The Kennedy Center ushered in the holiday season with a spectacle featuring Christmas standards, sacred hymns, and an abundance of holiday pageantry hosted by Virginia native Charles Billingsley and his big band. Also featuring performances from TaRanda Greene, The Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, The National Christian Choir Ensemble, and special guest star, award winning, … Read more
It’s that time again and were back to the roots of Mark On The Arts, where everything began 24 years ago with the very first Christmas Playlist. At the time it featured then cutting edge/now Holiday classic recordings like The Pointer Sisters’ “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”, John Cougar Mellenkamp’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing … Read more
The Holiday Season continues at Mark on the Arts with the season’s seminal dance classic, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s immortal masterpiece, The Nutcracker, performed by the prestigious Cincinnati Ballet, with stunning choreography by Artistic Director Emerita of the company Victoria Morgan. Tchaikovsky’s opus is based on Alexander Dumas Pere’s revised edition of E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Nutcracker … Read more
Every Who down in Whoville liked Christmas a lot…But the Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville, did NOT!The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason. Well, thanks to a sweet and clever new musical by Mel Harris (music) and Timothy Mason (book and lyrics), … Read more
It’s that time again, and this is down to the wire due to an overly busy December, and the fact that I thought the Annual Playlist may be over now that Cher released the ultimate Christmas album to just play over and over again. But this year bounced back, after being pretty brutal on most … Read more
And just like that, another year has passed and we are slowly emerging from the dark years of covid and attempting to pretend the world is back to normal. It’s not, but we’re all just tired of living like we have been for 3 years. So we have adapted a sense of normalcy. Which means … Read more
2020. A year of many unanticipated changes, none good. The most recent, when I published my first Halloween Playlist, Facebook informed us my forever platform of Facebook Notes was going to be retired the next day. Knowing even I’d never read all of this as an extended post, I decided the answer was something many … Read more
The holidays seem to come faster each year, and with Thanksgiving being late, the annual holiday playlist took on some urgency, especially with the void of entries this year. It almost became an anniversary year, except next year will be the twentieth anniversary of this list. Where did that time go? There were so few … Read more
And here we are at that time of season again. This has been a year of life imitating art imitating life as in the midst of attempting to assemble this playlist, I helped produce TWO separate Christmas shows, the wonderful new musical version of the iconic perennial Christmas movie A Christmas Story, and a fun salute … Read more
Holy cow, how can it be that time of year again? The last month has been full of searching Spotify and sifting through this year’s slate of potential Christmas CDs vying for the top slots. It’s a significantly more mixed bag than last year with a variety of old and new pop acts and the … Read more