Berkshire Theater’s Full Fall Schedule
Theater season in the Berkshires no longer ends on Labor Day weekend. South County’s big three Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, and Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox—are all presenting important plays this month.
Barrington Stage is presenting To Kill A Mockingbird, a 1991 stage adaptation of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize winning novel and the 1962 Academy Award winning movie starring Gregory Peck. Barrington Stage artistic director Julianne Boyd (see the YouTube clip below) chose the play expressly because she thought story of race and justice would capture the imagination of the residents of Pittsfield. Indeed, the city is in a state of Mockingbird mania: Leslie Ferrin is hosting a Mockingbird inspired show at her gallery; Pittsfield Brew Works is hosting a Mockingbird trivia night featuring “Atticus Finch lager”, and the new independently-owned Chapters bookstore on North Street is hosting weekly discussion groups about book. The frenzy is supported by Cultural Pittsfield, which received an NEA grant for a program called The Big Read that encourages residents of cities and towns to all read the same book at the same time.
To Kill A Mockingbird
Barrington Stage Company
Pittsfield, MA; 413.236.8888
October 8 - 26
(Speclal $15 tickets for previews on October 8 & 9)
Yes, Kate Maguire, the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s artistic director was thinking about election season last winter when she decided that she’d mount Rhoda Lerman’s one-woman play, Eleanor: Her Secret Journey, about the outspoken wife of president Franklin D. Roosevelt. She found the perfect actress to play the crusading First Lady: Elizabeth Norment, one of the stalwarts of the regional theater scene.
Eleanor: Her Secret Journey
Berkshire Theatre Festival
Stockbridge, MA; 413.298.5576
Through November 9
At Shakespeare & Company’s new Elayne P. Bernstein Theater, the company’s new director in residence, Irina Brook (daughter of avant garde director Peter Brook) is staging a world premiere adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s short story The Canterville Ghost with a cast that includes company favorites Micahel Hammond and Michael Toomey. It is a tale of an old English ghost and the American family he torments. “ I love all the comic moments when the ghost tries to impress us with his horrible and brilliant performances over the centuries, he has all the pathos of a tragic old out of work actor, reminiscing abut his greatest roles,” Brook has said. “I love how the piece goes from light comedy to something very moving about love and redemption.”
The Canterville Ghost
Shakespeare & Company.
Lenox, MA; 413.637.1199
Through November 9
October 18: Special family day and children’s magic show ($10)
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 10/01/08 at 04:29 PM • Permalink
A Choreographer Climbs the Walls at Bard
The Richard B. Fisher Center helped put Bard College on the cultural map, and now the Fisher Center is putting dancers on the roof of the iconic Frank Gehry-designed building. This weekend and next, site-specific Canadian choreographer Noémie Lafrance will premiere a work called Rapture on the brushed stainless-steel exterior of the arts center, which opened in 2003.
Rapture is the kind of highbrow, avant garde world premiere that doesn’t normally take place in a rural setting with sponsorship by Tiffany & Co. (which got involved because it sells gold and silver architectonic jewelry designed by Gehry.) After all, Lafrance’s most famous work, Agora, was staged in an empty, gigantic public swimming pool in trendy Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the gritty, residential neighborhood of choice for emerging artists. Rapture is as much an engineering as aesthetic challenge, and Lafrance is working with master rigger Sean Riley, the star of the National Geographic Channel’s World’s Toughest Fixes, and her dancers will travel across the building via an innovative kinetic-rigging system. The audience will be allowed to circle the building during the performance.
Lafrance hopes Rapture will allow Gehry’s architecture to be appreciated in a new light. “I am interested in the interaction between the places/structures we design, which define our navigation through space and the relations, whether psychological, historical, mythical or physical we might have to them as human beings,” Lafrance says in her artist’s statement. “The rigging system we have designed for Rapture will allow us to work in close intimacy with the building from multiple angles and dimensions. From there we will develop a new and abstract language that resonate the very unique textures and musicality of the architecture and reflect it in movement.”
Lafrance foresees Rapture as the first in a series of dances performed on Gehry buildings and hopes to choreograph pieces for nine structures, including the Walt Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles and his groundbreaking Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. So if you go to Bard this weekend or next, you’ll be able to say you saw a global phenomenon here first.
Rapture
Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College
Annandale on Hudson, NY
845.758.7900
September 25 - 28 & October 2 - 5
7 PM
$25 adults; $22.50 seniors
This is an outdoor performance. In case of rain, performance will be cancelled. Please contact box office four hours before performance for weather update and to reschedule tickets if necessary.
