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“Lombardi” is a Winner!
Through July 28 at The Mahaiwe
Football has not always been big business. Eric Simonson’s new play Lombardi, which is having its pre Broadway run at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, is set in 1965, when the most famous football coach in the land lived in an ordinary ranch house (which we see in a black and white photograph projected on the stage) and his wife hosted post-game parties with homemade crab dip in their basement rec room. It’s the exact same era as Mad Men—the celebrated TV show about the pre-feminist New York advertising world—and Judith Light as Marie Lombardi is the archetypal executive wife who finds solace in good clothes, cocktails and flirting with younger men (such as her husband’s players.) Light is so captivating—I kept thinking the subtitle of this play could be Long Day’s Journey into Green Bay—that you’re disappointed every time she exits the stage with her charm bracelet jingling. But Dan Lauria as Vince Lombardi is equally magnetic and he makes clear in a nuanced performance how a man so pig-headed in his obsession to win could be so loved by his players and indeed by the entire country.
Lombardi is the best type of nostalgia, because it captures, as the coach says himself, a time when “we played for pride.” It’s the time before Nike endorsement deals and before “gottcha” You Tube videos when magazine articles had the power to wound great men, which is why Lombardi is so wary of the Look magazine reporter played by Keith Nobbs who comes to spend a week shadowing him, trying to figure out the Lombardi mystique. Using a reporter to tell the story is effective, because it shows how both journalism and football have been corrupted and infected by show business values over the past decades. The eternal joy and beauty of football is the magic of eleven guys working as one with a common purpose, and it’s the same whether you’re on the high school junior varsity or in the Super Bowl. There’s nothing sweeter than a victory shared. And it’s the same thing with a well-cast, well-written and well-directed play, which Lombardi most definitely is. When it arrives on Broadway in the fall, it’s destined for a championship season.
Lombardi at the Mahaiwe
Great Barrington, MA
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/24/10 at 10:34 AM • Permalink
“Spelling Bee” at TriArts
We only saw the first half of director Andrew Volkoff’s version of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee because a storm knocked out the power at the Sharon Playhouse. But what we did see was funny and fresh—even though we’ve seen this show three other times with three other casts. Never have the kids seemed so much like kids and not adults playing kids, which heightens the ridiculousness of the spelling competition. Spelling Bee is one of those shows that adults enjoy as much as their tweens and teens, and it never fails to amaze that the audience participation aspect of the show always works.
TriArts
Sharon, CT
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/20/10 at 10:03 PM • Permalink
Review: “Judgment Day” at Summerscape
Through July 25 at the Fisher Center at Bard College
To begin by praising the set, props and sound design of the 1937 drama Judgment Day at Bard Summerscape should not be misinterpreted: This is an extraordinary evening of theatre in every respect, but the awesome stagecraft powerfully serves the story of a rules-following stationmaster whose split-second mistake causes a disastrous train crash that kills 18 people and a small town’s subsequent attempt to determine guilt and find justice. The Fisher Center’s black box Theatre Two has been transformed into a tunnel-shaped amphitheater and the seats on both sides are high above the stage. Mimi Lien’s set moves slowly back and forth on tracks in several scenes, reinforcing the play’s theme that reality shifts based on one’s perspective—and one’s motives. When the first train comes rumbling by, you can feel the theater vibrate and get a visceral sense for the violent power of a coal-stoked locomotive barreling through town at full speed.
Though it’s set in Austria-Hungary in the late 1930s, Ödön von Horváth’s play (translated by Christopher Hampton) is a universal tale about small-town life, the rush to judgment, and the question of whether lying to protect another person is ever defensible or wise. The star of the angry mob is Kelly McAndrew’s Frau Leimgruber, the archetypal town gossip who’s unaware of the consequences of her selfish disregard. As the stationmaster, Herr Hudetz, the handsome Kevin O’Donnell is charming, frightening and utterly convincing. Frau Hudetz, his older, embittered and unstable wife, is played with intense passion by Stephanie Roth Haberle. Hayley Treider as the not-so-innocent Anna is pretty perfect in her pivotal role. The other performances are mostly strong, but it’s a bit unsettling that some actors use accents and others don’t. Nevertheless, director Caitriona McLaughlin has managed to make this small story have an epic feel, and she has the actors use every inch of the bowling alley set to great effect. It seems a shame that this play will only run for ten performances, because anybody who appreciates theater that is visually and intellectually stimulating and morally challenging should see this production of Judgment Day.
