South of Broadway Theatre is a great little company based in the historic Old Village, North Charleston. It has gifted teachers from New York and LA. But it's also a kind of secret - not many people know that there's a theatre space on East Montague Avenue.

I'll be teaching a new class there from February 4th, specifically helping people with their on-camera acting. As far as I know, this will be the only regular film and TV course of its kind in this area. It's tailored to actors who need to learn, polish, or maintain their on-camera skills.

Visit the website below if you want to find out more about South of Broadway.

TIME: Mondays: 4-6 pm

DATES: February 4th, 11th, 18th & 25

WEBSITE: http://www.southofbroadway.com/

The Footlight Players' theatrical production of Crowns is sponsored by The Hat Ladies of Charleston. The run will be accompanied by a silent auction where people can buy hat-related art by John Carroll Doyle, Sophisticated Whimsy, Chuck Wolf Galleries and over 40 other local artists and artists' representatives.

All money received from the auction will benefit the Footlight Players Theatre.

Ten years ago, photographer Michael Cunningham started taking black and white pictures of church hats, fascinated by the way that they regally rested on women’s heads. He was on to something. An exhibition followed the same year, followed by a book called Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats. The exhibition toured, finally reaching the Gibbes in 2006, and an off-Broadway stage version wasn’t far behind.

Now the Crowns play will be performed by the Footlight Players, directed by Henry Clay Middleton (seen last summer co-starring in Piccolo Spoleto’s Denmark Vesey: Insurrection), and it’s not all about the hats.

Crowns features six women who are amalgamations taken from the 50 subjects in the book. Refreshingly, all but one of them are in their 40s or older, providing some strong acting opportunities for older local actresses. But a focal point is the youngest character, Yolanda, who is sent from Brooklyn to South Carolina to get in touch with her Southern heritage. There she encounters church life, Gospel music, soliloquizing grandmas and an awful lot of hats.

If a live aspect of Crowns sounds familiar, that could be because the CSO Gospel Choir performed selections from its repertoire at the Gibbes during the exhibition in 2006 – deemed a highly successful event by the museum of art. With Cunningham’s work growing in popularity, surely it won’t be long before we see Crowns: The Millinery Musical.

SHOW DATES: Jan. 25-26, 8 p.m., Sun., Jan. 27, 3 p.m., Mon., Jan. 28, 3 p.m., Thu., Jan. 31, 8 p.m., Feb. 1-2, 8 p.m. and Feb. 7-9, 8 p.m.

PRICES: $25/adults, $22/seniors, $15/students

ADDRESS: Footlight Players Theatre, 20 Queen St., Downtown Charleston, SC, (843) 722-4487

WEBSITE: http://www.footlightplayers.net/

The Great Debaters is a new movie co-produced by Oprah Winfrey and directed by Denzel Washington, who also stars as a teacher who leads an African-American debating team to great success in the '30s.

It's uplifting and heart-warming and it looks great. But it also rewrites history in a way that I couldn't go into in my City Paper review without giving away too much of the plot (personally, I hate knowing too much about a film before I go see it).

Hollywood is infamous abroad for changing historical facts to fit cinematic fiction. An emperor dying in the arena of the Colisseum? I don't think so, but it happened in Gladiator. WWII Americans retrieving the Enigma cypher machine? It occurred in U571, but apparently the US wasn't even in the war when the mission really took place.



Denzel takes a big victory at a relatively small university and sets it in a fancier place, so that his protagonists face America's most prestigious debating team instead. Are the stakes any different because the filmmakers take liberties with the truth and rewrite history to improve the dramatic effect of their story? That's for audience members to decide - but they deserve to know what really happened.

If you've seen the film or you're the kind of person who turns to the end of a book before you've read the rest of it because you can't wait to find out what happens, you can find out more about The Great Debaters' history-bending here.

A couple of Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) students told me about the perils of drawing nudes. "We always get fat, ugly models," they complained. This was brought home to them when SCAD did a nude show with a beautiful, lithe young model on the poster. "How come our models never look like that?" asked a male student.

Over here in Charleston, our nudes are as tasteful as the populace is polite. Hopefully we'll get a mix of real-life lumpiness and ethereal beauty in Nudes, a group show at the John M. Dunnan Gallery in downtown Charleston. The talented bunch of professional artists include Dunnan, Brianna Stello and John Carroll Doyle.

Here are the full details:

The John M. Dunnan Gallery is welcoming John Carroll Doyle, John Dunnan, Anna Murray, Landis Powers, Patrick Pelletier, Brianna Stello and McLean Stith for their opening exhibit Nudes, Tuesday January 22nd from 5:30-8:30pm at 131 King St. The Nudes exhibit is on display through February 14.

About the artists:

John Carroll Doyle is a nationally acclaimed, self-taught artist born in Charleston. He began his career doing commissioned large-scale paintings in the eighties for restaurants. Best known for his creative and impressionistic use of light and color, his paintings incorporating many different subjects and scenes are uniquely timeless pictorial representations. Doyle has also worked to become an accomplished photographer working on such projects as Femininity & I See London I See France.

