Mena Mark Hanna on the Changing Face of Spoleto Festival USA

Across the Carolinas, the season flips on Memorial Day in late May each year, signaling the start of summer. In Charlotte and Charleston, our respective tourist meccas, each city’s transformation can be marked by an annual event. 

In the Queen City, it’s all about Circle-K Speed Street and the Coca-Cola 600 — “NASCAR’s toughest test of man and machine.” Down in Charleston, an alternative option, as Spoleto Festival USA brings hordes of arts patrons seeking sun and culture. 

Imported by founder Gian Carlo Menotti from Spoleto, Italy, in 1977, the USA edition of this arts festival has grown bigger and more significant than its European parent, featuring more than 50 different events and 122 performances — plus a half-dozen ticketed Artist Talks interviews — over the course of 17 days this year.

With so many other things to commemorate next year, including America’s 250 years of independence, 2026 will also be the 50th year of friendly rivalry for the Yankee dollar between the 600 and Spoleto. 

Yet in a city that prides itself on historic consciousness and preservation, leadership at our nation’s largest performing arts festival is always fiddling with the formula, making over the models, rethinking the recipe. 

Some past festivals have incorporated visual or even circus arts, but the flavor hardly wavers as the basic ingredients remain the same: all varieties and vintages of chamber music, orchestral music, choral music and opera; theatre and dance, jazz and folk, bluegrass and rock, country and world.

Since taking over the reins of the festival from Nigel Redden in 2022, general director Mena Mark Hanna has presided over an extensive revamp of artistic leadership. We spoke to Hanna about the whirl of recent changes and the unique complexion of Spoleto Festival USA 2025.

Queen City Nerve: It seems to me much has changed at Spoleto. I’m looking back three years; in those days, you had the late Geoff Nuttall heading the chamber music. He’s been replaced by Paul Wiancko, the Kronos Quartet cellist. You had John Kennedy leading the Spoleto Orchestra and spearheading the new classical music programming. He’s been replaced by Timothy Myers. And now your choral music director Joe Miller is retiring. So I’m wondering if you’re going to be at a new landing point once his replacement arrives.

Mena Mark Hanna: Yeah, of course, I really love Joe Miller, and he’s been an incredible ally and supporter of me and the festival since I got here. He got an incredible opportunity to run the Vocal Arts Ensemble and that’s a big job for him in his career. So it’s tough to have a transition like that, but I think at a certain point transitions make sense for him. He was quite instrumental in helping us find his replacement. And if there were a course that could be taught at Harvard Business School in transitions, I would nominate him to teach the course.

Looking back, I guess the biggest changes in the last three years have been the elimination of the Music in Time mid-afternoon program and the initiation of the Front Row popular music series, which didn’t exist in 2022 and has tripled since 2023.

Yeah, I mean, as you wrote in 2024, “Down at Spoleto, the vibe is shifting.” So the first thing is that Music in Time did exist in 2022, that’s true, and it wasn’t really doing very well at the box office. What Music in Time did is that it compartmentalized new music and new composition into its own series. What we’d like to do is we’d like to make sure that the world premieres and the new music happen throughout the festival. 

So instead of having Music in Time, we’ve invested and doubled down on chamber music, creating an endowed position for the composer-in-residency that’s funded for five years. We have doubled down on world premieres in the orchestral series, and obviously last year in opera [the world premiere of Lyale Chaker’s Ruinous Gods].

Instead of new music and musical experimentation happening in its own series, you see it spread out and suffused in the rest of the festival. Additionally, you’re right about the programming of Front Row. 

Front Row did exist before I got here, but it was substantially smaller. We’ve definitely expanded it. The money that we make on Front Row as a revenue leader helps us absorb the cost for some of our losses, for more experimental opera and theatre, etc.

So what Front Row does is that it expands the aperture of the audience, brings more people into the bigger tent that we’re building called Spoleto, and then hopefully gets those people to chamber music, to theatre, to opera, and dance.