Judgment Day at Bard Summerscape
Annandale-on-Huson, NY
Through July 25
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/17/10 at 02:12 PM • Permalink
Review: “Six Degrees” at Williamstown
Through July 25
For anyone who is too young to remember 1980s New York as an era of smug money, John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation is a fascinating history lesson. As New York Times theater critic Frank Rich wrote, Six Degrees is “a masterwork that captures New York as Tom Wolfe did in Bonfire of the Vanities.” Based on the true story of a young African American con artist who not only pretends to be a prep-school friend of the children of several elite families but also the son of the barrier-breaking movie star Sidney Poitier, Six Degrees is a comedy of manners as well as a tragedy depicting how the best and the brightest lost a sense of themselves in the go-go 1980s.
The play is exquisitely constructed with flashbacks and monologues where characters directly address the audience, and WTF’s production is as sharp as Guare’s precise and hyper-articulate text. As Ouisa Kittredge, the conflicted bleeding heart matron, Margaret Colin could be mistaken for Stockard Channing who originated the role at Lincoln Center twenty years ago, As the con-artist Paul, Ato Essandoh is so sincere that you believe that he is the son of Sidney Poitier even though you know better. All of the younger actors are especially fine as they rage against their gullible parents. Of course, the play has become a period piece. Today, Ouisa would not have to go downtown to the Strand bookstore to buy a biography of Poitier to find out if he had a son named Paul; she would check Wikipedia on her iPhone. And Poitier himself no longer holds the same sacred place as a black film star now that actors like Denzel Washington and Will Smith are among the biggest stars on the planet. Still, Six Degrees remains a humorous, poignant evisceration of the Upper East Side elite and 90 minutes of first-rate theater.
Six Degrees of Separation at Williamstown Theatre Festival
Williamstown, MA
Through July 25
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/17/10 at 02:00 PM • Permalink
“Rocky Horror” in Rhinebeck
Through August 1
The Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck continues on its unconventional-for-community-theater course. Following its smart and sassy productions of Rent and Falsettos earlier this year, the Center is staging The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the campy, erotic and subversive cult classic that encourages audience participation.
Center for Peforming Arts at Rhinebeck
Rhinebeck, NY
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/15/10 at 04:53 PM • Permalink
“Lombardi” Kicks Off at the Mahaiwe
July 22 - 28
Actor Dan Lauria will portray the Green Bay Packers coach on stage.
Millerton resident and New York Times best-selling author Peter Richmond, whose new book, Badasses:The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden’s Oakland Raiders (Harper Collins) will be published this fall, interviewed playwright Eric Simonson for RI on the eve of Lombardi‘s out-of-town tryout in Great Barrington. It begins previews at Circle-in-the-Square on September 23, with the Broadway opening set for October 21.
Lear, Loman . . . Lombardi? A legendary football coach as stage protagonist? Though the sporting world is no stranger to the Broadway stage—Damn Yankees used the backdrop of baseball to tell its Faustian tale, and Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize winning That Championship Season revolved around the reunion of a college basketball team—no one’s dared broach the gridiron. Eric Simonson, however, has always been drawn to unlikely subjects, whether he’s dramatizing the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, putting Ahab onstage or directing an Academy-Award-winning documentary about Norman Corwin, an obscure visionary of radio’s golden age. And for a Wisconsin farm kid who grew up watching Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers playing in the football temple of Lambeau Field, writing a play about the sport’s most storied coach was probably inevitable: the driven Lombardi’s successes vaulted him beyond the grid of sport, and into the pantheon of American icons—a territory Simonson loves to tread. “The most interesting thing to me,” he says by phone from Los Angeles, “is why they are all lone individuals. They’re saying something in such an original way that it makes them pioneers.”
In a way, Simonson belongs in that club. Writing a play about a man who lived, breathed and worshipped the game of football—without being able to show the beautiful brutality of the game itself—would figure to be, at the least, problematic. (Of course, Shakespeare couldn’t portray the battles in Macbeth, and the box-office returns have worked out pretty well for that one.) But capturing the soul of a football coach without showing any football? “You have to accept that you’re not going to do what a film would do: cut to the game, do a montage of how the game went,” says Simonson. “Instead, you focus on the characters and economize as much as possible, creating interesting characters who have obstacles in front of them when they’re trying to get something.”
A member of Chicago’s Famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Simonson was nominated for a directing Tony in 1993 for The Song of Jacob Zulu, and in 2006, he won that Oscar for his 40-minute film A Note of Triumph, the story of radio essayist Norman Corwin. For Lombardi, he drew on material from David Maraniss’s bestselling biography, When Pride Still Mattered, to debut a very different play two years ago for the Madison (Wisconsin) Repertory Theater. “The play I had written before was more weighted on ideas than action, more thought-provoking than entertaining,” he says. “It was a whimsical look into Lombardi’s subconscious.”