John Dunnan, a native of Washington, D.C. now resides in Charleston, SC, where he owns the John M. Dunnan Gallery. Dunnan, a graduate of the Corcoran College of Art, is well known for his stylistic gesture drawings, abstract and figurative paintings and sculptures as well as his contributions and involvement with numerous arts organizations.

Born and raised in Charlotte, N.C. Anna Murray’s career has spanned from Wall Street to King Street. Anna’s work behind the lens of her camera has grown to include not only candid portraits of children and families, but also fine art studies of the human form and the world around us.

Landis Powers, a native of Detroit, Michigan, began his artistic career in early youth. After years of traveling as a designer and educator in the art of hair design, he moved to Charleston. Landis’ intellectual artistic vision is manifest in his contemporary expressionist style and free-spirited nature.

Born in California, Patrick Pelletier possesses a level of fresh creativity that is grippingly conceptual. Patrick has also had an immense passion for art since his youth, influenced by everything that surrounds him and inspires him in daily life. His mostly abstract work is a somewhat transcendental representation of reality.

Brianna Stello is a native of Cape Cod, exposed to the noble art of photography since birth by means of her mother Jennifer Stello. Brianna’s eye and mind-opening travels and imaginative perspective reflect a diverse and culturally rich aesthetic. Through the lens, she is able to materialize her vision, and the result is a captured moment, which speaks for itself.

McLean Stith was born in Great Lakes, Illinois and raised in Greenville, SC. Her first form of personal artistic expression was through the written word; however, poetry could not satisfy her hunger for a life-changing creative experience. McLean began painting during her medical residency in the late nineties, and fell in love with this new way of connecting deeply and emotionally to not only herself but the world around her as well. Artistically self-taught, McLean’s work portrays great diversity of subject matter.

Philip "The Machine" Hyman - aka Mr. Eyeball - is tirelessly devoted to promoting original, contemporary art in Charleston and its environs (his tirelessness has earned him the "Machine" tag - not sure about the Eyeball one).

He has two new shows this weekend. One is a group show at the Old Village called Distractions from the Truth.

The other, at Vickery's in downtown Charleston, is a solo exhibition to mark the one year remaining of President Bush's term. Hyman reckons he's already under suspicion and expects Homeland Security to visit him after the one-week-only affair. Of course he's kidding (I think), but a one-man show from the creator of "RoboCheney" has got to be worth surveilling.

Here are the sordid details:

Distractions from the TRUTH: “An art show”

Instead of finding out what Britney and Paris are up to, come see an art show with plenty of TRUTH and great distractions. Musical entertainment by Subterranean Bleu Mind(s) and DJ “The Bird Hermit”

Saturday January 19th, 7pm-11pm at The Mill, East Montague Ave. in the Old Village, North Charleston, S.C.

Show features artists Erin Eckman, Phillip Hyman, Connie O’Donald, Sharen Mitchell, Chuck Keppler, Michael Lane, Seth Corts and others.

Count Down to 1/20/09 “Reflections of the politics of war, a one man art show”

Artist Phillip Hyman reflects in art….. how he kept his sanity for the last 7 years during the Bush administration.

Meet the artist on opening night January 20th, 7pm-9pm at Vickery's Bar & Grill, 15 Beaufain Street, Charleston, S.C.

Art will be on display until Sunday January 27th.

Hyman hangs out with some of his zombie art, displayed at the Undead on Arrival book launch at The Black Cart, downtown Charleston. Can't imagine what he's pointing at.

The Bucket List, a new big budget confection starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, is a film about two guys dying who make a list of the things they want to do before they kick the bucket. Then they go out and do them with hilarious results.

This isn't the first film to address the subject and I'm sure it won't be the last. In the TV show Boomtown, one of the main characters had a bucket list inspired by his army buddy killed in the Middle East. And in 1996, a college friend of mine named Tim Morgan based his post grad drama on the bucket list theme. His half hour drama, Cut the Mustard (meaning "make the grade") involved two guys working through a list of adventures they wanted to have before they died. If I remember rightly, one item on the list was skydiving, as in the Freeman/Nicholson feature.

During the course of filming, Morgan asked to borrow my car. I hadn't driven for seven years after bumping into a parked car in my late teens, so my girlfriend Ros did most of the driving when we used our vehicle, a banger we'd got for a song from a kindly old man in my hometown of Bristol, England.

With our car on loan, Tim went off and did his filming. It took him some time, as the production was ambitious for a guy on a MA film course. When we got the car back, one door wouldn't close properly and the third gear wouldn't work unless you held the lever in place as you drove. We wondered how our mode of transport had got in such bad shape until we saw Tim's footage for Cut the Mustard. One of the character's wishes was to do some stunt car driving in a parking garage. Tim had torn the hell our of our jalopy, using it as a hard-worn prop.

The moral: never lend your car to a film director.

