The internationally known arts festival, founded by the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, will open its 37th season Friday with the traditional speeches, brass fanfare and shower of confetti on the steps of Charleston City Hall.

The festival continues through June 9, when the Red Stick Ramblers — a Cajun, honky-tonk and swing ensemble — perform outdoors before a fireworks display at Middleton Place Plantation outside Charleston.

In all there will be 160 performances by 45 artists and ensembles, compared with 140 performances last season. The city’s companion festival, Piccolo Spoleto, is staging an additional 700 performances.

The festival was founded in 1977 by Menotti as a companion to his Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. He left the Charleston festival in 1993 in a dispute over his successor and died in 2007 at age 95.

Spoleto events this year vary from a performance of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Tom Morris and the Handspring Puppet Company to a production of “Oedipus” by the Nottingham Theatre. Rosanne Cash also gives a concert.

Then there is “The Intergalactic Nemesis,” which the festival describes as a live-action graphic novel. Original comic book drawings are projected on a two-story screen while actors voice parts to accompany sound effects.

And one opera reinforces the concept that the festival is international.

“Matsukaze” is the story of the spirits of two sisters condemned to wander the earth. The composer is Japanese, the director is Chinese, the lead singers are Korean and perform in German, and an America conducts the orchestra.

In addition to new performances, Spoleto has a new venue this year.

The aging Gaillard Municipal Auditorium — where the festival staged opera, dance and other performances for more than three decades — is no more. It’s being replaced with a new $142 million world-class performing arts centre now under construction.

For at least two years, Spoleto is holding some performances in the College of Charleston’s TD Arena, the school’s basketball venue.

Festival General Director Nigel Redden said he wasn’t sure what to expect inside the venue, but the festival brought in an acoustician to check it out.

“He did tests and basically said with a certain amount of work we can make this work,” Redden said. In fact, he said, performances there will have less background noise than the Gaillard.

A band shell will be brought in for orchestral performances, including the June 6 performance of Verdi’s “Requiem Mass.” That will be the final Spoleto performance for Joseph Flummerfelt who, for more than three decades, has been the artistic director for the festival’s choral activities.

Redden said that in almost four decades, the festival has continued to find ways to keep the offerings exciting.

“One of the brilliant things Gian Carlo did in creating the festival in Italy and the festival here is he made the festival the star. The festival has depended much less on stars and star vehicles than other festivals,” he said.

“Our audience comes first and foremost to the festival and then decides what they are going to do at that festival,” he added. “They might say I’ll give that opera a try, even though I can’t pronounce the name.”

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On the Internet:

Spoleto Festival USA: http://spoletousa.org

Neuharth’s autobiography was titled “Confessions of an S.O.B.,” but close friend Jack Marsh — president of the Al Neuharth Media Center — said Friday that he knew his boss as a different man.

Marsh says Neuharth was a free spirit, a visionary and a tenacious leader who was as thoughtful as he was tough.

Neuharth died at his Cocoa Beach, Fla., home on April 19 at the age of 89.

Television journalist Tom Brokaw, who spoke in a video, said Neuharth went on to become one of the most transformative figures in American journalism.

The live cinema event company BY Experience said Friday it will show a live performance of Peter Morgan’s play with residents of the The Lillian Booth Actors Home in New Jersey.

BY Experience has donated the high-tech digital projector equipment needed for the broadcast and is permanently installing it in one of the home’s community space. Residents will now be able to catch all subsequent broadcasts by National Theatre Live.

The play will be broadcast live across the world from London’s Gielgud Theatre using multiple cameras on June 13. Some movie theatres will show it live while others will show it at different times throughout the summer. The Actors Home will get a copy of it June 14.

The play stars Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, and focuses on the queen’s relationship with the 12 prime ministers of her 60-year reign. Its title denotes the weekly meetings the two hold at Buckingham Palace.

“We thought this would be a great way to extend the performance arts-going life of people who could no longer get out and do that,” said Julie Borchard-Young, who runs BY Experience with her husband, Robert. “It’s a great service to be able to offer to the residents. We just knew it was the right thing to do.”

Mirren won an Oliver Award in April for the role. The actress also won an Academy Award in 2007 for her performance as the British monarch in “The Queen,” a drama about the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana.

The Lillian Booth Actors Home is a 124-person assisted living and nursing care facility for entertainment professionals in in Englewood, N.J. It is funded in part by The Actors Fund.

Current residents include veterans the world of stage and screen, including actors, vaudevillians, Ziegfeld Follies dancers, comedians, band leaders and set designers.

“This is a community made up of talented artists who’ve contributed their professional lives to performing arts and entertainment, so they’re the perfect audience for Dame Helen Mirren,” said Joseph P. Benincasa, president and CEO of the Actors Fund.

Following “The Audience,” residents of the nursing home — and National Theatre Live fans — will next get to see Nicholas Hytner’s production of “Othello” in September.

BY Experience originated the concept of bringing live arts, cultural and music events to cinemas audiences worldwide. It now distributes to over 60 countries.