Special Group Discount
10 tickets for $100
A Group of 10 Tickets may be purchased for $100 by contacting Elena Batt, Fisher Center Box Office Manager, at 845.758.7948
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 09/23/08 at 02:09 PM • Permalink
From Great Barrington to Off Broadway: Here Comes “Castronauts”
“The reputation of the Berkshires’ being a hideout for artists is true,” says Bobby Houston, an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker (Mighty Times: The Children’s March, 2004), who moved to Great Barrington a few years ago from his longtime home in California. ”Castronauts was born in the Berkshires.”
Castronauts (which is debuting in New York City this month as part of the New York Musical Theatre Festival) is a zany new musical that Houston dreamed up with an old friend, Patricio Bisso, whom he met during the filming of the Kiss of the Spider Woman more than 20 years ago. It is the story an illegal Havana nightclub populated by drag queens and other night owls, where Fidel Castro is killed and the barflies must flee to Florida in a ‘56 Chevy outfitted as a boat.
While the book writing was a long distance affair because Bisso lives in Buenos Aires, Houston found his composer, Randy Courts, down the road in his new hometown of Great Barrington. “The theater gods intervened,” says Houston. “I discovered three miles from my home a man my age who dresses like I dress in white shirts and blue jeans and he was available. He wrote 18 songs in twelve weeks, which brings us today,” says Houston, who is camping out in the city for the the run of the show, which he hopes will move to an Off Broadway theater.
Castronauts is directed by Will Pomerantz, who staged the sold-out production of Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing at Bard this summer. “He is a rising star and this show is way below his level,” Houston says happily. “When Will started giving our songs Broadway dances, I thought, This is the most fun I’ve had since being a grown up.”
Castronauts (Or How I Killed Fidel)
The Zipper Factory Theater
336 West 37th Street, NYC; 212.352.3101
Through September 28
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 09/18/08 at 03:28 PM • Permalink
Review: “See Rock City” at Barrington Stage is Worth A Detour
Gwen Hollander as a waitress and Benjamin Schrader as the lonely traveller at Barrington Stage; photo by Kevin Sprague
If you’re the type of person who worries about the future of American musical theater in the age of Disney on Broadway. hie yourself to Pittsfield where Barrington Stage Company’s Musical Theater Lab is staging a thoroughly modern and all-American musical called See Rock City & Other Destinations. You will be reassured that a new generation of artists have the creativity and chops to invigorate the most American of art forms.
See Rock City is not your typical book musical with a narrative and a happy ending. (The book and lyrics are by Adam Mathias and the music is by Brad Alexander.) It’s set up as an episodic travelogue, as if you are seeing the best scenes from six different musicals. The thread that carries through is that each scene is set at a different tourist destination--The Alamo, Coney Island, Niagara Falls--and every character is, of course, on some sort of journey to find his or her true self. There are three sisters who take an Alaskan cruise to scatter their father’s ashes in Glacier Bay as he requested, and they reprise a charming song about snow queens that they sang as children on such wintry cruises. There’s the waitress who’s never been out of state who is whisked off by solo diner to see the wonders of Rock City. There are two privileged Manhattan prep school boys who cut class to go to Coney Island for the day where they discover that they may be more than just best friends.
Every song is a story in itself, the kind of tunes that a certain sort of torch singer might add to his repertoire someday. And the book is sharp and clever. There is never a moment during the 90 minute show when you are not fully captivated. The casting for this show is exceptional. Everyone has a good strong voice (which is crystal clear because they are not amplified) and, more importantly, they all can act through a song--making you laugh and then tugging on your heart strings. For anyone who loves musical theater, See Rock City & Other Destinations is relevant, entertaining, and worth going out of your way to see.
(0) CommentsEnjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/18/08 at 01:16 PM • Permalink
Review: “Waiting for Godot” at Berkshire Theatre Festival
David Adkins and Stephen DeRosa in “Godot,” photo by Kevin Sprague
There’s a reason why certain plays--the ones you read in high school and college--are part of the theatrical canon: They are timeless dramas that explore universal truths or ponder eternal questions about human nature. By any standard, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is one of the great plays of the 20th century, a drama that has spawned thousands of dissertations. On its Broadway opening night in 1956, The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote “It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.” And so it remains today, and probably forever.
Godot is one of those plays that must be done with conviction, a belief that the mystery might reveal itself by the end of the evening though it never does (or does it?). The Godot at Berkshire Theatre Festival is BTF at its very best—precisely staged in the intimate Unicorn Theatre with masterful actors, who are engaging, funny, fierce and poignant. While making the play feel contemporary (and not so rooted to its post-war Europe origins), director Anders Cato excels when his actors have to do slaptick schtick, which is one of the counterintuitive charms of this evening of existentialism.
