Rigoletto, which has its third and final performance tonight, is a hit for St. Petersburg Opera, with strong performances and virtually full houses Friday and Sunday at the Palladium Theater. You can read my review here. There was also some interesting news announced about a Puccini Festival to be held in St. Petersburg in the spring. The highlight will be the company's three performances June 10-14 of Madama Butterfly at the Palladium, but there is also a second production in the works, nine performances April 30-May 8 of Puccini's short, comic opera Gianni Schicchi at American Stage. Both Madama Butterfly and Gianni Schicchi will be directed by Todd Olson (pictured), producing artistic director of American Stage. ... Read more

When the American Library Association today announced its youth media awards, among the Caldecott and Newbery and Carnegie award winners was a retired University of South Florida professor. This year's recipient of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Practitioner Award, given for lifetime achievement in advocacy for children and youth, is Henrietta Mays Smith. Dr. Smith was the first African-American faculty member of USF's School of Library and Information Science, retiring in 1993 as professor emerita. 

Among the other ALA awards announced today in San Diego:

John Newbery Medla for outstanding contribution to children's literature: Moon Over Manifest (Delacorte), Clare Vanderpool ... Read more

Hear that spinning sound? That's Mark Twain, a century dead, furiously revolving in his grave.

Twain's masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is one of the books most frequently challenged in schools and libraries. When Twain first published it in 1885, the novel was criticized in part because the boy Huck was friends with a black man, the runaway slave Jim (who is far and away the book's most heroic and admirable character).

These days, the book is most often challenged because it frequently uses -- as Southerners of the time it's set, a couple of decades before the Civil War, would have done -- the "n" word. ... Read more

TAMPA -- Given a choice of Nutcrackers, my preference is for productions that feature good young student dancers. There's something timeless and sweet about teenaged Snow Queens, Dew Drops and other soloists, outside of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Cavalier, roles that are danced by professional guest artists in any ambitious production. So the Next Generation Ballet Nutcracker I saw this afternoon at the Straz Center was right down my alley, with an impressive group of dancers in the youth company's inagural production, with choreography by artistic director Peter Stark. ... Read more