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2013-2014 SERIES
OUR 2013-2014 LINEUP
NEXT ACT! NEW PLAY SUMMIT 2 Be a part of the audience that get a chance to weigh in about the new work being considered for future seasons at the REP! This project joins the resources of the REP and Proctors to bring you the excitement of being among the first to experience the creation of new plays and musicals! Activities bring audience members together with some of the best writers and composers in America today! Your pass gives you entry to all events!
EVENTS
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STAGE
CHEF’S TABLE Enjoy live music and free hors d’oeuvres before the show – one of the best kept secrets in town! Starts at 6:30pm. DISCUSSION NIGHTS Get the scoop at a post-show discussion with the cast. BEHIND-THE-SCENES WITH MAGGIE This series features a pre-show “behindthe-scenes” discussion with Producing Artistic Director Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill. Complimentary continental breakfast starts at 12:30pm with the presentation beginning at 1pm.
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It’s supposed to be one of the most solemn occasions. The attendees bow their heads, the pastor orates, and the funeral singers provide the comfort of music, giving a melodious, personalized touch to the proceedings – even if what they’re celebrating is the deceased’s preference for All You Can Eat Liver and Onions.
those plans might take. In Junie’s eyes, working as funeral singers will be a way to get the career of the Lashley Sisters back on track. “We’ll be doing our old act again,” Junie insists, “but with different lyrics.” “You do realize,” says Lashley Lee, “I do my best singing when I’m totally tanked, right?”
That’s a song sung by sisters Junie and Lashley Lee Lashley, onetime country music stars whose career tanked after the alcoholic Lashley Lee crashed their tour bus into a pet store, sending many a goldfish to a too-dry grave. Reduced to running the family dry cleaning business, the ever-optimistic Junie still has her eye on a better future. Her sister, however, is bouncing in and out of rehab, and it’s growing ever more difficult to care for their aging father.
Fischer is herself a musician with a songwriting background – “my father is a songwriter, so it’s in the blood” – but when she met singer songwriter Don Chaffer and he took an interest in her show, she was delighted with his suggestion that he might join her in writing a song or two.
The Sparkley Clean Funeral Singers is a country-flavored musical that takes a light hearted look at difficult subjects, with the unexpected punch of emotional power that only a musical can convey. For playwright Lori Fischer, the journey to Albany began in Glens Falls, where the actor/playwright developed a solo show. Barbara’s Blue Kitchen premiered in 2000 at the Adirondack Theatre Festival. “It was directed by Martha Banta,” says Fischer, “who was then the artistic director at ATF. I’m very loyal to the people I work with, so as ‘Sparkley’ developed, Martha was there from the beginning. And she’s worked with Maggie, so she recommended the show.” Banta directed the acclaimed production of Fully Committed at the REP in 2002. Look at me, you’ll see that I’m on fire Look at me and you’ll know who I am I’m positively burning with ambition and desire I may be a small-town mama, but I got myself some bigtime plans! It’s an early refrain of the show, as the sisters compare their contrasting ideas on just what kind of shape
“I’d been calling my show a ‘play with music,’” says Fischer, “but Lynn [Lynn Ahrens, who wrote the book and lyrics for Once on This Island and Seussical, as well as lyrics for Ragtime] suggested that I should turn it into a straight-out musical.”
“But you know how it is with musicals,” she says. “You end up shifting things, moving things, we had to add songs that moved the plot along – and we ended up holed up in Nashville, working ten hour, twelve-hour days. We poured on the heat and even wrote two and a half songs on one of those days! Don has a studio there, so we were able to make demos right away.” The first public reading took place at Manhattan’s York Theatre Company in early 2012, “which was very helpful. We did some rewrites and had more readings in the summer.” The four character show is set in small town Tennessee, where the sisters – along with their father and the compulsive gambling Pastor Phil, sing blues, roots rock and quirky country tunes. And Fischer, who seems to share a Junie-like sense that the best the world offers is there for the taking, is thrilled to be bringing the show to Albany. “Martha is a terrific director who’s been with us since that first reading. It’s been a joy developing this with her, and it’ll be great to work with her and Maggie. I can hardly wait!”
