Christine Winkler as Cinderella. Photo by Charlie McCullers

Ballet preview
Atlanta Ballet’s “Cinderella”
Through Feb. 14. $20-$120. Cobb Energy Centre, 2800 Cobb Galleria Pkwy. 800-982-2787, www.atlantaballet.com.

By Pierre Ruhe

Atlanta Ballet’s new production of “Cinderella” is playing now through Valentine’s Day, but don’t expect evenings of sentimental romance. In artistic director John McFall’s choreography, the social-climbing heroine isn’t the hapless, saved-by-the-prince lass of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale. Instead, she is a modern, independent young woman who, aided by a magical Godmother, gains strength through the power of love.
It’s danced to Sergei Prokofiev’s lyrical three-act ballet score — a classic of ironic, Stalin-era Russian music — with the ballet’s fine orchestra in the pit, conducted by Dan Alcott.
For the 43-year-old conductor, it’s a bittersweet show. Alcott became Atlanta Ballet music director in 2000, and except for …

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Review
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
By Rebecca Skloot
Crown: 330 pages; $26

By Sarah Sacha Dollacker

When Henrietta Lacks, a descendant of Virginia tobacco sharecroppers, was treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins in the early 1950s, she had no idea that part of her would stay in a medical lab long after her death.
Scientists had been working feverishly to keep human cells alive for study. They had  successfully harvested cells and had moderate success keeping them alive for short periods, but they had not discovered a cell line robust enough to stay alive for extensive study.
Henrietta’s cells, scraped from a malignant tumor during surgery, quickly proved to be the cells science was desperately seeking. They not only lived longer than any other previously harvested human cells, but they also heartily multiplied, making them ideal for unlimited production.
These cells could be grown in labs and sent to scientists all over the world — and they were. …

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Members of dance company gloATL, here in a previous performance, will present “Bloom” on Valentine’s Day in LenoxSquare, thanks to Louis Corrigan’s gift. File

Dance preview
“Bloom” by gloATL.
7 p.m. Fri. Feb 12; 4 p.m. Feb. 13 and 14. Free. In the corridors of Lenox Square, 3393 Peachtree Road N.E.;  www.fluxprojects.org.

By Pierre Ruhe

Louis Corrigan has thought a lot about the arts in his hometown. About who goes to galleries and performances. About how that art is paid for.
What he’s realized can be boiled down into a simple statement: “It doesn’t take that much to do something here,” he offers. “One person can have a huge impact.”
A 44-year-old investment research analyst, Corrigan created (and funds) Flux Projects, a nonprofit dedicated to innovative temporary public art throughout Atlanta.
Corrigan has pumped $200,000 into Flux for the coming year and hired a veteran arts manager, Anne Archer Dennington, to run it.
At the nadir of the Great …

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Soldiers O’Donegal and Rajib (Michael Simpson and Jam Sarbh) wait as the imprisoned Yusef (Demosthenes Chrysan, center) scribbles a note to his wife "Tennis in Nablus" on the Alliance Theatre’s Hertz Stage. Photo by Jeff Gaines

Theater review
“Tennis in Nablus”
Grade: B+
Through Feb. 21. 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays. $25-$30. Alliance Theatre, Hertz Stage, Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E. 404-733-5000, www.alliancetheatre.org

By Wendell BrocK

For a play about a brutal 1939 rebellion in British-occupied Palestine, Ismail Khalidi’s “Tennis in Nablus” is a remarkably funny play.
Blood is spilling on the streets. Families are fighting against each other. Prisoners are being tortured and hung. But about all the tennis-playing English invaders have on their minds is what they’ll wear to the next costume ball.
Winner of the 2009 Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition, this Alliance Theatre world premiere is a …

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Henri Matisse "Le cygne," 1930-1932

Exhibit review
“Henri Matisse: A Celebration of French Poets and Poetry”
Noon-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays. Through May 9.  $5. Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, 4484 Peachtree Road. 404-364-8555, museum.oglethorpe.edu
Bottom line: Matisse’s books are the subject of this absorbing exhibition.

