EMERGING AMERICA FESTIVAL: The Hotel Nepenthe

Photo Credit: Jeff Adelberg

Tumbling forth from the fertile imagination of actor/playwright John Kuntz come the characters and situations of The Hotel Nepenthe, dovetailing, careening, doubling back and ultimately dancing with the spontaneity of kids at a party. And the $25 ticket price makes for an affordable excursion into a theatrical wonderland. Presented by the Emerging America Festival on the stage of the Wimberley, outfitted to contain the mysterious set and an 85 member audience. 
The "random events" that make up a life are never easily understood, followed, or sensibly arranged, and neither are the characters and events of The Hotel Nepenthe.  While following along might frustrate the linear minded theater-goer, this show clues us in at the start that we're in for a different kind of ride.  In the opening moments, Kuntz and company parody the warnings and advice of an airline stewardess,  asking the audience to "keep the tray table in an upright and locked position", "silence and turn off all electronic devices",  and the women gesture to the lavatories while John Kuntz himself warns us that "you better have gone before because there's no intermission".  And we're off on a flight of fancy through the corridors, rooms, taxis roads and bus rides of The Hotel Nepenthe.  Like most of John's plays, there is an overload of pop culture references, 60's and 70s television theme songs, recurring character names that may or may not signal connections, and an epilogue that anyone who knew John in the 80s and 90s ... well, any time at any party, will recognize as a thematic dance poem, a story in movement that exemplifies the joy and glee with which he entertains us and himself.

Photo Credit: David Gammons

The set is a mysterious landscape that functions as those hotel rooms and well-traveled roads along the way.  Live video gives us alternative views of both events in the foreground and on the periphery of a given scene, and the lighting creates the moods, tensions and mysteries we encounter.  Above, a faux-dropped ceiling allows for fluorescent lighting and the feel of a less-than-luxurious Hotel (despite the leopard bathrobes), and also for a rainbow (watch for it at the evening's end).  The quartet of actors is the perfect ensemble, who performed the play in it's premiere, produced by the Actors Shakespeare Ensemble in February/March 2011: Kuntz, Daniel Berger-Jones, Georgia Lyman and Marianna Basham, directed by David Gammons.  That production earned both the 2011 Elliot Norton and 2012 IRNE Awards for Outstanding New Play,  as well as the 2011 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Ensemble, and Elliot Norton Award nominations for David Gammons for Outstanding Director/Mid-Size Theater, and Marianna Basham for Outstanding Actress, Mid-Size Theater.
Presented by the Emerging America Festival, Thursday June 21 at 7:30 and 10:30, Friday June 22 at 8:00, Saturday June 23 at 2:00 and 8:00, and Sunday June 24 at 2:00.  Individual tickets ($25)and Festival Passes ($50-$85)  available at www.emergingamericafestival.com/tickets.html.

Apollinaire In The Park 2012 and the Kickstarter Campaign

This summer marks the return, after a year's hiatus, of Apollinaire Theatre Company's annual Apollinaire In The Park performances, a bilingual summer event outdoors in Chelsea at Mary O'Malley Park.  Rather than rewrite what's already been written, here's a reprint from their Kickstarter campaign page. Please support the efforts to provide free summer theater in Chelsea.  While my personal association with Apollinaire only began this past winter with UNCLE VANYA, the company under the leadership of Danielle Fauteax Jacques has been toiling away for many years, and this past season, Danielle received the Kenneth MacDonald Award for Excellence from the Independent Reviewers of New England, as well as the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director/Fringe for the Apollinaire indoor production of UNCLE VANYA (which was nominated for an additional two Norton's, Outstanding Fringe Production and Outstanding Actor/Fringe for Ron Lacey as Astrov).

Check out the articles below, visit their Kickstarter page and donate what you can to help the Apollinaire In The Park series continue with this summer's offering, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD.

One Play, Two Languages

Who else in Boston – or in the United States – mounts an outdoor show every summer, for free, that’s performed in English one night, then Spanish the next? Since 2003, Apollinaire’s outdoor moving stage has brought modern classics ranging from Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba to Chekhov’s The Seagull to Ionesco’s Rhinoceros to Chelsea’s Mary O’Malley Park.