As Gogo (the role originated on Broadway by Bert Lahr) Stephen DeRosa seems to be channelling Groucho Marx in the most delightful way imaginable. David Adkins as Didi has one of those malleable faces that expresses disappointment in dozens of ways, and you can feel his heart breaking. David Schramm makes the over-the-top Pozzo seem totally believable and his slave, the ironically-named Lucky, is played by Randy Harrison with an extraordinary unselfconscious pathos. And the clever set by Lee Savage turns the arrival of the goatherd played by Cooper Stanton into a surreal moment.
You may not understand Waiting for Godot, but it will engage your mind, rattle your soul and make you feel lucky to live where summer theater is both ambitious and accomplished.
(0) Comments
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/13/08 at 11:12 AM • Permalink
Review: “Of Thee I Sing” at Bard
Photograph by Stephanie Berger
If friends call you this weekend and offer you their extra ticket to Of Thee I Sing, which has been sold out for weeks, say, “Yes!”
The only disappointing thing about this revival of the 1931 Gershwins’ musical comedy at Bard Summerscape is the brevity of its run. Director Will Pomerantz has given the Pulitzer Prize winning show a taut, thrilling production that is both historical and relevant, and the casting is remarkable because the faces look like those you recall from the great Marx Brothers movies. It’s a screwball musical in the tradition of Animal Crackers (and Of Thee I Sing’s book was in fact written by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, who wrote screenplays for the Marx Brothers.) The deconstructed plywood sets give the play an avant-garde look, but otherwise the choreography and costumes transport you to the Great White Way of the Depression era. As if to emphasize the historicism, the actors do not wear body mikes and their voices, while not loud, are clear and fresh as is the timeless Gerswhin music under the confident baton of James Bagwell.
And, of course, the story of a presidential campaign focused on style rather than substance could not be more timely. Bravo to Bard for bringing Of Thee I Sing to us (and shame on Bard for not anticipating its appeal and booking a longer run.)
(0) CommentsEnjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/08/08 at 07:54 AM • Permalink
Theatre: Why Noël Now?
“Private Lives” at Barrington Stage; photo by Kevin Sprague
Is it coincidence or harmonic convergence that Barrington Stage Company and Berkshire Theatre Festival are both ending their main stage seasons with plays by Noël Coward, the most urbane of playwrights? According to the theater companies’ artistic directors, it was the availability of key players that led them to Coward this August.
Julianne Boyd, the artistic director of Barrington Stage, says that when she learned that two of her favorite actors—Mark H. Dold and Christopher Innvar—were interested in doing Private Lives, she decided she could fulfill her dream of directing what many consider Coward’s masterpiece, a comedy about two divorcées who can’t get enough of each other while on their honeymoons with their new spouses. “I am not doing this as a museum piece,” says Boyd. “They are not going to have cigarette holders! I am interpreting it for modern times. And I think having a woman director’s perspective changes the play, too.”
Kate Maguire, the artistic director of the Berkshire Theatre Festival, chose to mount Noël Coward in Two Keys because director Vivian Matalon (who directed last year’s Mornings at Seven) suggested it. Matalon brings unique insight to the the pair of one-acts—Come into the Garden, Maud and A Song at Twilight—which were Coward’s last works for the stage. “Vivian directed Coward himself in the plays in 1966,” notes McGuire.
Both artistic directors say the Coward plays have contemporary resonance for the region’s audiences. “Coward wrote about society and the pitffalls of that life in the most amusing way,” says McGuire, whose theater is located in what was once the Stockbridge Casino, the hub of Gilded Age social life, which was designed by the great Stanford White. Boyd notes that Coward wrote Private Lives in 1930 (in four days, unbelievably) and that it was an entertaining diversion and balm during very difficult economic times. “It was escapist and gay, in the old sense of the word,” says Boyd. “Maybe subconsciously that’s why I chose to do it now.”
Private Lives at Barrington Stage Company
Pittsfield, MA; 413.236.8888
August 7 - 24
Noël Coward in Two Keys at Berkshire Theatre Festival
Stockbridge. MA;413.298. 5576
August 12 - 30
Enjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 08/06/08 at 12:18 PM • Permalink
New Plays, No Charge
The Rural Intelligence Region has become a high-power incubator for both musical theater (at Barrington Stage) and for straight plays (at Vassar’s Powerhouse and the new Berkshire Playwrights Lab, which has found a home at the Mahaiwe Theatre in Great Barrington.)
On Wednesday, July 30, the Berkshire Playwrights Lab will present a staged reading of Anna Ziegler’s Variatons on a Theme, which is the story of a young playwright with a blossoming career, who sounds a lot like Ziegler, who was recently selected to be a writer in residence at the Old Vic in London. There will be a brief Q&A after the reading, which is being directed by Daniel Winerman.
