Arts & Culture

John StadlerMale characters played by women, female characters played by men, a dutiful matron who morphs into a vulnerable gay man, a patriarchal husband who becomes a mischievous five-year-old girl. In November, Washington University’s Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences will present an all-new production of Cloud Nine, the classic, gender-bending satire of colonial and sexual conquest by London playwright Caryl Churchill.

Edison Theatre and Dance St. Louis will present The Kansas City Ballet Nov. 12-14.Dance St. Louis and the Edison Theatre OVATIONS! Series will co-present three performances by the renowned Kansas City Ballet at Edison Theatre Nov. 12-14. The program will feature Six Solos, a suite of rarely seen 20th century masterpieces restored by William Whitener, the company’s artistic.

Matthea HarveyPoet Matthea Harvey, author of Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form and Sad Little Breathing Machine, will read from her work for Washington University’s Writing Program Fall Reading Series at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 4.

Hugh MacDonaldMusicologist Hugh Macdonald, the Avis H. Blewett Professor of Music in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, will lecture on “Berlioz’s Lost Roméo et Juliette” at 4 p.m. Friday, Nov. 5.

In his most recent book, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, published in 2004, author and poet Peter Balakian describes the systematic deportation and murder of as many as 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I. The book was a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times best seller.

Aquila Theatre Company will present a new stage adaptation of H.G. Wells’ timeless morality tale The Invisible Man Oct. 29-30.

Both events are sponsored by the Department of English and The Writing Program, and are free and open to the public.

This year marks the 50th and 100th anniversaries, respectively, of the deaths of Charles Ives and Antonín Dvořák. At 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 24, more than 20 St. Louis musicians — drawn largely from the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and Washington University’s Department of Music in Arts & Sciences — will present A Chamber Music Concert Celebrating Anniversaries of Antonín Dvořák and Charles Ives. The concert will feature songs and rarely performed works by Ives and Dvorák’s beloved “Serenade for Winds in D minor.”

He was nominated for his seventh collection of poetry, The Rest of Love: Poems; it’s the second time he’s been up for the prize.

The Reduced Shakespeare CompanyConfused by Confucius? Thrown by Thoreau? Wish Swift was swifter or Tennyson tinier? Not to worry! The world renowned Reduced Shakespeare Company, those “bad boys of abridgement,” will return to Edison Theatre Nov. 19 and 20 for the St. Louis premiere of All the Great Books (abridged), an action-packed literary romp through everything you should have read in high school but probably didn’t.