Nathan Weinbender

We’re now in the thick of Spokane Symphony season, with new concerts happening seemingly every week. On Friday, the symphony premieres a new concert series called Intersect, which will take a culturally themed orchestral program and meld it with relevant art, cuisine and history.

Stanley Kowalski looms so large in our cultural conscience that it’s easy to forget that “A Streetcar Named Desire” is really about Blanche DuBois, his emotionally disturbed sister-in-law. Much of that is due to Marlon Brando’s iconic portrayal of Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ landmark drama (he originated the role onstage, too), a performance so captivating and animalistic that it changed the trajectory of modern acting. And yet “Streetcar” is, of course, Blanche’s story; in fact, Stanley disappears for much of the play’s middle section. Watching Spokane Civic Theatre’s current production of the show, it occurred to me that Blanche seems more like a real person than most theatrical characters, because she’s allowed to be so many seemingly contradictory things at once – demure, flamboyant, compassionate, detached, wounded, predatory.

Tom Wopat is probably best known as Luke Duke, one of the trouble making Southern brothers on the CBS comedy “The Dukes of Hazzard.” But a lot of Wopat’s TV fans probably weren’t aware – and maybe still aren’t – that the actor had been a staple of the Broadway stage before he was ever a television icon. Wopat will be a featured vocalist in the Spokane Symphony’s first SuperPops concert of the season, performing a greatest hits program titled “Blockbuster Broadway.”