But even so, the eclectic aspect of Front Row’s lineup is almost mind-boggling.

We do want to make it more all-encompassing. You have Patti Smith coming for the first time; you have Jeff Tweedy coming for the first time; you have Yo La Tengo coming for the first time. Lucinda Williams has been here before, back in 2014; Mavis Staples has been here before. 

You have people like Valerie June and Corinne Bailey Rae coming for the first time. So it is an expansion. There’s also a kind of more experimental aesthetic happening within the Front Row series that’s more of a club scene with Arooj Aftab, aja monet, and Red Baraat. They’re all festival debuts as well.

So ideally, this is trying to appeal to a broader audience and convert them into people that would be interested in coming to [Alisa Weilerstein’s] Fragments, or coming to Manual Cinema’s The 4th Witch, or coming to hear a new work by Mahsa Vahdat, our 2025 Susan D. Boyd composer-in-residence at Chamber Music, or coming to Kronos Quartet. I actually find it amazing that this is the festival debut of Kronos Quartet.

You’re also making it easier for people to navigate what they’re going to see at Spoleto. Omnivorous festival fans like me can’t cram it all into one week, because it looks like the bulk of the best jazz is on the back end of the festival along with theatre, while the big classical attractions like Alisa Weilerstein, Thaïs, and the orchestral concerts are mostly on the front end. The thread that used to run through the festival, namely a theatre piece that had a three-week stand at Dock Street Theatre, isn’t here this year.

We have about 125 performances in 17 days this year. And if you do look at jazz, we’ve got the Phillip Golub residency happening May 25 through the 27th. Then of course, we have Cecile McLaurin-Salvant performing with our orchestra, which is going to be spectacular, on May 28.

The vast majority of jazz happens from June 1 onward, with Branford Marsalis, Vijay Iyar, Etienne Charles and Quentin Baxter, and then the spectacular residency of Ambrose Akinmusire, which I cannot recommend enough. I would certainly recommend going to the [second] performance on June 5, which is Ambrose on the trumpet, with Tyshawn Sorey on the drums, and Sullivan Fortner on the piano. 

With theatre, we saw some limitations with the model that existed before the pandemic, especially due to how the market has changed and how audience behavior has changed. Getting a performance like The Tempest and having it sit for two weeks … it just doesn’t sell very well. You hold on to an international company staying in Charleston for that long a period of time, when Charleston is becoming exceedingly expensive from a housing perspective. We found that the better models, when we started to model it out, were more variety within the 17-day period.

We have five theatre offerings within the 17-day festival this year, White Box from May 29 to the 31st; Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, starring David Strathairn, from June 5 to June 8; Manual Cinema, which is a world premiere of their 4th Witch, that’s June 4 through 8. And then two more family-friendly performances: Polar Bear and Penguin, May 31 and June 1; and Mrs. Krishnan’s Party, June 6 through 8.

You’ve done some things to make it friendlier to plan your stay at the festival — some subtle, some rather overt. You’re starting to offer 15% discount packages. Last year you introduced last-minute bargain basement tickets, and I’m noticing this year your brochure is easier to navigate. It’s not in chronological order or altogether in genre order, but it’s unmistakable that all 12 of those Front Row attractions are grouped together, even if they’re not chronological.

Look, Spoleto is quite an intimidating endeavor. To create one of the world’s premier performing arts festivals in a 17-day period and effectively put on 125 performances, which is the length of a standard New York performing arts festival that you would have for eight months, there’s definitely an ambition to the scope and breadth and intensity of a festival like that.

So we need to find ways to unlock it for the audience, to make it more digestible, to find ways that have more reverberations with specific types of audience members. And so the packages are a way to do that. Expanding Front Row and grouping that together is a way to do that. Making sure that we sell as much ticket inventory during the festival period as possible is a way to do that.