But when producers in New York showed interest in staging a more biographical Lombardi play last year, Simonson started over again, saving just one five-minute scene from the original. Eschewing the cradle-to-grave “biodrama” form he and co-writer Jeffrey Hatcher had used in Work Song their play about Wright, Simonson decided to limit the dramatic action to a single week, during which a journalist lives with Lombardi (Dan Lauria) and his wife, Marie (Judith Light), in search of a feature story. The reporter ends up finding out more about Lombardi’s inner life—as well as his own—than he bargained for. “He discovers that Lombardi will never be completely happy because he will never see his work reach complete perfection. And Lombardi infuses that philosophy into the reporter, inspires him to achieve the same kind of perfection in his own work.”
In Lombardi, the game is nothing more than the fabric into which Simonson has woven the character of an intense, complex, highly religious man whose searchings struck a universal chord for the author. “I see in the Jesuit philosophy a linking of perfection, a closeness to God, through work, that mirrors the philosophy of the culture of the country: the idea that if you work hard and pay your dues you will profit spiritually and economically,” says Simonson. “And Lombardi personified it. That’s at the core of why he’s such a cultural icon: he was striving for perfection. I do that in my life, and I see a lot of people who do that same thing—going after an impossible goal.”
Lombardi
July 22 - 28
Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center
Great Barrington, MA
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/14/10 at 11:33 AM • Permalink
Will “Pool Boy” Be the Summer’s Splash Hit for Barrington Stage Company?
Poolside in Pittsfield: Reba Evenchik and Nikos Tsakalakos.
There are two swimming pools that played a crucial role in the genesis of Pool Boy, Nikos Tsakalakos’s musical that is having its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company’s Stage 2 (July 13 - August 8). One is the swimming pool at the Hotel Bel-Air, the five-star resort nestled near the clouds in Los Angeles’s fanciest neighborhood; the other is the swimming pool behind the stately red-brick house in Pittsfield’s fanciest neighborhood that belongs to Bruce and Reba Evenchik, a Barrington Stage trustee.
When Tsakalakos spent his first summer in Pittsfield four years ago as the aide-de-camp to Tony-winning composer William Finn—his professor at NYU who runs Barrington Stage Company’s Musical Theatre Lab—they often hung out at Evenchik’s pool, which is a short walk from the theater. “Reba basically has an open door policy for the cast and crew at Barrington Stage,” explains Tsakalakos, who bunked with the Evenchiks the following summer. “This is the Bel-Air of Pittsfield!” he says, sitting by the pool where he first started composing lyrics for “Poolside at the Hotel Bel-Air.”
Last summer,
I wasn’t writing songs.
I was serving Mai Tais and Mojitos,
And specialty burritos
To models in red thongs,
Using shiny silver tongs.
I was working poolside
At the Hotel Bel-Air
Keeping it together
Trying not to stare
Tsakalakos made the most of chauffeuring Finn around the Berkshires, fully aware that Finn birthed his hit Broadway musical, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, on BSC’s Stage 2 in 2004. “As we drove around, I would tell Bill stories about working at the Hotel Bel-Air, and he said to me, ‘That is what you should write about’.” After writing that first song, Tsakalakos performed it a few times at late-night cabarets in Pittsfield and audiences were enthusiastic and wanted more. “When Bill heard it, he told me, ‘That will be the final song in your musical’.”
Once he had an ending, Tsakalos had to find a beginning, and he asked his classmate Janet Allard to collaborate on the book and lyrics. They wrote a story about a pool boy named Nick who’s an aspiring singer-songwriter who is willing to compromise his morals to win favor—and a record contract—with the people who could make him a star: the Sultan of Nubei, the music mogul, his beautiful wife, her pretty young assistant, the fastidious hotel manager and the faux Japanese sushi chef. It’s a rock-and-roll musical that satirizes the LA lifestyle: The Graduate crossed with Rent.
Although Tsakalakos is a compelling cabaret performer (see video below of him singing at the Barrington Stage gala in June), he is pleased that his alter ego will be played by Jay Armstrong Johnson, who was recently on Broadway in Hair. “Bill and Julie Boyd [BSC’s artistic director] have gone all out,” he says. “It’s very difficult to get a new musical to this point, and I am very grateful to them. I love doing this away from the pressures of New York. You feel the creative spirit in the Berkshires running from Great Barrington to Williamstown.”
Like the fairy godmother in countless musicals, Evenchik says she knew that Tsakalakos was a singular talent the first time he sang “Poolside” for her in her backyard. “I had a sense he was onto something very special,” she says. “He has a passion that comes out in his music and lyrics. His songs reach a very deep level. Nikos is a very authentic person and that is reflected in what he writes. His songs not only stay in your mind, they stay in your heart.”