Cut the Mustard was a great experience for Tim and his actors. The film was screened in various venues, including the Edinburgh Filmhouse movie theatre, and got a great response. Although there are uncanny similarities between Cut the Mustard and The Bucket List, I'm not accusing anyone of anything - it's just an $45 million coincidence, a case of great minds thinking alike, as often happens in the film industry. Other worthy films also share similar ideas; for example, 1988's Hawks is a great low budget Brit flick with Timothy Dalton and Anthony Edwards as two dying men who, surprise surprise, decide to go have adventures before they pop their clogs.

Tim Morgan went on to win a Royal Television Society award for another film called Space (I was briefly involved in pre-production and Ros produced). Then Tim had kids. Lots of kids. He currently works in the UK and has a production company, DVPMedia. I'm sure he wouldn't mind if Warner Bros., after The Bucket List's $19.5 million-earning wide release weekend, sent him a fiver just for the hell of it. Are you listening Jack?

Looks like the opening of Medical Univeristy of South Carolina (MUSC)'s new building, Ashley River Tower, will be delayed again.

Staff have been hoping to move in for weeks, ready to unsqueeze themselves from MUSC's main building on Ashley Avenue, where space is tighter than a weasel's butt. A move-in date of early February looks unlikely, though, if the latest rumors are true - the main driveway for ambulances is too narrow for the vehicles and will have to be rejigged.

As it stands, the Tower is a concoction of three different lumps - the most prominent is a shiny glass sail-shaped structure. At a size of approximately 641,000 square feet it could hardly be tucked away, but it really looks out of place in the historically inclined Holy City.

But no matter how imposing the new sections of the hospital may be, they ain't going to do people much good if they're not staffed or up to code. Pull your finger out, MUSC!

I've seen a lot of movies in my time, and a fair few of those have been scary ones.

But it's rare to see a film that's so dreadfully creepy that it makes you want to watch with a hand across your eyes, peering out between your fingers. You know, the kind where you wish the dreadful atmosphere would let up... yet you're enjoying it at the same time.

The Orphanage (co-produced by Guillermo del Toro) is a film like that, and you can read a review of it here. Suffice to say it's a cool movie.

Thanks to everyone who came!

- Nick

Above & below: My son, Sam, keeps me company during today's

book signing at Barnes & Noble.

I thought Charleston poet and filmmaker Devin Dukes might be wild and crazy, judging by his - er -unusual short film project about Spanish Moss muff coverers, The Merkin Man. But he turned out to be good-natured and helpful.

He's currently working on a feature film that, if I understand correctly, combines comedy, history and time travel (Bill & Ted's Redneck Adventure, anyone?).

In a small town like this, it's no surprise that I was familiar with one or two people who help him with his films. One is Steve Zimmerman, who edited The Merkin Man and was also videographer on The Man Who Shot God.

When Steve delivered a screening copy of Merkin to me in December, I was in full Holiday Magic mode so I asked him to deliver the DVD to Santa on Marion Square. Steve was a good sport when he visited the grotto, but he quickly left me (dressed as St. Nick) to deal with the horde of children that was then descending upon me. He looked like he felt kind of sorry for me, for some reason...

You can read my Charleston City Paper review of The Merkin Man here.

I feel like I've been hibernating recently, staying at home, watching bad movies and behaving like a lazy git.

Now the warm weather's back it's time for me to get out and about again... or at least drag myself to the local bookstore.

I'll be doing the first ever bookstore signing for "Undead on Arrival" at Barnes & Noble West Ashley, 1812 Sam Rittenburg Blvd, Charleston this Saturday January 12th at 2 p.m.

If you get the chance, please drop in and say hi!

Here's a blog post from Charleston City Paper's Arts & Entertainment editor, John Stoehr back in December '07 (sounds like a long time ago, doesn't it?):

"Be sure to check out Nick Smith’s review of an old-school screen printing show at 52.5. The exhibit, set among racks of CDs and punk ‘zines, runs through Dec. 31. And while you’re at it, Mr. Nick has a new novel out called Undead on Arrival.

"The official launch party was earlier this month at The Black Cart. He’ll do a book signing and reading on Jan. 12 at 2 p.m. Barnes & Noble, 1812 Sam Rittenberg Blvd. Smith, evidently a lover of Felis silvestris catus, is also the author Milk Treading and The Kitty Killer Cult. For more information, call the bookstore at (843) 556-8979 or go to http://arts.ccpblogs.com/2007/12/19/journal-screen-printing-101-and-mr-nick/www.bn.com."

Hogmanay in West Ashley

I was kept awake last night by fireworks raging past my window 'til 2.30 a.m. +, and the sound of merry Rednecks whoopin' and hollerin' the New Year in - the glorious sounds of America's annual rebirth.

In Hogmanays past I've been punched, trampled, propositioned by soused old ladies or left alone to contemplate my frail mortality, my personal history and the universe's future.

The more I look forward, the less seems to have changed; on a personal level, I'm still scared by the mere idea of performing on stage, even though I've done it countless times and I've taught acting to hundreds of people (a new course starts at the North Charleston Cultural Arts Center on Jan. 28).

That fear has something to do with the fight or flight reponse, apparently. But I'm stubborn which is why, perversely, I'm determined to get back up there as soon as I can...