SHOW DESCRIPTION + Prices What’s a girl to do? Daughter Junie inherits the job of taking over the family dry cleaning business, tending to Dad -– who’s having a hard time remembering things – and keeping an eye on younger sister Lashley – who’s fresh from rehab. Junie’s dream of being a country singer takes a hiatus until she’s called upon to give a personal touch at the Sparkley Funeral Parlor by writing and singing songs to make every final send-off a very special one. This world premiere musical comedy from country singer songwriter Lori Fischer is perfect for a heartfelt, laughter filled summer at the REP!
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world premiere!
the Funeral Singers BOOK BY LORI FISCHER MUSIC & LYRICS BY LORI FISCHER & DON CHAFFER || JUL 5 - AUG 4
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BEHIND THE CURTAIN As a theater lover, you know that new plays need development. Discovering new work is one of the most exciting parts of a producer’s life, and last November, Capital Repertory Theatre shared that process with the Next Act! New Play Summit.
The Summit was so successful – it gave us this season’s The God Game – that it will be presented again this fall. “It energizes the theatre, and allows us to expand our artistic horizons with the kind of work that places us at the nucleus of creativity. When you work with playwrights, you’re working with the creative source: everything comes from that.” said Producer and Artistic Director Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill. Next Act! offers a chance to peek behind the curtain and see plays in their adolescence – comfortable on their feet but perhaps not yet ready for life on their own.
“It’s extremely rare for anyone who writes a play to get it into actors’ mouths,” MancinelliCahill explains, “never mind having it produced.” Last year’s festival drew 120 submissions, which were first offered to our nine person reading committee in the form of a synopsis and the first ten pages. Those that made the first cut were read in their entirety, and three plays, one of them a musical, were ultimately selected to be presented. “But with 120 submissions,” says MancinelliCahill, “we wanted to find a way to present more than three plays, so we also created the ‘First 15.’” That was a day in which the first 15 minutes of six plays were read. “For the ‘First
15,’ we told the audience, ‘You’re a literary manager. Would you have requested the rest of the script? ’All of them said yes.” She characterizes the experience as a learning moment, “for both the audience and me. I’ve always asked myself, if Angels in America had crossed my desk, would I have done it? There’s a story of a very famous theater that received it, and an intern there rejected it. Would I have been able to tell?” The Next Act! New Play Summit became possible due to the then new relationship between The REP and Proctors. The script that first emerges from a playwright’s desk is rarely the same item that appears in production. The journey can begin with a table reading, in which actors are invited to give voice to the story, and progress from there to workshops - script in hand readings
- that may or may not include staging. The script’s pacing is refined, the characters are fine-tuned. A forum such as Next Act! is an unusual luxury for the writer. “Readings can be expensive for a LORT Theatre like ours. That’s why it was so helpful to join forces with Proctors at last year’s Next Act!, enabling us to get a grant to pay for some of the process,” says Mancinelli-Cahill. As it did last year, Next Act! will take place at Capital Repertory Theatre and in the GE Theatre at Proctors, and again the works presented will be candidates for future full production. In addition to the readings, the three-day Summit will include other events intended to highlight the process of new play development, including discussions with the featured artists. We hope you can take part in the creative process that is our Next Act! New Play Summit 2.