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Online:

http://www.ntlive.com

http://www.byexperience.net

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Follow Mark Kennedy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

According to preliminary Nielsen Co. figures Friday, Candice Glover’s victory over Kree Harrison was watched by 14.2 million viewers. That’s a 34 per cent drop from the year before, when nearly 22 million viewers saw Phillip Phillips claim the “Idol” crown. That represented the show’s previous record low finale audience.

Among advertiser-coveted young adults, “American Idol” saw an even steeper 42 per cent drop for Thursday’s finale.

The lack of interest in the winner of this year’s contest parallels the show’s declining ratings for the season. Fox is scrambling to revive the singing contest that once dominated TV, revamping the judges’ panel and making yet-to-be detailed format changes.

Original judge Randy Jackson has already announced his exit.

The “Wavin’ Flag” musician says he’s found renewed focus to “be honest” in his work, after playing it too safe with 2012′s “Country, God or the Girl.”

K’naan says from Los Angeles that he’s writing new material he hopes will be ready this fall.

His disdain for last year’s disc was laid bare in a New York Times opinion piece published in December 2012.

K’naan began that 1,200-word article by saying: “Here is a story about fame,” and went on to recount label pressure to cater his dense global rhymes to a pop-loving female, teenage U.S. audience.

K’naan, who draws much of his inspiration from his troubled homeland, now says he’s been thinking a lot about the artist he wants to be and the kind of music he wants to make.

“It’s a very instinctual album, (there’s) not a lot of mulling over it,” K’naan says of the new songs.

“I just felt like I had to do things this time around that felt pretty urgent to me.”

And he is hoping to get the material out into the world as soon as he can, he admits, largely because of regretful choices made with “Country, God or the Girl.”

“The rush is that I didn’t really like that album so much, so I think that that’s the experience — the reflection of the album I put out has caused me to put out another one,” he says of last year’s disc, which nevertheless earned respectable reviews.

“It’s not even a mechanical thing, it’s the urge to explain the dynamics of things and try to be honest about where I’m at, what my life is and also the difference between writing music that you could write and music that you should write.”

In the Times piece, the Toronto-bred rapper recounts meeting label executives to discuss how to keep his U.S. audience growing.

Their main advice: change his lyrics because “radio programmers avoid subjects too far from fun and self-absorption.”

“And for the first time, I felt the affliction of success,” K’naan writes.

“When I walked away from the table, there were bruises on the unheard lyrics of my yet-to-be-born songs. A question had raised its hand in the quiet of my soul: What do you do after success? What must you do to keep it?”

As a result, “some songs became far more Top 40 friendly, but infinitely cheaper.”

Reached earlier this week, K’naan says he’s filled with a creative drive to write new songs as well as work on his first feature film, which will be workshopped later this month at a Sundance Institute lab in Utah.

“Everyone has a thing that only they can do,” he says.

“There are different ways of approaching work, artistic work. As an artist, we know that we can do a few things and sometimes we do the work that seems that like other people can do also and then there are works that we do that is our own to do. So I think that that’s part of what I’ve been thinking about.”

These days he says he needs to “be honest about things and not necessarily be safe.”

“My previous work — with the exception of the last record — you wouldn’t call those songs safe, you know,” he continues.

“They weren’t structured around any kind of a pop success or idea around success. They were just what one thought they had to do or say. I think that’s kind of like the journey I’m on at this point — to reclaim that position in which the only thing I’m considering is the work that I feel like I need to do rather than what I feel like people want to hear.”

Also this year, you can see Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure and Elizabeth Rex.

Bard on the Beach runs Tuesdays to Sundays, starting June 12th. The performances take place at Vanier Park

News1130 is a proud sponsor of the 24th annual Shakespeare Festival.

That changes emphatically with “Fruitvale Station,” a Sundance hit that premiered Thursday night at the Cannes Film Festival. In the film, he plays Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old victim of the infamous 2009 police shooting on the Oakland, California, transit system.

To humanize Grant, first-time filmmaker Ryan Coogler fashioned the movie around his last day: Jordan hardly leaves the frame.

“When I first saw it, I was like, ‘Man, can we cut to something else? I’m tired of looking at myself right now,’” Jordan said in an interview by the beach off the Croisette. “That’s when it really sunk in that this is sink or swim. Sink or swim. Hope I’m swimming.”

Not only is the 26-year-old Jordan swimming, he might as well be doing swan dives along the Riviera. He utterly commands “Fruitvale Station” with star-quality charisma and an honest naturalism.

“I wanted to show that I could carry a movie,” he says. “That’s the next step. I want to do films. I want to be a leading man. A lot was riding on this.”

“Fruitvale Station,” which was simply called “Fruitvale” before the Weinstein Co. picked up the film for release July 16, won both the Grand Jury prize and the Audience Award for a drama at Sundance. Cannes has a tradition of cherry-picking the best of Sundance. Much as “Beasts of the Southern Wild” did last year, “Fruitvale Station” is playing in this year’s Un Certain Regard section.

