![]() |
Home - City Guide - Baltimore - Culture | ||
![]() |
||
Culture The performing arts have as long and distinguished a history as Baltimore itself. The central booking agency for most venues is Ticketmaster (tel: (410) 752 1200); there is also Baltimore Tickets, at the Visitors Center, 451 Light Street (tel: (410) 752 TICS or 8427). Concert Hotline (website: www.concerthotline.com) and the Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association (website: www.baltimore.org) can provide up-to-date information. Music: The city's main classical music venue is the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, 1212 North Cathedral Street, Mount Vernon (tel: (410) 783 8000). The Music Director Designate, Yuri Temirkanov, is not limited only by classical music, with a range from Marvin Hamlisch and Wynston Marsalis to The Chieftains on his agenda. The Lyric Opera House, 140 West Mount Royal Avenue (tel: (410) 494 2712), is nearby and the resident Baltimore Opera Company is just starting its 50th season. The Peabody Conservatory of Music, One Mount Vernon Place (tel: (410) 659 8124), the oldest such school in the USA, often schedules free recitals and concerts. Theatre: Baltimore has numerous theatres spread across the downtown area. At the Theatre Hopkins, a brick barn dating from 1804 at John Hopkins University (tel: (410) 516 7159), British and Irish plays are regularly performed. Center Stage, the State Theater of Maryland at 700 North Calvert Street (tel: (410) 332 0033), performs a wide range, from Shakespeare to Beckett. The venue is also home to the Everyman Theatre. The Vagabond Players, are based in Fells Point at 806 South Broadway (tel: (410) 563 9135) and perform a range from modern classics to recent Broadway successes, such as Death of a Salesman and shows such as Blood Brothers. At the Morris A Mechanic Theatre, 25 Hopkins Plaza (tel: (410) 625 4230), performances are non-profit making and cover plays, music and dance. Dinner-theatre is also extremely popular in Baltimore. The kinds of programmes range from variety style to classic Broadway shows. Bobby B's Palace, 2132 Turkey Point Road (tel: (410) 687 8838; website: www.aljolson.com), specialises in impersonations of great performers, such as Al Jolson. The town of Timonium is only 15 minutes' drive from downtown Baltimore and the country's largest and very highly critically acclaimed Timonium Dinner Theatre, is located there at 9603 Deereco Road (tel: (410) 560 1113). The menu at this family-owned and operated establishment always includes some interesting homemade specialities. Dance: This is not covered by a separate company, with everything from classical to Broadway shows being staged by the various theatre and music venues. Film: The Senator Theatre, 5904 York Road (tel: (410) 435 8338), was built during the golden age of Hollywood and is one of few surviving examples of a real neighbourhood movie theatre. As well plenty of ordinary cinemas ('movie theatres') showing the latest Hollywood releases, there a couple of specialist venues for more arthouse releases. The Baltimore Museum of Art, Art Museum Drive (tel: (410) 396 7100), takes certain themes for its screenings, whereas the Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral Street (tel: (410) 396 5430), is more wide ranging in its programme. Maryland itself has been the setting for many films including most recently the Blair Witch Project (1999). A recent season-long exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society Museum and Library, 210 West Monument Street (tel: (410) 685 3750), celebrated the place of Maryland in film history. Cultural events: In the last week of April, the Baltimore Waterfront Festival, uses life on the water as the focus for the entertainment, music and events. Throughout the second half of the year (end of June onwards), the Inner Harbor hosts the Gospel Music Crab Festival (website: www.crabfest.com). During the first two weeks of the same period is the Latino Fest at Patterson Park (website: www.eblo.org), sponsored by the EBLO (the Education-Based Latino Outreach). Also in this summer period is the Harborplace Birthday Celebration (2001 being a biggie - 21st) held in the Harborplace Amphitheatre (website: www.harborplace.com). The same venue hosts the annual Baltimore 4th of July Celebration. The Artscape Festival, Mount Royal Avenue (tel: (410) 396 4575; website: www.artscape.org), is a combination of the visual, literary and performing arts held indoors and out, rain or shine. In September, in Mount Vernon, the annual Baltimore Book Festival is held. Literary Notes Over the last two centuries, Baltimore has been home to several well-known writers, as well as featuring in their work. Ironically, two of the most well known and most strongly associated with Baltimore stand on either side of the literary fence: Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) as writer and H L Mencken (1880-1956) as critic par excellence. Poe's house, built around 1833, is now a museum to the writer, situated west of Lexington Market at 203 Amity Street (tel: (410) 396 7932). Poe's grave is at the Westminster Cemetery and Catacombs on the corner of Fayette and Greene Streets. His monument was funded by pennies collected in the 1930s by Baltimore schoolchildren. Mencken, 'the sage of Baltimore', was born in the city and studied at Baltimore Polytechnic and lived mostly at 1524 Hollins Street, Union Square. As a noted philologist, editor and satirist, he became most famous for his biting, perspicacious and profound work as a literary critic, having a huge influence on American writing in the 1920s after his major work, The American Language, was published in 1918. Francis Scott Key (1799-1843) became famous for his original poem The Defence of Fort McHenry, which he wrote on witnessing, from a British man o' war, the American flag flying throughout the unsuccessful British siege of the city. The poem was later set to music by the English composer John Stafford Smith (using the tune of To Anacreon in Heaven) and, in 1931, it was adopted as the US national anthem The Star-Spangled Banner. Much of the rest of the town's literary past centres on the Mount Vernon district, which also hosts the annual Book Fair in September. The Mount Vernon Place Methodist Church (at the corner of East Mount Vernon Place and South Washington Place) was built in 1873 on the place where Francis Scott Key died. There is a plaque on the outside of the church to commemorate him. F Scott Fitzgerald's wife, Zelda, was treated for mental illness at the John Hopkins University, during which time he stayed at the Stafford Hotel, now simply 716 North Washington Place. Fitzgerald (1896-1940) later moved to 1307 Park Avenue, where he finished Tender is the Night (1934). Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), who invented the fictional type of the 'hard-boiled' private detective (with such novels as the 1930 The Maltese Falcon, made into the classic 1941 film directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart as the detective Sam Spade), was born in nearby St Mary's County. Other writers who have an acquaintanceship with the city are: John Pendleton Kennedy, who lived at 12 Madison Street and was a bestselling novelist in the 1820s and is credited with inventing the idea of the genteel South; Pulitzer Prize-winner Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) who was born in Baltimore; Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) who studied at John Hopkins University; Russell Baker, a columnist with the New York Times, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Growing Up (1995) is based upon his boyhood in Baltimore; and novelist Anne Tyler (b 1941) who features the oddities and quirkiness of modern-day Baltimore in her writings, such as The Accidental Tourist (1985). |