Author: Kevin Lee

By all means, look behind the curtain. The Mystic Order of the Jazz Obsessed’s Jazzalea Awards honor behind-the-scenes personnel who make stage magic possible. The 2016 award went to entertainment reporter Lawrence Specker, whose work magnified Azalea City jazz for more than 20 years. Bob Spielmann’s numerous decades of service in various jazz organizations earned him the 2017 award. This year’s Jazzalea goes to J.C. McAleer III, Mobile Jazz Festival founding member and initial executive director. He guided the event from its 1965 birth, then handed the reins to Spielmann in the late 1980s. McAleer was executive director of...

Who are you really? How much perspective is generated internally and how much is shaped by those around you? How much is from your community? Nathan’s professor, Dr. Pearson, poses this short question with deep implications, and what follows is a dive into identity that swims through the psychological and into the topical. Welcome to “The Pot.” Glenn Hutchinson’s timely 2015 stage play comes to Mobile through personal acquaintance. Director John Richards was in Miami for a training conference and occupied his free Sunday with community theater. “It’s only been performed about three or four times. I really enjoyed...

Marrying mind and soul, the visual and the physical was as simple as signing a lease. Then came the elbow grease. “My husband and I always wanted something downtown, an art gallery, but weren’t quite sure how,” Noel Hanley said. A principal dancer with Mobile Ballet for six years, Hanley also taught yoga, an avocation with the potential for greater cash flow. She mixed dream with pastime to form the hybrid space Sway Downtown. Finding the spot was crucial since Hanley knew rents and price tags were rising steadily amidst rejuvenation. They found a Conception Street location last summer,...

Ingenuity is art’s most daunting challenge. Want to kill some hopes? Utter the words, “It’s been done.” Reputed curator Hans Ulrich Obrist sought to negate and embrace that hobgoblin in resourceful fashion. Combined with artists Bertrand Lavier and Christian Boltanski, he compiled a perpetual exhibit entitled “do it” that has wound the globe for more than 20 years and manifested in well over 50 institutions. Now Mobile is added to that list. The exhibit isn’t shipped in crates. It’s a compendium of 250-plus written instructions from artists to future collaborators for works shaped by personality, place and time. Mobile...

If there’s one thing that can be said about the namesake of Marnée’s Studio near the Loop it’s that she’s determined to do things her way. It’s in the portmanteau on her sign. “My name was Margaret Renee but it never really suited me and this is the name I should have always been called by. I legally changed it,” Marnée Edwards said. Open less than a year, the gallery at 2353 Airport Blvd. is earning a reputation for concern far beyond its doors. Edwards has plenty of causes she’s ready to help. “I’ve done some benefit paint parties...