It’s a casting director’s nightmare. You’re closing up shop after an exhausting day of auditioning actors, good and bad, and you’d just as soon not hear another word of the play – at least for the rest of the night. In David Ives’s Venus in Fur, it’s a playwright named Thomas who’s just about to wrap up an audition day when an oddly garbed actress barges in, wet from the rain. The setup seems a million miles from the short novel that inspired the play, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. “It’s a serious novel. It’s a central text of world literature,” says Thomas, to which the actress Vanda replies, “Oh, I thought from the play it had to be porn. Anyway, you don’t have to tell me about sadomasochism. I’m in the theater.” The book bestowed its author’s name upon the willful pursuit of pain: masochism. It tells a storywithin-a-story as its unnamed narrator reads the confessions of a friend who describes a volatile, provocative romance. But that’s not where Ives got started with the project. “I had this terrible idea,” he says, “which was to turn The Story of O into a play. It’s a really terrible idea because it could never possibly work in any way.”
“Luckily for me, the rights weren’t available, so I didn’t have to go through the agony of doing that. But since I was thinking along those lines, I happened to re-read Venus in Furs and I thought it would make a great play because the relationship is so dynamic and so complicated.” At the heart of the story is the self-described super-sensualist, Severin, pursuing a relationship with an exotic stranger who lives upstairs, a relationship grounded in subjugation – the suggestion of which initially horrifies the woman.
“I took the book and turned it into a play for four actors,” Ives continues, “set in the book’s period, nothing terribly fancy, and I showed it to Walter Bobbie, a friend of mine who ultimately directed Venus in Fur. He said, ‘I don’t think this works. It’s too literal and I don’t know what it has to do with today. I don’t think this
is it.’ So I took that advice and I went away and a couple of months later – I couldn’t let go of those characters – I turned it into the play as we know it in about nine days.” Ives is best known for All in the Timing, an evening of one-act comedies, which holds a record during the 1995-96 season, as the mostperformed play in the country after Shakespeare productions. Other plays of his include New Jerusalem, which won a Hull-Warriner Award, Polish Joke, The School for Lies (adapted from Moliere’s The Misanthrope) Is He Dead? (adapted from Mark Twain’s only play), the book for the musical White Christmas, and several translations of new and classic works. For his final version of Venus in Fur, how did Ives come up with the idea of shifting the action from 19th-century Europe to a 21st-century Manhattan audition room? He pauses. Was it an unexplainable inspiration?
“Everything is unexplainable inspiration,” he says with a laugh. “The world is unexplainable inspiration. We have doorknobs and paper clips – where do these things come from?” An actor’s career depends on those few minutes in the audition. It’s a high-pressure environment that can bring out panic and foolishness in the otherwise self-controlled. “They bring along props!” the character Thomas complains. “Whole sacks full of costumes.” Naturally, the late-arriving Vanda has done just that. Yet, what she pulls from her battered shopping bag will turn out to be game-changing.
“I showed the play to Brian Kulick, who runs Classic Stage Company,” says Ives. We had a reading of Venus in Fur and he loved it. He offered to do the play and put it into the next season and we started looking for actors. It took us six months because it was very hard to find two actors who had all the necessary qualifications. There were plenty of actors who wanted to do it, but not many actors who could.” The play was such a hit at the small, Off-Broadway theater that it quickly migrated to Broadway,
opening in late 2011 and running for nearly 200 performances to unanimous critical acclaim. In its journey from book to stage, Venus in Fur lost its plural, mostly, explains Ives, “because I think ‘fur’ sounds softer and sexier than ‘furs,’ but such things are all subjective. Also, one says someone is wearing ‘fur’ these days, not ‘furs,’ so it sounded more contemporary.” And the way he puts it almost implies that there could be more reasons still. Which fits the topsy-turvy nature of the play, as Thomas and Vanda enact characters from a seemingly timeless era. Thomas confesses that he loves “the size of these people’s emotions. Nobody has emotions this size anymore. Outsized emotions. Operatic emotions. ... Nobody’s overcome by passion like this, or goes through this kind of rage.” But how much of himself has the reserved Thomas put into his script? Vanda coyly asks him, “So, is it you?”
“Why do people always think a playwright has to be the people he writes about?” Thomas replies. “Because,” says Vanda, “playwrights do that sh*t all the time.” It’s both a power struggle and a guessing game as the audition plays out. Despite your best predictions, you’re sure to be surprised.