Bring Theatre Back Under the Bridge

Apollinaire's 2010 production of Cyrano, staged in 5 locations in the park, brought together Chelsea’s English and Spanish speaking residents along with attracting audiences to Chelsea from throughout the state and beyond.  Unfortunately, funding from our traditional sponsorship base ran short and a hiatus occurred in 2011. Now a new campaign has been launched to produceTom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for 14 free performances from July 11-28, 2012.

From the Oscar winner who gave us Shakespeare in Love, this wickedly funny companion piece to Hamlet turns Shakespeare inside out and shows us what's going on offstage from the point of view of Hamlet’s school chums.
Tom Stoppard serves up a feast of wordplay, wit, and slapstick while exploring the timeless questions of identity, illusion, and being on a boat.
An instant modern classic, R&G Are Dead won the 1968 Tony Award for Best Play, has appeared on stages all over the world.

Why Kickstarter?

The true cost to bring free summer theater to the community is over $30,000.  Kickstarter allows Apollinaire the opportunity to ensure the production doesn't run in the red and keeps free summer theater alive. Your valuable and generous donation will help us reach our goal.  If we don't reach the kickstarter goal of $5,850, your donation will not be processed and Apollinaire in the Park receives no funding at all.

Please help us get there and bring bi-lingual theater back under the bridge.

Your donation helps us cover production costs which include:

• Actor Stipends for our cast of 16                                                      
• Designer Stipends for Costumes & Sets                                          
• Stage Manager Stipends for our team of 6 running the show in 3 locations                                                                               
• Sets, Costumes & Props                                                                      
• Park Permits, Insurance & Rehearsal costs                                      
• Postcards, posters and marketing

Thank you for supporting Apollinaire in the Park!

Emerging America Festival 2012

Hotel Nepenthe
Emerging America Festival

Pirates of Penzance
Emerging America Festival 

Experiment America
Emerging America Festival

This week, Boston celebrates the third annual Emerging America Festival.
Co-produced by the Huntington Theatre Company, American Repertory Theater, and the Institute for Contemporary Art, the Festival began in 2010 and was immediately successful.
From the website:

"From June 21 through 24, Emerging America will bring together some of the country’s most promising performers, writers, companies, and directors for a weekend filled with energy, imagination, creativity, and drama.

Emerging America spans Boston and Cambridge with events happening at all three artistic homes throughout the 4-day festival: the A.R.T.'s OBERON, 2 Arrow St. Cambridge MA; the Huntington’s Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA, 527 Tremont Street, Boston; and the ICA at 100 Northern Avenue, Boston."


For the next four days, I'm taking in all the events I can, in and around volunteering for the Theatre Communications Group Conference, for the first time taking place in Boston.

Subtitled "Model The Movement", the conference brings together theatre-makers from around the country in workshops, meetings, "breakout sessions", and, of course a big party!

That's me as Telegin,  in UNCLE VANYA, www.apollinairetheatre.com

This year's party will include a "Fashion Show" of costumes from area designers and theater companies, modelled by actors in character from shows currently running and from the past season.  I will be walking the runway in my Telegin costume, along with Erin Eva Butcher in her Sonya togs,  from Apollinaire Theatre Company's UNCLE VANYA, in designs by Toni Bratton Elliot. (Here's a reminder: Apollinaire's UNCLE VANYA, nominated for three Elliot Norton Awards, and directed by the Norton Award "Outstanding Director/Fringe Theater" Danielle Fauteaux Jacques, will return in a limited engagement in October.  Please visit www.apollinairetheatre.com for information and tickets to the Oct.3-28 return).