Pool Boy
July 13 - August 8
Barrington Stage Company Stage 2
Pittsfield, MA
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/07/10 at 08:35 PM • Permalink
“Richard III” at Shakespeare & Company
Now through September 5 @ 7:30 p.m. in the Founders’ Theatre
John Douglas Thompson leads an all-star cast of familiar faces—Johnny Lee Davenport (Twelfth Night, Hamlet), Nigel Gore (Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet) and Annette Miller (Martha Mitchell Calling)in a new production of Richard III directed by Jonathan Croy.
Shakespeare & Company
Lenox, MA
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/06/10 at 07:21 AM • Permalink
Review: A Fab “Forum” at Williamstown
Now through July 11
“Something familiar, something peculiar” are the opening lyrics of Stephen Sondheim’s 1962 musical comedy, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but there’s probably never been a production this unexpectedly and delightfully peculiar. I was clueless about what was in store at the Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) until five minutes before the curtain when I overheard a gentleman of the old school mutter in the men’s room: “Forum was all about tits and togas when I first saw it on Broadway. I don’t see how they can do it with an all-male cast, but I will keep an open mind.”
If you’re open-minded, you are in for a fantastic treat. To give Forum a fresh spin, the young director Jessica Stone proposed to WTF artistic director Nicholas Martin that she could stage it with an all-male cast, but she has not turned this into a campy drag show. The unconventional casting has merely made you more aware that Borscht Belt comedy with its reliance on visual and verbal puns can be sidesplittingly funny when its performed with razor-sharp timing. As Psuedolus, Christopher Fitzgerald (who recently played the leprechaun on Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow) gives a star-turn that’s as astonishingly riveting even if you’ve see this show many times before. But to say he’s the star does a disservice to the rest of the cast who are uniformly excellent and play their roles as if the gods had dictated that they were fated to triumph on the WTF stage. With a 16-piece orchestra in the pit, Sondheim’s score (the first for which he wrote both music and lyrics) sounds lush, almost symphonic. But the best sound of all is the laughter that ricochets off of the walls of the ‘62 Center from the opening curtain to the final bows. Laughing together with 500 other people for two hours is something peculiar and familiar indeed.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Williamstown, MA
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/04/10 at 11:54 AM • Permalink
“The Amorous Quarrel” at Shakespeare & Co.
June 23 - August 28 @ the Rose Footprint Theatre
The family-friendly, outdoor Bankside Festival features Molière’s wild, knock-about comedy, The Amorous Quarrel, with original music by Andy Talen. Each performance consists of a complete production of the show at the outdoor, tented Rose Footprint Theatre, the future site of S&Co.’s historically accurate re-creation of Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre. Shows are held Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 5:30pm. Tickets are free for children 18 years and younger, and $10 for adults.
Shakespeare & Company
Lenox, MA
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/25/10 at 06:52 PM • Permalink
“The Wedding Singer” at TriArts
June 24 - July 13
You can always count on a great live band at the musicals staged at TriArts Sharon Playhouse, and the band is an integral part of the family friendly production of The Wedding Singer that congers up the glory days of the 1980s.
TriArts
Sharon, CT
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/23/10 at 05:54 AM • Permalink
“Sweeney Todd” at Barrington Stage
Now through July 17
When Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd opened on Broadway in 1979, New York Times critic Ricard Eder wrote: “The musical and dramatic achievements of Stephen Sondheim’s black and bloody Sweeney Todd are so numerous and so clamorous that they trample and jam each other in that invisible but finite doorway that connects a stage and its audience . . . .an endlessly inventive, highly expressive score that works indivisibly from his brilliant and abrasive lyrics.” BSC artistic director loves the challenges of re-staging great musicals, and she has had great success in recent years with Follies, West Side Story and Carousel. Now, she’s done it again with Sweeney Todd, which feels fresh and alive despite its familiarity. With Jeff McCarthy giving a muscular yet oddly sympathetic performance in the title role, Boyd has another hit on her hands.
Barrington Stage Company
Pittsfield, MA
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/21/10 at 03:05 PM • Permalink
“Women of Will” at Shakespeare & Company
Now - July 24 at 2:00 pm / 7:30 pm
Does anybody in the world understand all of Shakespeare’s women better than Tina Packer? The founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company (with help from Nigel Gore) explores the bard’s chronological portrayal of female characters in this American premiere of Women of Will in the Founders’ Theatre..