SHOW DESCRIPTION + Prices This sizzling Broadway hit redefines sex comedy. Here’s a delicious, suspense packed study of the erotics of power. A writer-director laments the woeful parade of actresses who have auditioned for his new play, Venus in Fur. Enter Vanda, an out-of-work actress, who is the epitome of every fault he has described: crude, desperate and needy – or is she? In the course of 90 minutes, we discover there is much more to Vanda, as she turns the tables and takes charge in this sexual roundelay about power and powerlessness. *Contains strong language and sexual subject matter.
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Tony Award® Winning – Capital Region premiere!
by David Ives || SEP 27 - ocT 27
The entrance of Marley’s Ghost in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is one of the story’s scariest moments. Playwright Patrick Barlow had another idea. Here’s a character who, after death, learned to regret his Scrooge-like greed. He’s something of a reverse image of his still-living partner. Why not bring him onstage in a Marx Brothers-like mirror sequence? And it’s a credit to Barlow’s dramatic savvy that the scene which follows lacks none of the dramatic intensity we expect when Marley gets down to the business of trying to reform old Scrooge. Barlow brought similar anarchic touches to his version of the Hitchcock movie The 39 Steps, and now offers a A Christmas Carol in which five actors play 20 characters, not counting “various narrators, debtors, furniture, inconsolable spirits, etc.,” as the script suggests. It’s the REP’s fresh take on a timeless holiday classic, familiar territory livened with a sense of fun. It’s a story that belongs on the stage, and it made its London debut a mere six weeks after the book was published in 1843. Six weeks after that, the city was host to eight stage productions, one of which quickly transferred to New York, joining a musical version the opening night of which was marred by fistfights. At Christmas time in 1853, Dickens himself appeared before an overflow crowd at the Birmingham Town Hall to give what would prove to be an enormously successful reading of A Christmas Carol. Dickens loved the stage and had appeared in amateur dramatics, but this marked his first public reading which, true to his keen social conscience, he insisted be affordable for any who wished to attend. He used a reading desk and had a couple of screens placed behind him to better amplify the volume. As biographer Peter Ackroyd described it, he “rose a little nervously before the seventeen hundred who had endured a snowstorm in order to hear him. But he soon got into his stride and, as he told a friend a few days later, ‘we were all going on together, in the first page, as easily, to all appearance, as if we had been sitting round the fire.’” Another biographer, Edgar Johnson, wrote, “It was more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting without a single prop or bit of costume, by changes of voice, by gesture, by vocal expression, Dickens peopled his stage with a throng of characters.” It’s a performance he would give for the rest of his life, a three-hour event (soon cut to two) that played to packed houses in the U.K. and America. His final appearance, on March 15, 1870, in London’s St. James’s Hall, occurred three months before his death. Clive Francis, an actor who has recreated that evening, notes that on performance days, Dickens “had two tablespoons of rum flavoured with fresh cream for breakfast, a pint of champagne for tea and, half an hour before the start of his performance, would drink a raw egg beaten into a tumbler of sherry.” The compelling intimacy of Dickens’s performance had roots in his writing style. As biographer (and actor) Simon Callow notes in Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, the book gives us “Dickens the buttonholer: your friend, your intimate, your brother, your self. ‘Scrooge found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor,’ he writes ... ‘as close up to it as I am to you.’” Callow, whose films include Shakespeare in Love and A Room with a View, performed his own one-man version of A Christmas Carol at the end of 2012. Film adaptations number nearly 30, from the 1901 Marley’s Ghost through versions starring Reginald Owen, Alastair Sim, Albert Finney, and even Jim Carrey as the miserly miscreant.
