Arts & Culture

Painters have studio visits. Musicians have backstage passes. And museums? Well, museum’s have vaults. On April 12, the Kemper Student Council showcased dozens of rarely seen works from the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s acclaimed permanent collection as part of the group’s third annual Vault Party.

He’s dashing, debonair and fluent in at least six languages. He’s escaped the insides of balloons and roller-bladed on Letterman. He can honk Beethoven’s Fifth in a space-suit of bicycle horns. He is Michel Lauzière, the Master of Unusual Comedy, and he’s coming to Edison Theatre.

The “Pina Colada Song” guy wrote a musical? Yes, he did, and a good one, too. In 1986, Rupert Holmes’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood won the Tony Award “triple crown” of best musical, best book and best score. This week, the WUSTL Opera Workshop will present experts from Drood and five other works as part of its semester’s-end performance.

In Wǒmen (我们): Contemporary Chinese Art, now on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, three undergraduate students—the inaugural Arthur Greenberg Curatorial Fellows—explore the hopes, illusions and realities of China in the Reform Era.

Described by The New York Times as “an artist’s artist,” painter Peter Saul (BFA ’56) has provided lush, lurid and scathingly satirical commentaries on political, social and historical events for more than 50 years. On April 11, Saul will be one of seven alumni recognized by the the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at its sixth annual Awards for Distinction dinner.

Fashion design is both a singular practice and a series of interrelated skills, from sketching and patternmaking to tailoring and construction. But for Washington University fashion majors, the puzzle pieces all come together May 5 when the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts presents its 84th Annual Fashion Design Show.

Performances of Lucky Stiff, a musical starring and directed and produced by students on the Washington University Medical Campus will be April 25, 26 and 27 in Whelpley Auditorium on the St. Louis College of Pharmacy campus. Shown is Greg Bligard, a third-year MD/PhD student, rehearsing a scene from the show.

Acclaimed architect Daniel Libeskind discusses the role of drawing in his practice. The conversation centers on a pair of artist’s books he created in the early 1980, which are now in the collection of WUSTL’s Kranzberg Art & Architecture Library.

Born in 1819, Clara Wieck was a musical prodigy and one of Europe’s most successful concert pianists. Though long over-shadowed by her husband, Robert Schumann, recent years have brought renewed attention to Wieck-Schumann’s own compositions. On April 12, the Eliot Trio will perform one of her best-known works, along with compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johannes Brahms.

Medical history, gender studies and comedy: Sarah Ruhl’s acclaimed In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) has it all. WUSTL’s Performing Arts Department will present an all-new staging of Ruhl’s Pulitzer and Tony-nominated play April 19-28 in Edison Theatre.