At the Powerhouse in Poughkeepsie, will have it second Readings Festival from August 1 -3 with staged readings of five new plays: Mean Time by Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, Enough by Deborah Rennard, Little Black Dress by Ronan Noone, Knowing Cairo by Andrea Stolowitz, and Veronica by John Patrick Shanley. Admission is free to the peformances at the Susan Stein Shiva Theater, but reservations are required: 845-437-5599
(0) CommentsEnjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/27/08 at 03:59 PM • Permalink
“The Violet Hour” Gets a Radiant Production at Barrington Stage Company
“The Violet Hour” at Barrington Stage; photo by Kevin Sprague
When Richard Greenberg’s play The Violet Hour opened on Broadway at the newly refurbished Biltmore Theater in 2003, New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote that it was an “example of the funk that descends when bad casting happens to good plays.” Now, Barrington Stage has given The Violet Hour a well-deserved do-over with a dream cast that delivers every bon mot with pitch-perfect precision.
Richard Greenberg is one of the most produced playwrights of his generation who made his Broadway debut in 1989 with Eastern Standard (a Yuppie AIDS play with a screwball comedy mien) and had his biggest triumph in 2002 with Take Me Out, the story of the first major league baseball player to come out of the closet. The Violet Hour is the story of a young book publisher in 1919 who must decide whether to publish a book by his charismatic Princeton classmate or by an older black chanteuse who’s also his mistress. (To reveal the play’s deus ex machina would be giving away too much.) It’s the perfect situation for the hyper-articulate, hyper-literate characters Greenberg likes to write, and you can see how much fun each member of the cast at Barrington Stage is having with the language. Everyone gets their turn to be clever, charming, morose, mocking and self-involved, while trading smart banter with other members of the cast.
Like all of Richard Greenberg’s plays, The Violet Hour is ultimately about words and how they come alive when put in the right hands. In Greenberg’s plays, the actors must nail every line; they play a game of verbal ping pong that would implode if anyone lost control for a split second. Under Barry Edelstein’s exacting direction, no one misses a beat and the play moves along so briskly that when it’s over you’re wishing for another intermission and a third act.
William Finn, the composer and lyricist who runs Barrginton Stage’s musical theater lab, was thrilled by the production having been disappointed by the version he saw five years ago on Broadway. As he walked down North Street after the show, he borrowed a cellphone to call the playwright in New York. “I told Richard that he should drop whatever he’s doing and get to Pittsfield,” said Finn,” because he will love this production.” So will anyone who loves what happens when good acting and good writing come together.
(0) CommentsEnjoy this post? Share it with others.
Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/22/08 at 07:14 AM • Permalink
Summer Stock: Staying Alive (Part II)
Al Bundonis, Kelly Strademo & Michael Padgett in “Camelot” at TriArts
The Mac-Haydn in Chatham is not the only barn in our region where you can see musical theater with high production values, vigor and pluck. TriArts at the Sharon Playhouse stages three musicals every summer with a unique formula that combines first-rate regional and community theater: a couple of professional leads who belong to Actors’s Equity, knock-out costumes, inventive sets, and a chorus that ranges from grade-school kids to senior citizens. It’s not an easy feat to pull off, but TriArts always makes the most from every show such as the current production of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot.
Camelot (Lerner & Loewe’s follow-up to their hit My Fair Lady) was never considered a great musical, although it starred the formidable duo Richard Burton and Julie Andrews when it opened on Broadway in December 1960. It has a luscious score that the 11 piece TriArts orchestra animates under the expert baton of Joshua Stone. But Camelot is undeniably dated, a pop-culture artifact from a far-off time when show tunes were popular music. The stars of TriArts production have a pleasing give-my-regards-to-old-Broadway quality: Al Bundonis as King Arthur is a good facsimile of the sort of matinee idol that don’t exist anymore. And Kelly Strandemo as Guinevere is the definition of the Broadway ingenue—as lovely to listen to as to look at.
For me, the enlightening thing for me about seeing Camelot was finally understanding why Jacqueline Kennedy compared her husband’s administration to this musical comedy in an interivew with T.H. White of Life Magazine one week after the assassination. As she said in the interview:
I want to say this one thing, it’s been almost an obsession with me, all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy, it’s been an obsession with me… At night before we’d go to sleep… we had an old Victrola. Jack liked to play some records. His back hurt, the floor was so cold. I’d get out of bed at night and play it for him, when it was so cold getting out of bed… on a Victrola ten years old—and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot… “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”...There’ll never be another Camelot again...
Do you know what I think of history? ... For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But Jack loved history so… No one’ll ever know everything about Jack. But ... history made Jack what he was ... this lonely, little sick boy ... scarlet fever ... this little boy sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history ... reading the Knights of the Round Table ... and he just liked that last song. Then I thought, for Jack history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way, if it made him see the heroes, maybe other little boys will see.
The TriArts production of Camelot (through July 20) gives you a splendid and entertaining opportunity to understand the origins of the Kennedy administration’s nickname.
(0) Comments