This is all about finding ways to continue to do the thrilling world premieres and the ambition and scope that we want to do in the performing arts at an international level while also trying to make it as financially sustainable as possible. And, given external circumstances, it’s starting to become more apparent that the responsibility is on the festival to become more self-sufficient.

So this is us being judicious and intentional in how we are seeing the changing landscape of the performing arts.

Are you also experimenting and floating trial balloons to further refine your formula?

What you’re going to start seeing this year more than last year, I want to get back to the early, heady days of Spoleto and its counterpart festival, Piccolo Spoleto, where the art really spilled out into the streets and you would walk through the city in the late ’80s into the ’90s and you really felt this catalytic kind of energy that was cackling all around the city.

You see that in some other places. You see that in Edinburgh in August for the Edinburgh Festival [coupled with Edinburgh Fringe]. But we need to find a way to unlock that, not just for Spoleto and Charleston, but for this country.

Just looking at this festival, you’ve got six world premieres, including the world premiere run of the complete Fragments cycle by Alisa Weilerstein. You’re talking about an eight-hour project over six performances that involves 27 different composers that gives a completely different realization, new contextualization of the Bach Cello Suites. And that kind of ambition and scope is what Spoleto should be doing for this country in the performing arts.

Right. Like Peony Pavilion [2004] or Omar [2022], things that just splash out at you and cry out, “You’ve got to see this!” You want to have blockbusters like that at every festival and it seems like you’re magnifying that aspect with this Front Row series, to some extent.

To some extent. You’re a perceptive and close reader of everything we do. Some of the more surprising things for me have been how some of our performances have sold. 

I mean, something like The Turn of the Screw in the Dock Street Theatre, which we are marketing as much as an opera as it is a ghost story, with a director that has currency at Spoleto because of her remarkable staging of Vanessa two years ago. That’s effectively sold out, that performance, and so to get an opera that is above capacity and near sellout pace is something that we’re very proud of accomplishing at Spoleto. 

And even things that are edgier and stranger, like White Box, it’s selling very, very well. It’s a US premiere of this Norwegian explorer tale in 1897, where a party of three disappears in the Arctic Circle and the entire production is made up of the found photography of that failed expedition. These are some exciting, strange things that you won’t see in the rest of the country that we’re bringing, that we’re doing world or US premieres for.

What are the things you’re most looking forward to in terms of what you’d consider popular attractions, and what are you most looking forward to in terms of what you think of as kind of obscure attractions?

As far as popular attractions may go, I’m absolutely beside myself that we have Patti Smith coming. She’s just an all-encompassing artist, a kind of punk poet laureate. I think it’s a real watershed moment for her to be at the festival because of actually how genre-defining and genre-defying — both things — her art is.

On the obscurity side, I would really love to see more people come and see Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski, with the Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn performing in it. It’s a play about a Polish resistance fighter during the Holocaust, but it’s also about how one man bore witness to one of the most tragic chapters in human civilization and lived to tell that tale. His ability to persevere through that is one of the great viewpoints of the Holocaust that we have today — a remarkably important story that people should go and see.

Where do we look if we’re searching for something that is absolutely going to blow our mind?

If you really want something that’s absolutely going to blow your mind, you have to go to all six performances of Fragments by Alisa Weilerstein, because each performance of Fragments is unique and retells the story of Bach’s Cello Suites in a completely new light.

This is a project that has a stage director, a costume designer, a scenic designer, a makeup designer, a lighting designer. These are fully staged theatrical performances, a work of performance art. So seeing them together in such close proximity as an extant run is something that is probably never going to be repeated again. And if it is, we will be trying as much as possible to support it in the future.

Well, you did co-commission this mighty project, after all…

Yeah, it’s a pretty remarkable moment for cello performance, historically.

Spoleto USA runs from May 23-June 8, 2025, at various locations around Charleston, South Carolina. Visit the website to learn more.