Shakespeare & Company
Lenox, MA
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 06/21/10 at 03:04 PM • Permalink
Review: “The Whipping Man” Wows
Barrington Stage Company Stage 2 through June 17
Why is this play different than all other plays? Certainly, it’s the premise. Have you ever before seen a drama about three Jewish men—two of whom happen to be newly freed slaves—who share a house at the end of the Civil War? But it’s also the raw yet polished production of Matthew Lopez’s The Whipping Man: Barrington Stage has found three actors who—as individuals and as an ensemble—leave you trembling with awe.
After seeing The Whipping Man, you will never be able to experience a Passover seder the same way. On the day after Abrahma Lincoln is assassinated, two recently freed slaves and the son of their former master share an improvised seder on the floor of a plantation house in Richmond, Virginia. When the recently freed slave played by Clarke Peters sings “Let My People Go,” the traditional song about the Jews’ fleeing Pharoah in Egypt, you’re made achingly aware of the layer of hypocrisy that blinded ostensibly religious people to the immorality of slavery. As weighty as the subject matter is, Lopez’s play is a soaring, exhilarating piece of theater that makes your mind race and your heart pound. His rapid fire dialogue is often extremely clever and theatrical, but it never feels forced or unnatural.
Director Christopher Innvar could not have wished for a better cast, and you get to witness how great actors thrive off each other’s energy and skill. As Simon, the elder slave with a long memory, Clarke Peters (who’s well known for his role on HBO’s The Wire and the TV show Treme) is the play’s center of gravity who manages to hold onto his faith despite all the hurt and betrayal he has known. Peters’ brilliant, powerful peformance, which deflty blends rage and compassion, is miraculously matched by his co-stars: Nick Westrate as Caleb, the severely wounded Confederate solider who comes home to find his family’s mansion in ruins, and LeRoy McClain as John, the newly freed bookish slave who played with Caleb when they were both boys. As friends turned rivals, they play a game of cat and mouse that is taut and suspenseful and Westrate and McClain don’t let up for a second.
Everything about this production syncs beautifully. Sandra Goldmark has put real candle sconces on the walls of the set, a small touch with huge impact on the authenticity of the mood on stage. Kristina Lucka’s handsome costumes help define each character with pinpoint accuracy. And the modern music by Brad Berridge is a compelling counterpoint to the historicism of the drama. In this era of YouTube, HiDef movies and video-on-demand, Barrington Stage Company has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you don’t need any special effects for live theater to be suspensefully spine-tingling, intellectually stimulating, and extraordinarily entertaining.
The Whipping Man
Barrington Stage Company Stage 2
36 Linden Street, Pittsfield, MA
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 05/30/10 at 11:56 AM • Permalink
Les Costumes Magnifiques!
Recycling is second nature to Govane Lohbauer. Last year, Shakespeare & Company’s costume director got a call from S&Co founder Tina Packer who said she wanted to direct a winter production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which is set in the 18th century French court and requires elaborate costumes. “Tina asked me, Can we do it from stock?” recalls Lohbauer, who knew the financially-challenged theater company could not afford to buy the sort of sumptuous fabrics needed to make new period dresses and dress coats. “I told Tina we could do everything from stock—except the wigs.”
Lohbauer (right) has been designing costumes for S&Co for 30 years. “My studio used to be in the eves in the stables at The Mount, which we shared with the bats and the mice,” she says, smiling at the memory as she stands in her enormous sunny studio above the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre. Since 1980, she has saved seemingly every belt, buckle, blouse, coat, hat, petticoat, shoe and trouser that has ever been worn on stage at S&Co. Her vast fiefdom looks like a meticulously organized Goodwill store with an incredible pedigree. “We’re the envy of every costume shop in the northeast,” she says. “And everybody rents from us—Barrington Stage, BTF, Williams College, and all the companies in Boston.”
One of the challenges of designing Liaisons was its location in the smaller Bernstein Theatre where the actors are literally inches away from the audience, so there could be no sleight of hand. “I couldn’t use zippers, for instance, because they’re not period,” she says. A self-taught costume scholar, she explains how she remade dresses from The Merry Wives of Windsor to be appropriate to late 18th century France. “What distinguishes these from the Renaissance is the sleeves, which are really tight,” Indeed, authenticity is key to Lohbauer’s philosophy. “Lizzie Aspenlieder wears a full corset,” she says. “The actors wore panniers [the wire contraptions that create exaggerated hips] since day one of rehearsal.”
Serendipity also plays a part in the costume process. “People are always donating things to us, and we got two very important gifts last year,” she says. “There was a decorating business in Great Barrington that went out of business and she gave us bolts of expensive silk fabrics that I put aside for this show. And my daughter, Sandy [Wade-Cleary], got a stash of lace from someone she worked for and gave it to us. I think the lace made all the difference for these costumes.”