Anthony Rapp in WITHOUT YOU this week at the Modern Theatre

Boston audiences only have this week to experience WITHOUT YOU, Anthony Rapp's moving, cathartic and rewarding solo piece about "love, loss and what I sang".  Directed by Steve Maler (who directed Rapp in the title role in the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's 2002 production of HENRY V, in the free Shakespeare On The Common series), this one-week engagement follows performances in Pittsburgh (2008) and at the New York Musical Theater Festival (2010), and precedes a run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August followed by a London premiere.
Initially a show about his experience playing Mark, the career defining, and changing, role in Jonathon Larson's Pulitzer Prize winning "rock opera" RENT, it's also about his relationship with, and the loss of, Jonathon Larson, who died suddenly of an aortic dissection, believed to have been caused by undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, in the early morning on January 25, 1996, the day before RENT's Off-Broadway opening.  But it is also the story of the love and loss of his Mother who died after a long and debilitating cancer illness that also coincided with the life of that musical.  Through songs from RENT, as well as original music by Rapp and his collaborators (there was no program on Tuesday night), and his personal narrative, Rapp shares his life and his story, intertwining his midtown out-of-work barrista days with the audition that led to playing Mark, who captured a generation "living with, not dying from disease".  His anecdotes become the throughline, from first audition to the sing-through tribute, onstage at New York Theater Workshop's Off-Broadway theater, attended by Larson's family and friends just days after his sudden death.
On Tuesday night, the full house was silent through the most moving final sections, including a recreation of Rapp's performance of SEASONS OF LOVE at the sing-through tribute to Larson, and this show's title song, the ballad WITHOUT YOU, at his Mother's memorial.

Bye Bye 2011-12, Hello Summer

With the Elliot Norton Awards two weeks ago, and last night's Tonys, the 2011-12 theater season officially comes to a close.  And the Summer Theater Season begins!
As a Boston-based (well, Cambridge, actually ...) theater artist, I bemoan the loss of the outdoor summer theaters of my past ... The long- defunct Open Door Theater in Jamaica Plain and the more recently lost Publick Theater along the Charles River in Brighton.
For me, the Open Door was a rite of passage, a rough hewn natural amphitheater (a big ol' hole in the ground caused by pre-historic glaciers, or so I've been told).  The theater was, as the late Susan McGinley, founder and force-of-nature, called it, a cross between theater and summer camp.  Each night the entire company was involved in both set-up and strike in the transformation from verdant gorge to rough-hewn theater, from lighting poles and set pieces to the makeshift dressing areas made up of open automobile trunks propping up mirrors and a truck trailer costuming storage unit.

At the Open Door, I made lifelong friendships and professional relationships.  I had the opportunity to play roles "against type": a less-than-macho wit-matched Petruchio opposite actress and former BU acting teacher Josie Good; a lanky Sancho Panza opposite the Don Quixote of the sonorous Patrick English.  It was also where, in the summer of 1981, I was given the opportunity to make my Boston directing debut with HAVE, a sprawling Hungarian peasant tragedy/epic, with a cast that included many who went on to become some of Boston's bright lights, from former Shear Madness star Michael Poisson, the voice-over and theater actress Dorothy Gallegher, Marina Re (now based in NY), to the award winning actress and teacher/coach Paula Plum; Portland, OR's Mikki Lipsey; Kelvin Keraga, James Mullen, Brooke Stark ...  (it was a cast of, if not hundreds, dozens, like, two dozen plus...).  For The Open Door Theater's 20th Anniversary season, I directed the Boston premiere of the Frank Galati adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, a production that earned me the Boston Magazine Best Theatrical Director award in 1995, and set the wheels in motion for my permanent return to Boston from my seven year sojourn in NY, and led to the development of my company, Raven Theatrical (94-98, Elliot Norton Fringe award in '97).  That Grapes cast included Liam "Kelly" Sullivan in his post-academic debut as the younger Joad brother Al, the ten year old Ari Graynor, Boston stalwarts Donna Asali, Susan Bigger, Bob Deveau, and Bill Doscher;  George Hahn, ; as well as my Raven Theatrical cohorts Patrick Donnelly, Ken Mason and Kelly Lawman, with an original musical score by Peter Bufano of the eclectic musical group Cirkestra.  That production of The Grapes of Wrath was cited (along with the children's musical "Emil and the Detectives") by Boston Magazine when awarding me Boston's Best Theatrical Director, 1995.

My experience at the Publick, besides many shows as an audience member, was limited to one: I played the Groucho role in A Day In Hollywood/A Night In The Ukraine.  It was directed by Artistic Director Spiro Veloudos, and was one of, if not his first forays into directing a musical.  Needless to say, Spiro went on to become the Lyric Stage Company of Boston's Artistic Director, where he has very successfully directed many well received and award winning productions of both  musicals and straight plays.  Besides me, the Marx Brothers quartet was comprised of some of my closest friends: Jimmy Russo as the Chico character,Jim Quinn as the "Zeppo", and  Lisa M. Troy (who later eventually became Mrs. Jim Quinn) as the "Harpo".  While I (and most of the critics) was disappointed in my vocal work in the show (none of us felt I really reached a Groucho sound ...), I was extremely pleased with myself, physically.  Still today, I can look at the video of the show, turn down the color, and enjoy my physicality, having captured Groucho's walk, his ability to leap with abandon, and to circle around the Margaret Dumont character like an airplane around the Empire State Building.  (It was also one of my Mom's favorite roles of mine, and she would giggle and laugh just at the memory of "the way you jumped up on that piano").

