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    Welcome Back

    Phylicia Rashad comes home to make music with the Houston Symphony — and new memories

    Tarra Gaines
    Mar 29, 2017 | 2:40 pm
    Phylicia Rashad
    Phylicia Rashad recalls growing up in Houston as a "grace-filled time.”
    Photo courtesy of Phylicia Rashad

    One of Houston’s favorite daughters, television, film and theater star Phylicia Rashad comes home this week for art, but she plans on indulging in many memories of the “grace-filled time” growing up in Houston while she’s here.

    The award-winning actress, theater director and educator will join the Houston Symphony for a newly adapted, semi-staged concert version of Beethoven’s masterpiece and only opera, Fidelio, serving as the opera’s narrator. It becomes a very special performance for Rashad, as many years ago another narrating role right here in Houston first led her to become an actress.

    A Natural Narrator

    “All of this started when I was in the sixth grade,” Rashad said in a recent phone interview about the upcoming concert that brings back to her birth city. “I was chosen to be the mistress of ceremonies for the music festival of elementary schools throughout the city in a program that took place at the Houston Coliseum.”

    She still remembers the teachers that helped her prepare and rehearse for that great responsibility and what a large influence that role would have on her future. “When I was 11 years old and narrated that festival, I know that’s when I decided I would become an actress," she said.

    We, of course, know the many characters Rashad has taken on stage and screen since then, but once in a while she again picks up the narrator title for musical performances. In fact, it was a recent appearance with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center as narrator for Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait” that she believes might have led to the invitation from the Houston Symphony for this new concert.

    “It was an incredible experience, one of the most gratifying experience ever,” Rashad said of working with the National Symphony Orchestra. “To speak Lincoln’s words that carry such depth and meaning today with music, that’s so powerful and beautiful.”

    For this adapted version of Fidelio, developed by Houston-based director Tara Faircloth, working closely with symphony music director Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Rashad will not recite characters’ text from the opera but instead excerpts of speeches, poetry and literature from poets, philosophers and leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

    Rashad was not too familiar with the opera before being asked to narrate, but certainly finds both a timeliness and universality to this story of a woman’s fight for freedom for her wrongly-imprisoned husband.

    “There are certain things that will always be timely. Reflections on the meaning, the purpose of life and human existence, certain questions that are asked today were also asked thousands of years ago," she said.

    Art Advocate

    Speaking with Rashad makes it clear how much at her core she lies both an advocate for and educator about art. Perhaps she always has been since she first took on that mistress of ceremonies role in the sixth grade.

    “Art is essential to human existence and expression,” she said. “You think about your own self as a child. As soon as you could stand up and walk you were dancing. You sang because children do sing without being taught; they make melodies before they talk. You drew pictures before you could read. This is fundamental human expression and do view it any other way is to miss it’s essence beauty and importance.”

    Growing up in an artistic and scientific household first laid the foundation for this live-long cherishing of the arts. Her mother is the award-winning poet and playwright Vivian Ayers and her father, Andrew Arthur Allen, was a dental surgeon. Actress, director and choreographer Debbie Allen is her younger sister.

    Rashad says she climbed trees and played with friends in their Third Ward neighborhood, but her normal everyday existence also included a home where she constantly encountered art and artists.

    “There was always books on different subjects, always music. There was always artists, musicians and professors in the house. They were always there and that was just ordinary and natural for me,” Rashad recalled.

    Houston Wonder

    Perhaps her continuing success first came from this art-loving and art-making home, but she also remembers that whole Third Ward community as a place that pushed her to strive and achieve. Even now she can remember all the names of her favorite teachers at Jack Yates High School, the same school that her father attended.

    “There was a sense of community that was so strong and it was always moving the young people forward,” she remembers. “People were with each other. People interacted with each other. When I think about my childhood and years growing up in Houston, it’s like that song that says ‘My soul looks back in wonder.’ Whatever difficulties there were in the world and in society, and Lord knows there’s always plenty of that, it was a grace-filled time.”

    And Rashad continues moving forward, nowhere near ready to retire. She recently guest starred in the ABC miniseries When We Rise and has a reoccurring role on Empire. She’ll direct a play in Chicago next and plays a major role in the new Amazon comedy Jean-Claude Van Johnson that has Jean-Claude Van Damme spoofing himself.

    “I thought: My god, I’m going to an action heroine,” described Rashad about her reaction when she first learned of the project.

    But before heading back out in the world continuing to make art and entertain, she’s excited to make music with the Houston Symphony and plans to take the opportunity to visit old friends and simply walk down Houston’s many memory lanes.

    “When I come back I remember with love and I remember with so much gratitude. When I talk to people about the way we grew in Houston, they think it’s fantasy. It’s not fantasy. It was real. I’m so grateful to experience that.”

    Phylicia Rashad joins the Houston Symphony for Beethoven's Fidelio on March 31 and April 2. For more information, visit the Houston Symphony website.

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    A Roman Holiday (Season)

    All roads lead to Houston museum's blockbuster exhibit of Imperial Rome

    Tarra Gaines
    Jun 11, 2025 | 3:15 pm
    ​The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times"
    Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
    The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times" ("Statue of Trajan" Minturno, Italy, 2nd century, marble, National Archaeological Museum, Naples)

    Houston's holiday season will have a distinctly Roman feeling this year, as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is bringing the glory of the Gladiator era to Texas. On November 2, 2025 through January 25, 2026 the MFAH presents the monumental new exhibition “Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times.”

    Featuring 160 objects of antiquity, including marble sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, delicate glass vessels, and exquisite bronze artifacts, the exhibition will transport visitors back in time to the Roman Empire during a flowering of art and architecture. The MFAH partnered with the Saint Louis Art Museum to organize the exhibition, which will showcase many pieces that have never been on view in the U.S.

    While Emperor Trajan might not be the most famous — or in some cases, most infamous — of the Roman emperors, he ruled between 98 and 117 C.E. during the empire’s height and was the second of the so-called “Five Good Emperors” of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty. He was also the first emperor born outside of present-day Italy, in what is now Andalusia, Spain. During his reign, he granted citizenship and rights to some peoples from conquered lands. The exhibition will explore how this time period expanded what it meant to be a Roman and how art reflected Rome’s power and promoted the empire’s values and ideals.

    \u200bThe Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times"
      

    Photo courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

    The Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents "Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times" ("Statue of Trajan" Minturno, Italy, 2nd century, marble, National Archaeological Museum, Naples)

    From statues of prominent men and women of the era, including Trajan, to vivid frescoes and furnishing from the villas of Pompeii, the objects in the exhibition will tell fascinating cultural and political stories of life in imperial Rome. To add context to the artworks and objects of antiquity, the MFAH will recreate a section of Trajan’s Column, which was a towering pillar with a spiraling narrative frieze, one of the few monumental sculptures to have survived the fall of Rome.

    “Art and Life in Imperial Rome: Trajan and His Times” brings such a wealth of objects to Houston thanks to unprecedented loans from the renowned antiquities collections of Italian museums including Museo Nazionale Romano, the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, the Parco Archeologico di Ostia, and the Musei Vaticani. It would would likely take months of travel across Italy to see this much art.

    “This is truly a rare opportunity for U.S. audiences to experience spectacular objects from this glorious era of the Roman Empire,” said Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH, in a statement. “We are enormously grateful to our colleagues in Rome, Naples, and Vatican City for lending these treasures to us and broadening the appreciation of Italy’s cultural heritage.”

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