s a ton of different arts organizations that are thriving here.

Aislyn: The night before meeting Lissa, I saw a performance here from Step Afrika!, one of the top African-American dance companies in the country. They performed “The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence,” a dance that features Lawrence’s art and speaks to the shift that changed the demographics of Charleston when the migration occurred in the 1900s. The combination of art, history and dance was incredibly powerful, and it brought the house down,

That was such a neat performance, and I felt like it just brought so much energy to the space.

Lissa: So dance has become a major thing for us because we are really the only providers of national and international dance companies in Charleston outside of the festival period. So it’s really been an important void to fill, which is great, and we love bringing stories. It’s important to us across genres to bring stories that are particularly relevant to our community and to the Southern kind of identity of the area.

So the work that Step Afrika! brought the migration, which is about the Great Migration, from the south to the north in the 1950s and 60s is one that’s both taught in the schools and is really relevant here and, and, um, is just an extraordinary story way of expressing that story through rhythm and dance with that company.

Aislyn: And the Gaillard Center was such a fantastic backdrop for this show. The walls are this lovely orangy, apricot color, and the acoustics are some of the best I’ve ever heard.

Lissa: That was designed really for opera and symphonic music and unamplified music. And so the acoustics are really beautiful in the hall for that.

And we’ve seen musicians across genres really just marvel at how stunning a space it is and how their craft feels elevated in the room. It is also gorgeously painted an apricot color, so that is very memorable to most people. Our matriarch, Martha Rivers Ingram, who was the visionary behind the rebuilding of the Gaillard, her favorite color is apricot. And so we went ahead and implemented that and we’re all delighted because we do think it makes it a memorable space for people to perform and for those both of those reasons,

Aislyn: It somehow it feels very Charleston, like the color, it just feels coastal and I don’t know inviting.

Lissa: Well, thank you for saying that. Yes, absolutely.

Aislyn: The acoustics are so outstanding that I asked Lissa to share one of the more memorable experiences she’s had here at the Gaillard.

Lissa: And I think the one of the most stunning experiences I had in my first year was Audra McDonald was here and she was performing with a microphone, as you do it was a Broadway luminary. And she for her encore, she turned off the microphone, stepped the lip of the stage and sang Summertime from Porgy and Bess.

And we all about just felt the ground because we knew it was such a magical moment and you just don’t always bind that. But we also had, you know, Trey Anatasio from Phish perform here in acoustic set here last year and he was calling it the, the Carnegie Hall of the South. And so, you know, you really do have folks who are really musical recognize that this is a special space.

Aislyn: The Gaillard Center also commissions work, both national and international, but as a performing arts center based in the South, they really try to focus on local stories like the Center’s first self-produced work, Finding Freedom: The Journey of Robert Smalls.

Lissa: We produced a play about a local hero, Robert Smalls. He’s a Reconstruction-era hero, and it was a story that many people know in our community, but really not beyond our community. He engineered a daring escape on his, a boat in the harbor during the Civil War. Went past the three major forts and escaped to the freedom of the Union army outside of the harbor. He then went on to fight on behalf of the Union and became a representative in the House of Representatives in Washington for five terms. So this is an amazing story, an American story, and we feel like should be more broadly told.

And so it was really wonderful to bring it to the stage and have the embrace of this community to get to know Robert a bit more. And our ambition is to tour it around the country. And so hopefully we’ll be able to tell that story outside the walls too.

Aislyn: Now in its 10th season, the center has some really intriguing work on the horizon.

Lissa: We have two commissions coming up in the spring that are particularly exciting. One is called Dark Waters and it is a new dance piece commissioned with Complexions Contemporary Ballet. And it features a new symphonic work that was composed by a local composer Edward Hart, who’s a really well celebrated, living composer. And it is exploring the different types of dark water that exist in the Lowountry, from the tidal marsh to the cypress swamp, to the rice fields to the harbor to the beach, and thinking about the kind of ecological difference of that, but also the mysteries, the lie beneath the dark water. It’s gonna be a really interesting, beautiful program.

And then we have another fun one. It’s called The Lost Things. It’s by an illusionist and theater maker Scott Silven. And it’s all about memory and so it’ll be a theater illusionist kind of experience. And in our 10th anniversary we’re thinking about memory, and so we thought this was an appropriate piece to support and to bring here to go on that journey with our community and with anybody else who’s visiting, of course as well.

Aislyn: I’m already planning my spring visit for these shows and there are links to both in the show notes for you to plan as well., But if you come to Charleston for the holidays, you might check out a totally different kind of show.

Lissa: So one of the things we’re excited about is creating some new traditions here in Charleston. And we’ve done so by bringing a spiegeltent to the lawn of the Gaillard. The, the facility sits in a beautiful campus that has a front yard that is kind of a welcoming entrance to the building. And we bring in a spiegeltent from Europe, which is, there’s only 37 of them left in the world, and they used to be traveling dance halls at the turn of the 20th century.

So this one lives in America and they erect on site. It has a wooden floor, stained glass windows, mirrored columns. And it creates this really intimate, sort of bohemian feeling space on our lawn. And we do a series of burlesque shows with a group called Underbelly. And so if folks are here over the holidays, this is a not to be missed experience. It’s a very intimate performance. It feels very seasonal, and it’s just a huge amount of fun.

Aislyn: Clearly, there is so much to see and hear in Charleston, so make sure you check out the theaters and catch some opera, some dance, some comedy. In the show notes, you’ll find links to all the venues and musicians we mentioned, and if you’re lucky like me, you’ll get to see the Gullah Collective.

Gullah Collective: Thanks so much, folks!

Aislyn: And that concludes our Unpacked Minis, the Charleston edition. If you’ve missed any of the other episodes on food, outdoor adventure, and local artisanal shopping, check the links in the show notes and next time you visit our favorite South Carolina port city. Let me know if you’ve explored any or all of these places. Happy travels.