So as the summer rolls around, in comes ROLLER DISCO: THE MUSICAL, at Oberon, playing Wednesday and Thursday nights all summer.  Based on the movie "Roller Boogie", it sends up the era in a similar vein as XANADU, which had a great run at SpeakEasy Stage Company that just closed last Sunday.  Unlike XANADU, however, this show has an original score that pulses with the beats (and bass lines) of the 70's disco anthems and ballads, and the cast is all rollerskating, all the time.  Having seen an early preview, I'll only say that it is it's own show, reminiscent of Xanadu but with an original approach that works well in the Oberon space.

Also this week, CAR TALK: THE MUSICAL (is every summer show titled with a colon and the suffix "The Musical"?).  This is the debut of a newly rewritten version of the show produced last year at Suffolk University, directed by Suffolk's Wesley Savick, and co-produced by Underground Railway Theater and Suffolk University at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge.  This week, there are 2-for-1 preview tickets available.  The cast features some of Boston's funniest musical performers, including Maureen Keiller, Leigh Barrett and NH's Scott Severance.

XANADU SpeakEasy Stage Company at the Roberts Studio Theatre, Calderwood Pavillion at the BCA, thru June 9, 2012

Irreverent and self-referential: that's as academic as I'll get in describing the sweet and silly spoof of the 80s "Razzie" winning movie musical XANADU. 
Book writer Douglas Carter Bean takes the screenplay and turns it into a framework that SpeakEasy director Paul Daigneault 's ebullient cast uses to take us on a roller-skating ride through a score that includes Magic, Evil Woman, and the title song Xanadu. It's the pure solid gold talent of this ensemble that had me laughing almost non-stop for the 90 minute story of Muses, Demi-Gods and Roller-Skating Disco-Dreams. 
While I enjoyed the Broadway production, which received Tony nominations for Best Musical and Best Book in 2007, XANADU was practically screaming out for this earnest "small theater" production that makes the most of its limitations, turning them into it's clever and entertaining assets. 
Without reservation, each one of the nine cast members delivers: McCaela Donovan 's Olivia Newton John Demi-Goddess, Ryan Overberg 's hunky artist/discopreneur, Robert Saoud's power-businessman haunted by a Muse in his past, and the double and triple cast turns from Shana Dirik, Kathy St. George, Kami Rushell Smith, Val Sullivan, Cheo Bourne, and Patrick Connolly. If you're thinking "why see a terrible movie musical on stage", forget about the movie and see if for the cast, the powerhouse trio of musicians, the creative period and fantasy costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley, Crystal Tiala's circular set that puts the audience on three sides, Karen Perlow's lighting, and the biggest disco ball in town.

He's BAA-AACK ! ! !

Blog me once, then blog me twice, then blog me once again,
It's been a long long time ....

It's been so long since I've written ... and things have been rough since last I wrote.  A hip replacement (excellent recovery),  family illnesses, and the death of my Mom, Georgia Ravanis Fennessy (1/21/1929-10/25/2011).  I've been doing my writing on Facebook, and, for no good reason, haven't been writing here.  But I'm back, and looking forward to ongoing communication.

I started this blog around the time of the 2010 Elliot Norton Awards, and here I am a week before the 2012 Awards starting back in.

Just a few comments on what I'm doing here:
Reviewing?  
Well, no, not really, though sometimes I'll have things to say about performances I see at theaters around town.  I'm hoping to promote local theater, while giving my take on what I see and what's going on in Boston and throughout New England.
Listings?
Well, I'll try to be a source for what's going on, but I can't promise I'll be able to keep up with absolutely everything.  That's where you, readers, theater companies, publicists and others, come in.  Email me info about your events and I'll try to list all that I can.  And I'll try to get to everything I can, too.  I've been getting back to theater in a big way, both by going to shows and events, and by auditioning again.