And the quality of the costumes makes all the difference to the actors. “Costumes are integral to defining a character’s status, wealth, and station and support the world of the play,” says Elizabeth Aspenlieder, who plays La Marquise de Merteuil. “In Liaisons, it’s layer upon layer of deception – so my character is the only female with no less than 3 separate and stunning dresses. Costumes are especially important in an 18th century French period piece where manners, etiquette and how one presents oneself is key. To some degree the costumes become a layer of who you are and how you define yourself, how you move.”
Alexandra Lincoln, who plays Emilie, the courtesan, echoes Aspenlieder’s sentiments. “My two costume pieces are corsets and this very elaborate, gaudy, lavender dress with gold trim and lavender gloves,” she says. “Plus a sequined purse. My pannier is also bigger than everyone else’s. I think ‘more is more’ is the philosophy behind my costume. And that does translate into my character, who doesn’t obey all of the rules. I burp, I laugh at people, I do what I want. I have a healthy sense of joie de vivre that the opulence of my costume reflects.”
“You always think of a whore as being dressed in reds and more racy colors, but in my costume I appear very girlie and playful, with purple bows and lavender,” continues Lincoln. “I do think that affects the character. I’m not a dark force. The play has a lot to do with maintaining false appearances, and here is this courtesan with frilly bows, almost like Little Bo Peep gone very badly astray.”
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 02/17/10 at 03:11 PM • Permalink
What’s My Line? A Quiz to Win Free Tickets to “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” at Shakespeare & Company
All of the actors at Shakespeare & Company have behind-the-scenes roles. You can’t just be a player when you’re a member of Shakespeare & Company; you also have to be a teacher, administrator or director. The troupe’s guiding ethos is the interconnectedness between its Performance, Education and Training wings; all of its artists are trained as practioners as well as teachers. The cast of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which is being directed by founding artistic director Tina Packer, all have day jobs, which support the company’s mission. If you can match the actor to his or her day job (scroll down), you can win a pair of tickets to the new production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which runs January 29 - March 21.
1. Joshua Aaron McCabe (The Vicomte de Valmont) 2. Alexandra Lincoln (Emilie)
3. Lydia Barnett-Mulligan (Cécile de Volanges) 4.Douglas Seldin (Victoire/Majordomo)
5. Scott Renzoni (Azolan) 6. Elizabeth Aspenlieder (Marquise de Merteuil)
7. Enrico Spada (Chevalier Danceny) 8. Renée Margaret Speltz (Madame du Rosemonde)
9. Jennie Burkhard Jadow (Madame de Volanges)
WHO’S WHO AFTER HOURS?
The Cast’s Day Jobs
Answer Form
1. _________
2 _________
3. _________
4. _________
5. _________
6. _________
7. _________
8. _________
9. _________
A. Concession & Retail Manager
B. Communications assistant/Williams College student
C. In-school resident educator
D. School programs manager
E. Marketing and web manager
F. Information techonology manager
G. Co-director Shakepeare in the Courts
H. Director of publicity and playbill advertising
I. Food services manager
Cut and paste the form above into an email, and place a letter (corresponding to a job description) in the blank space next to each number (corresponding to the actors’ headshots.)
Email answers to danshaw@ruralintelligence.com by noon on Monday, February 1.
Everyone who correctly matches each actor with his or her job will be eligible for a drawing to win two tickets to see Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which runs through March 21.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 01/27/10 at 09:36 AM • Permalink
Berkshire Fringe Festival Grows Up
Fringe founders Peter Wise, Sara Katzoff & Timothy Ryan Olson
The Berkshire Fringe Festival operates in the spirit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which started in Scotland in 1947, when eight theater troupes turned up uninvited at Edinburgh International Fesitval and had to perform on the outskirts of the city. Although the Berkshire Fringe’s home at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington is not exactly an out-of-the-way location, it is removed from the tourist-friendly Old Guard Berkshire Cultural Establishment, which is anchored by Berkshire Theatre Festival (est. 1928), Jacob’s Pillow (est. 1933), Tanglewood (est. 1937) and Williamstown Theatre Festival (est. 1955). The Berkshire Fringe (est. 2005) is the love child of Sara Katzoff, Timothy Ryan Olson, and Peter Wise (above), who all graduated from Simon’s Rock. Their mission is to give other young artists a chance to test themselves and their ideas in front of an audience in a real theater. “We want every artist to have a venue and voice,” says Katzoff, who notes the three volunteer their time to the not-for-profit festival. “Our theme this year—and really every year—is embracing artistic risk.” (To see highlights from previous seasons click on the video below)
The Fringe has struck a chord with established talents like actresses Karen Allen, Karen Beaumont, and Hilary Somers Deely, who serve on the fringe’s advisory board. “Fringe festivals are really popular all over the world,” says Katzoff, who has performed herself at the San Francisco Fringe. The biggest challenge is recruiting an audience for edgy material such as The Gay Agenda’s Big Broadway Show, the story of Micah and Nicholas who’ve been sequestered in their basement by a family member for years with only original cast recordings to listen to during their isolation. (Click here for the full calendar.)