By Catherine Fox

One of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Henri Matisse was a jack-of-all-trades. If paintings were the French master’s long suit, his creativity infused all his endeavors — drawing, printmaking, sculpture, stained glass, collage and, as you can see firsthand at the Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, books.
Matisse’s first effort, the 1932 illustrated publication “Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poésies” was undertaken at the suggestion of famed publisher Albert Skira. After illness left him bedridden in 1941, he went on to make 11 more.
This absorbing exhibition, the first North American exhibition tour of the Albert …

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Untitled by Cathy Daley. Pastel on vellum

Gallery preview
Art Papers Auction
Collectors’ preview: 7-9 p.m. Fri., Feb 5. $100. Limited slots. Call ahead for tickets.
Silent auction: 7-10 p.m. Sat, Feb 6. $25 in advance; $30 at the door.
For tickets and information: 404-588-1837, www.artpapers.org.
Mason Murer Fine Art, 199 Armour Drive. 404-879-1500.

By Catherine Fox

For one weekend every year — this one — Art Papers Auction is the crossroads of the art scene.
The annual event, which brings together 300 works from local, national and international artists at Mason Murer Fine Art, attracts as many as 1,700 people to bid on pieces ranging from $75 to $13,000.
It’s an important weekend for the bimonthly publication devoted to contemporary art. It counts on raising one-quarter to one-third of its $700,000 budget through auction sales, entrance fees and Friday night’s preview party.
Art mavens will recognize many sought-after Atlanta artists on the roster as well as such …

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According to a press release from PETA, a sculpture of a baby elephant in shackles will be temporarily installed in Woodruff Park Feb. 5-12 to protest what the animal rights organization says is mistreatment of pachyderms used in circus acts. The installation is timed to precede the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Baily Circus’s nine-day run at Philips Arena.

The sculpture, titled “Ella PhantzPeril,” was designed by Harry Bliss, a cartoonist and illustrator whose work appears in The New Yorker.

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Atlanta playwright Janece Shaffer

Theater preview
“Brownie Points”
Through Feb. 28. 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays; 2:30 p.m. Feb. 13 and Feb. 27. $35. Theatrical Outfit, 84 Luckie St. N.W. 678-528-1500, www.theatricaloutfit.org.

By Bert Osborne

A girl’s camping trip sets up a topical discussion of race and motherhood in Theatrical Outfit’s “Brownie Points,” a new comedy by successful Atlanta playwright Janece Shaffer. A winter storm strands them overnight at a cabin in the Georgia mountains, and while their kiddies sleep in a nearby room, five diverse women open up about their different walks (and views) of life.
“Living in Atlanta, it’s inevitable that race becomes a part of your life, so I wanted the play to start a conversation about it,” Shaffer acknowledged during a recent lunch interview.
“I look at the older generation, and then I look at the younger generation, and they have completely different experiences with race. My …

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Nonfiction
“The Most They Ever Had”
By Rick Bragg
MacAdam Cage, 172 pages, $25

By Gina Webb

It may be all over, but the shoutin’ is as eloquent and as outraged as ever. In “The Most They Ever Had,” Rick Bragg, who championed the working poor of Jacksonville, Ala., in his first three books, now returns to his hometown to speak for three generations of “lintheads” — textile workers who lived and died working for the Profile cotton mill.
Bragg alternates stories about those men and women with a history of the industry that gave with one hand and took with the other. In 1905 the mill’s doors opened to sharecroppers who gladly traded their shacks and mules for an American dream: steady jobs, new homes, electricity, heat, shops, churches and schools. Stability came with a price: Employees worked in unventilated rooms where the air was clogged with lint, the microscopic particles eventually damaging their lungs. Its dangerous machines mangled their fingers, hands …

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Fiction
“The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers”
By Thomas Mullen. Random House. 416 pages.
Author appearance
Thomas Mullen will sign and discuss “The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers” at 7:15 p.m. Feb. 3 at  the Georgia Center for the Book, 215 Sycamore St., Decatur. 404-370-8450 Ext. 2225.

By Sarah Sacha Dollacker

When Jason Fireson wakes up under a white sheet, he’s completely disoriented. His back is cold from resting on a flat metal surface, and it’s deathly quiet in the room. As he revives, he notices his brother, Whit, lying as if dead on a similar table. Looking around, he realizes they are in a morgue. Jason feels his body. There are bullet holes in his stomach and blood on his skin, but he’s miraculously alive. He shakes his brother, and as Whit awakes, Jason notices the bullet holes in his brother’s flesh. They shouldn’t be alive — Jason suspects they may in fact be dead — but they feel human, and with a sudden rush, they both realize …

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