And what about the many hats I wear?
That's a topic that has confused people ever since I started writing plays, casting my cousins, brother, and friends in them, and acting in, and putting on, shows in the backyard when I was 10.
I started acting in "Halfway To Concord", the fifth grade play about "David Lovett", a colonial boy whose family ( I remember he had a sister, "Elspeth") took a part in Paul Revere's ride, though I don't recall what it is they did.  Though a fictional family, I did my research, and on a Sunday ride with my Uncle Pete, my Mom, my brother Bob, and my Greek Grandparents, YiaYia and Papou Ravanis, we drove all over Concord and found the Lovett House, which I believed then was where my character lived.  I really never found out if he was an actual person, and I've always wondered if there was a historical context to our fifth grade Patriot's Day play.  But though I didn't know it, that was the start of my theatrical research, and also the beginnings of the support I've found throughout my life from my family for all the things that interested me.  We literally travelled up and down every road in Concord, though now that I think about it ... the play was called "Halfway to Concord" ... shouldn't we have been looking in, say, Belmont?  Arlington?  It never occurred to me then.  But I'll never forget that afternoon, sitting up front with my Mom and Uncle Pete, craning my neck out the window to read every historical signpost and placard.
The first actual play I recall directing was in high school, as a student project.  I directed George Bernard Shaw's one-act, "Passion, Poison and Petrifaction".  A one-act comedy, and the thing I remember most is that I decided to have "Hail, Britannia" sung at the close of the play, only I was sure the lyrics were "Hail! Britannia! Britannia all the way!", which amused my drama teacher greatly.  It was 1969.  I was 15.
I studied musical theater for only one year at the Boston Conservatory of Music.  At that time, the Conservatory (we didn't call it BoCo then ...) had a strong Dance program alongside its obvious concentrations in Music, but the Theater program wasn't as strong.  That year I was introduced to the true study of acting by my teacher Phoebe Wray, a dynamic teacher and performer who I later learned had a career that began in the Off Off Broadway movement in places like the Cafe Cino, with playwrights such as Lanford Wilson and Robert Patrick, and who continues to teach at BoCo.
But aside from Phoebe, and a wonderful voice teacher named Lillian Lee, I didn't feel I was getting enough, and didn't feel up to competing with the level of song and dance "triple threats"that, even then, the Conservatory was attracting.  So, at the urging of a friend, I auditioned for the Theater program at York University in Toronto, and for the next three years was in the Performance Stream, with a minimum of 9 hours a week of combined voice/movement/acting classes, in what I found to be a more complete Conservatory-like program.  It was at York that I began to direct, and took great advantage of the resources.  Each year, Student Project Week opened up the department facilities for student use.  One year a friend and I produced an experimental piece using the poetry of a Boston writer I had met at the Conservatory.  Another year I played Dick in DAMES AT SEA. And another year I played Bobby (at barely 22), the lead in Sondheim's COMPANY, while co-directing and choreographing.  And in my third year, I became Artistic Director of the York Cabaret, a student run cabaret theater in an on-campus pub.  One of the Cabaret's shows was "Passionella",  based on a Jules Feiffer story, which makes up Act Three of the musical THE APPLE TREE, and among the cast members was Risa Bramon Garcia, who went on to a hugely successful casting career (She cast Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, Roseann Barr's sit-com, and countless other projects over decades of casting solo and with her business partner Billy Hopkins), producing (100 Cigarettes, etc.), and is now a renowned acting teacher and coach based in LA and working throughout this country and in Canada.
So, in a sense, I've always worn many hats.  It's only been in the bigger arena of an adult career that I've confused so many who wonder what I'm up to.
At present, though I continue to freelance and pursue casting opportunities, and scout talent as a consultant to others in casting, I'm focusing on a return to theater, in both Acting and Directing.  In only a year of seriously putting myself out there as an actor, I performed with DEATH AND THE POWERS: THE ROBOTS OPERA at the Cutler Majestic, in the ensemble of "The Miseries of the World", directed by Diane Paulus and choreographed by Karole Armitage, and as Telegin in the Elliot Norton Award nominated production of UNCLE VANYA with Apollinaire Theatre Company, which returns in October 2012 for a month of performances.  Other opportunities are coming, and I'm exploring opportunities to direct again.  "Watch this space" for more information ...
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