Alternative Festivals in the Berkshires
Bang on A Can Summer Music Festival
July 16 - August 1
MASS MoCA
North Adams, MA
WordXWord Festival
August 17 - 22
Pittsfield, MA
To help create buzz, the first night for each of the six shows in the festival (which are performed five times over 21 days) will be “Pick Your Own Price,” and you can pay as much or as little as you like for your ticket. (On other nights, the main productions are $16, but there are free events, too.) “Word of mouth is our biggest asset in selling tickets so we hope this helps spread the word,” says Katzoff. The Fringe also does a mellow version of guerilla marketing by sending its interns loose with pamphlets and fliers on the sidewalks of Great Barrington to talk up the shows with pedestrians. “It would not work in New York City, but it’s incredibly effective here.,” says Katzoff. “People feel like they have been personally invited to a show.” The personal touch extends to this year’s gala on Monday, July 27, which is nearly sold out. “We had a committee for the first time and they wrote personal notes on the invitations,” says Katzoff. “It was a very proper thing to do. I guess that means we’re now a proper organization.”
Berkshire Fringe Festival at Simon’s Rock
Great Barrington, MA; 413.320.4175
July 27 - August 17
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 07/22/09 at 10:15 AM • Permalink
From Pittsfield to Pougkeepsie: The Evolution of “The Burnt Part Boys”
Four years ago, Julie Boyd and William Finn announced that they would start a Musical Theater Lab in Pittsfield, which would make its home at Barrington Stage Company’s Stage 2. They said it would be an incubator for new musicals, and it got off to a brilliant start in 2006 with The Burnt Part Boys (photo left); the show—with music by Chris Miller, lyrics by Nathan Tysen, and a book by Mariana Elder—was presented in the basement of the Berkshire Athenaeum, which had been cleverly outfitted with planked walls to feel like a shaft in a coal mine. Finn, who had taught two of the show’s creators at NYU, was kvelling and wrote in the playbill: “They are not only charmers, these writers, but they’re artists not afraid of entertaining. This story is classic but fresh; it’s an old western transposed to a mining town where lessons are learned and lives are changed. The lyrics I love because no one else but Nathan could have written them in such an openhearted way. And the music, by Chris Miller, is down-home yet sophisticated and always transporting. How lucky I am to present the professional debut of these young writers.”
Fast forward three years, and the incubation period is not quite over: The Burnt Part Boys, which is still being billed as a “new musical,” will be presented this summer at Vassar & New York Stage and Film’s Powerhouse Theater (July 17 - 26). What’s more, it is already set to open Off Broadway in 2010 in a joint venture between Playwrights Horizons and the Vineyard Theater. “I didn’t see it three years ago, so I cannot say exactly how it is different,” says Johanna Pfaelzer, artistic director of New York Stage and Film, who says that the “story has radically changed” since its first incarnation. “This is the next step in the evolution,” she says.
Boyd takes great pride not only that Barrington Stage presented the “world premiere” of The Burnt Part Boys, but also that another Musical Theater Lab show from 2007, Calvin Berger (book, music and lyrics by Barry Wyner), will be getting a staged reading this month at Playwrights Horizons in New York directed and choreographed by Tony-winner Kathleen Marshall. So, it’s a sure bet that a couple of this summer’s Musical Theater Lab productions will have lives after Pittsfield, too.
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/30/09 at 04:58 PM • Permalink
Professor Karen Allen Directs “Moonchildren” at Simon’s Rock
Karen Allen—the actress who played opposite John Belushi in Animal House, Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Joanne Woodward and John Malkovich in The Glass Menagerie directed by Paul Newman—has become famous in Great Barrington for her eponymous Railroad Street store that sells Allen’s locally-made knitted cashmere clothing and other luxe bohemian apparel. Though the movies made her a star, it is theater where she honed her craft, playing parts such as Helen Keller in the Broadway production of Monday After the Miracle in 1982 and Annie Sullivan in the 1987 revival of The Mircale Worker at New York’s Roundabout Theater .
Now, Karen Allen is teaching the art of acting at Simon’s Rock, the “early college” for high-school age students, up the hill from her store, and she is directing Michael Weller’s Vietnam-era play Moonchildren, which runs for seven performances at the Daniel Arts Center from Wednesday, April 22, to Sunday, April 26.
The play, which is set at a college in 1965-1966 just before the eruption of massive student demonstrations against the war, is deja vu for Allen. “I went to college in 1969 at George Washington University,” says Allen, who has set the play there. “Everything was changing. Students were co-habitating for the first time. They could live in an urban commune.” Allen lived in what she calls an “urban commune” in Washington, DC. “It was a brownstone with five floors and we kept our bikes in the backyard,” she recalls. “There were eight of us and we all contributed to taking care of the house and we took turns cooking dinner one night a week.”
She chose Moonchildren, after reading dozens of plays, because she knew that she had the right students to cast in the roles (and for the two adults she cast David Wade Smith and Kale Browne, her ex-husband and father of her son) and because it would offer the students a literate way to learn about the pre-Woodstock era when everything started to change in American life. “Their parents were children in 1960s, if they were even born!” she says.
Professor Allen has been challenged by a schedule that only allowed for 9 hours of rehearsal a week. “That’s one day in professional theater,” she notes. And she is concerned, as any conscientious mother and director would be, about the health of her actors who are busy with exams and final papers. “We don’t have undertstudies,” she says. “Every night I tell them, Go home and get a good night’s sleep!”
The original Broadway production of Moonchildren—“bitterly funny and funnily bitter” according to Clive Barnes’s 1972 New York Times review—was a launching pad for the actors Edward Herrmann, James Woods, Jill Eikenberry and Christopher Guest, and it established Weller as an important voice of his generation.
“Michael Weller, who I knew a little bit in New York in the 1970s, is such a gifted writer,” says Allen. “He studied jazz at Brandeis and he writes like a jazz musician. The play is a series of riffs.” She says the play differs from her own college experience in one important way. “I don’t remember anybody in our house being this witty,” she says.
Moonchildren at Simon’s Rock
April 22 - 24 at 7:30 PM; April 25 & 26 at 2 PM & 7:30 PM
Reservations highly recommended; 413.644.4400
Suggested donation: $5
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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/22/09 at 12:11 PM • Permalink
Top Ten Reasons Why 2009 Will be a Summer of High Drama (So Get Your Tickets Now!)
1. Julianne Boyd knows how to breathe fresh life into classic musicals (as she did brilliantly with Follies four summers ago when Barrington Stage Company was based in Sheffield), and this year she’s directing Rodgers & Hammerstein’s magnificent Carousel on Barrington Stage Company’s main stage in downtown Pittsfield; it will run June 17 - July 11.
2. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley returns to stage The Jacksonian, her 8th play at Vassar’s Powerhouse Theater, which is celebrating its 25th year collaborating with New York Stage & Film.
3. It’s hard not to be happy listening to the music of Leonard Bernstein on a summer’s night, and Berkshire Theatre Festival will be doing a semi-staged version of his operetta Candide, directed by Ralph Petillo, in the intimate Unicorn Theatre (July 8 - August 15.)
4. If you’ve always wondered why The Fantasticks ran for 42 years Off Broadway (and how you somehow managed to never see it), the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck will give you the opportunity to make up for the lapse; the musical runs May 29 - June 14
5. A stage version of the Mike Newell’s movie Enchanted April, which follows four English ladies on their vacation to Italy (and seems like a Merchant Ivory production), will be at The Ghent Playhouse from May 15 - 31.
6. A.R. Gurney and Sam Shephard are among our best living playwrights and their worlds could not be more different. Williamstown Theatre Festival will stage revials of Gurney’s Children and directed by John Tillinger (July 1 - 12), which will be followed by Daniel Goldstein’s production of Pulitzer Prize-winner Sam Shephard’s True West.
7. You probably know the 1956 film starring Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby (and Louis Armstrong as himself) but have you ever seen a stage version of High Society? The plucky Mac-Haydn Theatre kicks off its 41st season with the Cole Porter musical May 28 - June 7.
8. To make sure we are intellectually challenged as well as entertained, Bard Summerscape will present The Oresteia: Agamemnon, Choephori, and The Eumenides, the trilogy of plays by Aeschylus and translated by Ted Hughes, in various combinations, from July 15 - August 2.
9. If ever there were a Broadway show that was meant to be a community theater staple it’s Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, and TriArts will no doubt give it a rousing, 76-trombone production at the Sharon Playhouse from August 6 - 23.
10. Stageworks in Hudson has grit, gumption, and champions new work such as Lucille Lichtblau’s Car Talk, which has its world premiere July 22 - August 9.
11. So who’s counting? If you missed Shakespeare & Company‘s muscular production of Othello last summer, you’ll have more than a dozen chances to see it performed in the Founders’ Theatre between July 3 and August 29.
