by Mark G. Auerbach
Of Note:
Cynthia Rider
Cynthia Rider has been named as Managing Director of Hartford Stage. She comes to Hartford from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she had been Executive Director. Rider becomes the theatre’s eighth Managing Director, joining recently-appointed Artistic Director Melia Bensussen. It will be the first time in the theatre’s 55-year history that two women will jointly assume the co-leadership roles.
The Yiddish Book Center has announces line up for its 2019 Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music, July 11-14. The festival line-up includes international performers of Yiddish and klezmer music, with performances by Berlin’s Yiddish folk-rockers Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird, Israeli vocalist Vira Lozinsky, and the Aviva Chernick Ensemble from Toronto, alongside stalwarts of the American scene including the Grammy Award-winning Klezmatics, vocalist Eleanor Reissa, and pioneering klezmer revivalist Hankus Netsky. This year’s festival, once again curated by artistic director Seth Rogovoy, also includes concerts by Nigunim Trio and Frank London’s Klezmer Brass Allstars with special guests, and vocalist Sarah Mina Gordon in a duet program with Daniel Kahn. Yidstock performers often cross-pollinate and appear sometimes billed and sometimes unannounced at each other’s concerts. For details: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/yidstock
The Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at UConn will host its Summertime Saturday Puppet Show Series on five Saturdays from July 13 -Aug. 10, featuring an exciting variety of puppet styles. All performances will take place at the Ballard Institute Theater located at 1 Royce Circle in Downtown Storrs, CT. For details: bimp.uconn.edu
Cloteal L. Horne in rehearsal for Twelfth Night. Photo by Zachary De Silva 1116
Keep in Mind…
Twelfth Night, Shakepeare’s rich, affecting, and deeply funny story of longing, love, and laughter, will be performed at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, July 2-August 14 in the Tina Packer Playhouse. Company director Allyn Burrows stages the production. “This production of Twelfth Night, or What You Will unfolds in a mutable landscape of yearning and surprises, set in a dance hall on a boardwalk by the seashore in 1959,” said Director Allyn Burrows. “Ours is a story of what arises from a shipwreck, the madness of love, and that shipwreck called love. Nothing is as it appears where people convene with a longing to connect, even the twins at the center of the action, who in this account are twins of the soul, of a different race. Expectations are tossed in the air and land like so many scattered shells on the shoreline, inviting and impermanent.” For details: www.shakespeare.org.
The Night Alive cast: Left to Right: Joel Ripka, James Barry, Marielle Young, Justin Campbell, Nick Ullett Photos taken by Shanna Gerlach
The Night Alive, Conor McPherson’s play, staged by Daniel Elihu Kramer, opens the Chester Theatre’s 30th Anniverary season, with performances through June 30. Tommy rents a single room in his Uncle Maurice’s Dublin house. Doc, a friend with whom Tommy does odd jobs, bunks in, and the two scrape by in the disheveled, messy bedsit, untethered and without direction. The “routine” is disrupted when Tommy saves a young prostitute named Aimee from an assault and brings her back to the house to get herself together. She stays, shaking up the group dynamics, especially when her boyfriend shows up. The cast includes: Joel Ripka, James Barry,, both of who appeared in last season’s The Aliiens, and Marielle Young, Justin Campbell, Nick Ullett. For details: http://chestertheatre.org/
John Leguizamo
Latin History for Morons, John Leguizamo’s Broadway hit, is Bushnell-bound on June 30. Tony and Emmy Award® winner John Leguizamo, stars in his play, inspired by the near total absence of Latinos from his son’s American History books. Leguizamo embarks on an outrageously funny, frenzied search to find a Latin hero for his son’s school history project. From a mad recap of the Aztec empire to stories of unknown Latin patriots of the Revolutionary War and beyond, Leguizamo breaks down the 3,000 years between the Mayans and Pitbu. For details: www.bushnell.org
Celebrate America! with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra’s Talcott Mountain Music Festival on July 5 in Simsbury, CT. Carolyn Kuan conduct a program of popular Americana music, accompanied by the Asylum Hill Congregational Church Choir. Rain date: July 6. For details: www.hartfordsymphony.org
Berkshire Mountain Boys
The Berkshire Mountain Boys perform their repertoire of bluegrass, gospel, folk ballads, and country music of yesteryear on July 14th at the Historic North Hall in Huntington. “We sing the old songs,” according to founding member Phil Pothier, including some old Carter Family favorites”.For details: www.northhallhuntington.org
How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, will be presented by Ghost Light Theater, July 5-13, at Gateway City Arts, Holyoke. Sue Dziura directs warm, tragic, funny, and strikingly perceptive memory play in which a young woman named Li’l Bit looks back on her warped experience with love and struggles to forgive in the face of her past sexual trauma. For mature audiences only. For details: gatewaycityarts.com
America v. 2.1: The Sad Demise & Eventual Extinction of The American Negro, Stacy Rosen’s award-winning play, is having its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company’s St. Germain Theatre through June 30. The play is a day in the life of a troupe of Black actors who are charged with re-enacting the revised history of the once-thriving American Negro. It quickly becomes a day of reckoning. A provocative, funny and dark look at Black Americans in post-apocalyptic America. Logan Vaughn directs. For details: https://barringtonstageco.org/
Bel Canto Opera Celebration at the White Church in Blandford. For 25 years, what began as a fundraising effort has continued to bring spectacular up-and-coming opera talent to the hilltowns each year. Eve Queler, Music Director Emerita of Opera Orchestra of New York and part-time Blandford resident, is the force behind this longstanding event. Please join us for this enjoyable à la carte performance – a wonderful taste of opera. One performance only, , July 13. For details: http://www.thewhitechurch.org/event/2019-summer-concert-series-25th-annual-bel-canto-opera/
The Tanglewood Learning Institute is Tanglewood’s bold new initiative to supplement the concert experience opens at the end of the month with the opening of the Linde Center for Music and Learning and the new programs of the Tanglewood Learning Institute, which represent a dramatic new chapter in the life of Tanglewood. The 140 offerings of the Tanglewood Learning Institute have been designed to encourage thought-provoking conversations as they explore ways to better understand the world through the lens of music and begin to break down the traditional boundaries between performer and audience. , For details: https://www.tli.org
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Mark G. Auerbach studied theatre at American University and the Yale School of Drama. He’s worked for arts organizations and reported on theatre for newspapers and radio. Mark produces and hosts ArtsBeat Radio for 89.5fm/WSKB.