Jordan, who says he was merely hoping the film would make it into Sundance, was excitedly enjoying himself at Cannes on Thursday. He’s planning to stay at the festival a few days longer than necessary, “to drink a little more, stay up a little later.”

“It’s electric,” says Jordan. “It’s like March Madness. It’s that time of year where everyone’s just in it, talking about movies.”

But he’s also trying not to get ahead of himself.

“I don’t want to be that ignorant American who comes over here and expects everyone to love it: ‘Oh, you got to love it because it’s hot over there,’” he says. “I want people to be excited about it because it really affects them.”

“Fruitvale Station” has certainly been doing that, with raves for the film continuing at Cannes. Its power owes much to Jordan’s performance, as he slowly — through a routine day of running errands, fighting to keep a job, trying to live down an earlier stint in prison, and caring for his daughter — fleshes out Grant beyond the simple posthumous photo in a newspaper.

“Something me and Ryan really wanted to show is spontaneity,” he says. “It’s about the humanity. It’s about how people treat each other, regardless if they’re black, white, orange, from wherever, whatever social background, how much money you got — it doesn’t matter.”

Coogler, a native of the San Francisco Bay area where the film takes place, had Jordan specifically in mind for the part. A moment after meeting him, the director knew he had the magnetism of the sociable Grant.

“In everything that he was in, I wished the camera stayed on him,” says Coogler. “He would be in a scene, and on TV, it leaves and goes on (to another character). I would be like, ‘Man, we should be following that guy.’”

Jordan has had some memorable roles, including as the tragic, young, drug-dealing Wallace in the first season of “The Wire,” and as Vince Howard, the troubled but good-hearted quarterback of “Friday Night Lights.” The show, Jordan says, was the first time he got the material to “show what I can do.”

The actor says he was “drooling at the bit” to play Grant. But perhaps the greater challenge to seeing his name atop the call sheet every day during shooting “Fruitvale Station” was that Jordan would be playing a real person, one whose family was intimately connected to the production.

“His daughter is going to have to watch this movie one day,” he says. “I didn’t want to let anybody down. I didn’t want to see me up there. That was the biggest thing: I didn’t want to see Mike up there.”

Jordan has been in talks to play the Human Torch in Twentieth Century Fox’s “Fantastic Four” reboot. He acknowledges the possibility, but says, “That’s not real yet.” The film is to be directed by Josh Trank, who cast Jordan as one of three high school friends who gain superpowers in “Chronicle.”

If Jordan were to be cast in “Fantastic Four,” he would be the rare black actor to assume a superhero role. Jordan acknowledges that some will prefer the continuity of the Human Torch remaining white, as he is in the comics. But he thinks the character’s most identifiable qualities have little to do with race. (Jordan’s character in “Chronicle” was also originally scripted as white.)

“I’m all about breaking barriers and changing stuff,” says Jordan. “It’s 2013. We’ve got a black president. Times have changed.”

But whatever is to come for Jordan, it’s clear he has big ambitions: “I want a career like Leo,” he says. “I want a career like Ryan Gosling.”

Smiling, Jordan says: “It feels good. It feels good to get to a place where I can be creative and selective about certain things I do. I’m really curious to see what’s next.”

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle

“They were tribute shows and I certainly didn’t want anything to do with that,” the 46-year-old McGraw said with a laugh. “I wasn’t ready for that yet.”

Instead, McGraw decided to take the show in a new direction, recasting it as a summer tour preview for fans. “ACM Presents: Tim McGraw’s Superstar Summer Night,” taped one day after the ACM Awards last month in Las Vegas, will air Sunday on CBS (9 p.m. EDT).

McGraw invited top country stars like his wife, Faith Hill, Taylor Swift, Lady Antebellum, Keith Urban, Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan and The Band Perry to perform, but said he was most excited by appearances from pop- and rock-world acts like Ne-Yo, Pitbull and John Fogerty.

“There were a lot of great country artists there, but I see those guys all the time,” he joked.

McGraw serves as host, sings some of his own songs and joins his fellow artists for others. Most of the invited stars perform one of their own songs during the show.

He and Ne-Yo team up on “She Is.” McGraw joins Pitbull on “Felt Good on My Lips,” and he teams up with Swift and Urban on “Highway Don’t Care.”

The moment that really sticks with him, though, was joining Fogerty, Aldean, Urban and Bryan for Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou.”

“We were completely floored when he opened his mouth and started singing,” McGraw said of Fogerty. “We’re all Fogerty fans, CCR fans, all the stuff that he did that was fantastic. But when he started playing guitar and started singing ‘Born on the Bayou’ in that voice — I think he’s in his mid-60s, if I’m not mistaken. He can flat … sing. We just sort of stepped back and looked at each other and said, ‘Are you kidding me?’”

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Online:

http://timmcgraw.com

http://www.acmcountry.com/

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Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott .