West Side Story given new life

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After our beloved dog Wesley died last summer we looked at many pups to take his place and none would do. But then there was this little black and white baby at the Humane Society that was just perfect. She was part Border Collie. We thought of England, my husband's native land. We thought of the Welsh Hills where I had so often walked during the years I had lived there. I loved watching the Collies herd sheep. By rearranging a few letters of the name our puppy had been given at the pound we had her coming home name - Gwyneth. August 21st will be Gwyneth's first birthday.

Brother Can You Spare A Dime

Ambush show stopper performance by Mandy Patinkin on David Letterman Show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OZfoFAs2u4&feature=related

First thought of setting The Comedy of Errors in Reconstruction South or -- maybe a mid-Atlantic city. A time of upheaval, reorganization, overthrow of old order. Loss. People displaced by conflict. Carpetbaggers. Late Victorian. Need for costume. Problem with necessity of using Southern accents. Same time as Little Women, Gone With the Wind. Character types. Adriana (Scarlett), Luciana (Melanie Wilks), Antipholus of Ephesus (Rhett Butler), Antipholus of Syracusa (Ashley) The Dromios (the Talbot twins)...Mammy! Miss Prissy!! Dinner is Bar-B-Que. This is paradoy. How to keep the truth. The docks. The tie ups. Same as the ones in Baltimore and Liverpool. Same companies designed and built the docks. Their ships were the business. Fast links. Through Liverpool and Bristol for the slave trade. When I lived in Bristol I recognized the moorings from growing up in Baltimore. McCormick spices.

Ah, yes. The Comedy of Errors. Mix-up of identities: ID. ID for travel. ID theft. Credit cards used by someone else. Family Loss: breakup. Why travel in the first place if the trip is so dangerous? Storm. Natural occurrence. Devastating. Thinking of J.M.W.Turner's stormscapes. Limbs and other lost objects. Laws in Ephesus. So strict. Death to residents of Syracuse. Town full of cozeners. Street fair. Fortune tellers, magicians, puppet shows, fire eaters, jugglers, games of skill, potions, cures, massage, souvenirs, jewelry, shells, oddities of the deep. Twins. Special powers of twins. Separated at birth. Nautical setting. Harbor or haven. Ships.Tourist trap. Dr. Pinch. Officers of The Law. Abbess. Widow’s walk. Three story house with widow’s walk. Casablanca. The film. Translate ships to airships. Marlene Dietrich - songstress. So often music is used for The Comedy of Errors. Trevor Nunn substituted songs by Guy Woolfenden for chunks of text. Sometimes only a phrase of the original text made it into performance. "Beg, borrow or steal to make up the sum, make up the sum, make up the sum..." This phrase in particular was used to great effect to emphasize the frame of the entire play. A Egeon's life was at over unless resolution could be found before day's end. Music of Bertolt Brecht. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAYywhNi0-k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K9nt5IR3Fo
Those who had been archaeologists become spies.

Tommy Bay

Julia Varley of Odin Teatret in Denmark as a Fate with puppets of Medea’s children.

Related

Web site: Odin Teatret

A Greek God and His Groupies Are Dressed to Kill

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Alan Cumming, the Scottish stage and film star, portrays Dionysus, the god of wine, in John Tiffany’s staging of "The Bacchae."

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Published: July 5, 2008

A god deserves a great entrance. And Dionysus, the god of wine and party boy of Mount Olympus, whose celebratory rituals got the whole drama thing rolling in the first place, surely merits a spectacular one.

Auditions for plays are:
Sept 8-11 for the Madison Square Garden Christmas Carol musical, October through December 2008(Equity).
After Thanksgiving, auditions for the rep season which is: Othello, Three Musketeers and The Comedy of Errors, end of December through June 2008 (Equity).
Other plays this season: Furniture of Home (new script set in post-Katrina Bayou La Batre, AL), Fall of the House (new script mysterious link of present day characters to death of Edgar Allen Poe), Bear Country (new script about famous Alabama football coach).

www.shakeituptimes.blogspot.com
www.asf.net

WSJ reviews season: hhttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB121332103313270501.html

Playbill on West Side Story http://www.playbill.com/news/article/119526.html

Alabama Shakespeare Festival Associate Artist, sixth season: Lettice "Lettice and Lovage," Queen Cymbeline, Celeste Thinking of You PREMIERES: OFF BROADWAY: Ronee Progress (Hudson Guild), Mary Stanley Nightingale (Vineyard). US: Amy Grace (Portland Rep), Sylvia Weapons of Happiness (Buffalo). OTHER THEATRE: Flora Humble Boy, Nancy Soccer Moms (BoarsHead), Mistress Page Merry Wives of Windsor, Mrs. Prentice What The Butler Saw, B Three Tall Women, Lady Croom Arcadia, Maria Lend Me A Tenor (Meadow Brook) Pam Joe Egg (New Rose), Pat Sight Unseen, Diana Lend Me A Tenor, Hazel Up ‘n Under, Joy Shadowlands (Portland Rep), Marlene Top Girls (Virginia Stage), Candida (Peterborough), Gwendolyn The Importance of Being Earnest (Pioneer Theatre and Cincinnati), Olivia Twelfth Night (Alaska Rep); Margot Dial M (St. Louis), Ariadne Heartbreak House (Indiana Rep), Hermione Winter's Tale, cast Hamlet (Fort Worth Shakespeare Festival), Myra Hay Fever (Cincinnati and Portland Rep),Illona The Play's the Thing (Tarrytown) Adriana Comedy of Errors (Folger), Chorus Iphigenia at Aulis (McCarter), Hermione The Winter’s Tale, Anna Inspector General (Williamstown). LONDON’S WEST END: Dietrich Piaf, Phyllis Fontaine Once In A Lifetime, Children of the Sun (Royal Shakespeare Company: Aldwych, Wyndham’s, Piccadilly Theatres). BRITISH REP: Cabaret(Exeter), Joseph (Sheffield and York), Wizard of Oz, Super Skirt (Sheffield), Alladin (Peterborough), Henry IV part 1&2 (Bristol)TOUR: John,Paul, Ringo & Bert (Cameron McIntosh Productions) Maria Twelfth Night (London Productions), Isadora Duncan What A Way To Run A Revolution (Cockpit). FILM: Imaginary Crimes with Harvey Kietel, Valentino with Nureyev, Communal Flat with Shirley Booth and Paul Savorino, Wicker Man, She Devil with Meryl Streep and Rosanne Barr.

(Director) Alabama Shakespeare Festival Associate Artist directed The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV Part A and The Trojan Women. In Michigan she directed Angels In America, Part 1, The Millennium Approaches and won Lansing’s Pulsar Award for The Comedy of Errors at the BoarsHead Theatre. She has also directed Speak Truth To Power, Someone To Watch Over Me (Cranbrook), Much Ado About Nothing (Waterworks), Beyond Oz, Casualties (Heartlande), and Story Theatre (Interlochen). She joined the 2005 La Ma Ma Umbria's International Director Symposium in Italy working with Joanne Akalitis and Ann Bogart. A career actress, Diana was a member of England's Royal Shakespeare Company where she was directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, Terry Hands and Howard Davies. She played leading roles Off-Broadway and at major US regional theatre and has had parts in Hollywood films. Diana has worked with voice experts Cis Berry and Andrew Wade of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Patsy Rodenburg of the Royal National Theatre as well as Pat Quigly of the Stratford Festival, Ontario. She has taught widely. Before training as a classical actress at the UK’s Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Diana was a Thomas J. Watson Fellow in European experimental theatre. She received her British Society of Fight Director’s Certificate from the legendary William Hobbs at London’s Royal Academy.

From Adriana Gavaria:

Acting Is Everything: An Actor's Guidebook for a Successful Career in Los Angeles, Expanded Gold (Paperback) by Judy Kerr which in turn led me to this other book which is wonderful for auditioning for TV: The Eight Characters of Comedy by Scott Sedita

As of Friday, June 13, 2008

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Down for 'The Count' and the Bard By TERRY TEACHOUT June 13, 2008; Page W7 Montgomery, Ala.

Phil Scarsbrook Ray Chambers in "The Count of Monte Cristo."

What do you think of when you hear the phrase "Shakespeare festival"? Probably not a full-time resident company that performs a diversified repertory of plays and musicals in a two-theater complex on the edge of a medium-size city. Yet all this is exactly what the Alabama Shakespeare Festival is and does. It's the biggest enterprise of its kind in the Deep South, and I've longed to go back for a return trip ever since I first paid the company a visit three years ago. No sooner did Broadway close up shop for the season just past than I hopped a plane, rented a car and drove to ASF's unlikely home, a handsome cultural park plopped down in the middle of suburban Montgomery that you reach by driving past a Waffle House and turning left just before you get to the Best Buy. That's how the locals steer you to the Carolyn Blount Theatre and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, which are at opposite ends of a 250-acre plot of golf-course-green grass.

I was in town long enough to take in two of the company's three current offerings, and I freely admit that I wasn't there to see "The Count of Monte Cristo." To be sure, Alexandre Dumas's once-popular 19th-century novel of derring-do among the rich and venal has also had a long stage life, but no matter whether you take it in as a book, a play or a movie, "The Count of Monte Cristo" remains a melodramatic period piece that, like "The Scarlet Pimpernel," is now mainly enjoyed by children of all ages. Little did I know that Charles Morey's 1998 stage version is an impeccably solid piece of theatrical work, and ASF is performing it so vividly that I ended up finding the whole thing thrilling from swash to buckle.

Even if you haven't read the Dumas novel, you've probably heard of the plight of Edmond Dantes (Ray Chambers), a hapless young French sailor who is framed for a crime he didn't commit and flung into the dungeons of the Chateau d'If, where he spends a quarter-century incarcerated in the cell next to that of a kindly Jesuit (Chet Carlin) who schools him in the ways of the world and makes him heir to a vast fortune. No sooner does the Abbé expire than Dantes conceals himself in his friend's shroud, escapes from prison, disguises himself as a mega-rich nobleman and heads for Paris, bent on killing, humiliating and/or impoverishing the evil conspirators who stole the best years of his life.

DETAILS

ALABAMA SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL
Carolyn Blount Theatre, Wynton M. Blount Cultural Park,
1 Festival Dr., Montgomery, Ala. ($19-$42), 334-271-5353

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO
closes June 29

ROMEO AND JULIET
closes June 28

Mr. Morey, the artistic director of Salt Lake City's Pioneer Theatre Company, has squeezed Dumas's 1,400-page blockbuster into a shapely two-act play that rattles along at near-cinematic speed. His staging is notable for the complete absence of the self-parodic touches that you'd expect from a present-day production of a 19th-century costume drama. No eyes are winked, no mustaches twirled: Mr. Morey's cast plays it as straight as a stick, inviting us to experience "The Count of Monte Cristo" not as an exercise in postmodern sniggering but as a heartfelt cautionary tale of how even the most heroic of souls can be shriveled beyond redemption by the desire for vengeance.

Part of what makes this approach work is that Mr. Chambers, who doubles as the director of ASF's Professional Actor Training program, also happens to be a top-of-the-line classical actor. On my previous visit to ASF, I saw him give a tough-minded, elegantly spoken performance as Shakespeare's Coriolanus. It goes without saying that the role of Edmond Dantes is rather less dramaturgically demanding, but Mr. Chambers carried himself as though he were Hamlet, and no sooner did he extract himself from the Chateau d'If than I found myself swept up in his improbable quest for justice. The supporting roles are all acted with conviction, especially Mercedes, the love of Dantes's life, whom Sarah Dandridge plays with affecting seriousness.

Phil Scarsbrook

Avery Clark and Adriana Gaviria in "Romeo and Juliet."

If it's the Bard you require, ASF is also offering a piping-hot modern-dress version of "Romeo and Juliet" jointly staged by Geoffrey Sherman (the company's artistic director) and Diana Van Fossen that is set in South Florida. Elizabeth Novak's "Miami Vice"-style costumes run to skin-tight jeans and stiletto heels, and the youthful cast wields daggers and Palm Pilots with identical aplomb. Such updated stagings are less common in the Deep South than elsewhere on the summer-festival circuit, and I heard a fair number of older folks expressing a certain amount of befuddlement at intermission. The youngsters in the audience, by contrast, had no trouble whatsoever getting the point, which is that Shakespeare is (A) exciting and (B) sexy. I was especially impressed with Adriana Gaviria, who plays Juliet as a very young-looking maiden, thereby increasing the dramatic charge of her pubescent attraction to Avery Clark's regular-guy Romeo.

Montgomery may not be the Old South's hottest vacation spot, but playgoers in search of high-quality theater below the Mason-Dixon line should definitely consider spending a long weekend at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Count of Monte Cristo" are playing in repertory with Mr. Sherman's staging of "Cymbeline" through the end of June, after which all three productions make way for a revival of "West Side Story" that opens on July 18 and runs through Aug. 24. If it's half as good as the shows I saw this summer and in 2005, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it sight unseen.

Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.