But it’s the stage where this story works its magic best. In his book The Life and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, Paul Davis notes that each new era “recreates the story in response to its own cultural needs,” giving us Victorian parables, Edwardian children’s stories, depression-era anti-capitalist screeds and even Freudian treatments in which Marley is pictured as some aspect of Scrooge’s subconscious. It has enjoyed theatrical longevity both on tour and as an annual event. British actor Seymour Hicks debuted his adaptation in 1901 and gave thousands of performances as Scrooge while touring it for the next 47 years. There’s an ongoing version that has been featured every year for 39 years in Raleigh, North Carolina, which is only a year longer than the version the Guthrie in Minneapolis presents. Similar long runs continue at theaters in Omaha, Memphis, Atlanta, and Buffalo. A Christmas Carol: The Musical debuted on Broadway in 1994 at Madison Square Garden and, over the ensuing decade, featured as Scrooge such actors as Terrence Mann, Tony Randall, Hal Linden, Roddy McDowell, Roger Daltrey, Tony Roberts, Frank Langella, Tim Curry, F. Murray Abraham, and Jim Dale.
It also continues to be successful as a one-man show, with contemporary versions starring Patrick Stewart, Kevin Norberg, and the author’s great-greatgrandson, Gerald Charles Dickens. It’s been a Mr. Magoo cartoon, audio-acted on radio, sung as an opera, even reimagined in steampunk terms. One of the producers who brought Patrick Stewart’s version to Broadway saw the potential for a small-cast version, and enlisted Barlow, cofounder of The National Theatre of Brent (which actually is a twoman comedy troupe), to devise something along the lines of The 39 Steps. As he did in the previous show, Barlow achieves an impressive balance between honoring the original story and having fun with the characters and situations. Our favorite lines and favorite moments are there, intact, but they’re livened with the spirit of British pantomime. There’s music, of course, featuring many traditional tunes. There’s audience participation and there’s a good measure of slapstick. Which means it’s responding to our current cultural needs by provoking laughter as we revisit the classic heart and soul of the Christmas.
SHOW DESCRIPTION + Prices This timeless classic gets a merry retelling in a new adaptation by the creator of the two-time Tony Award® winning hit “The 39 Steps.” Five actors portray over 20 characters, exploring new facets of this Dickens’ classic. Re-imagined with a fresh new physicality, this highly theatrical, sometimes comic, ultimately moving adaptation is sure to brighten up your holidays!
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Charles Dickens’ masterwork in a rousing new adaptation by the creator of Broadway’s hit The 39 Steps!
adapted by Patrick Barlow || Nov 22 - Dec 22
He’s had a hell of a day. It’s been a hell of a week. Martin Luther King, Jr. is on his way to Memphis on April 3, 1968 to organize the Poor People’s Campaign. His flight is delayed by a bomb threat, but he gets there in time to give a speech at Mason Temple, the headquarters of the Church of God in Christ.
“What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?” he says to the assembled crowd. “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.” As Katori Hall’s Olivier Award-winning play The Mountaintop opens, King has finished the speech and checked into the Lorraine Motel, where he often stayed in that city. He’s tired. His feet are unpleasantly aromatic. He wants a cup of coffee. He’s told that room service is closed. But a young, talkative maid arrives with coffee and even some cigarettes for King to bum. She’s very attractive. That touches on a weakness of his of which he’s all too aware. Their conversation grows intimate; confessional, even. And theatrical magic occurs as we discover the secret the woman harbors and finally is persuaded to share. Those first few months of 1968 were pivotal to world history. A climate of unrest had been spreading, much of it the result of baby-boom kids reaching maturity and proving to be a powerful demographic. They had an unprecedented buying power. The music and movies they supported confused and offended their elders. And they were dying in large numbers in a hard-to-understand war being fought halfway around the globe. The ones who lived through those months know how volatile everything seemed. Here’s an overview of the events leading to that fateful night in Memphis. As the year begins, the U.S. government seeks to keep us safer by mandating shoulder harness safety belts in new passenger cars. At the same time, baby book avatar Dr. Benjamin Spock gets indicted on charges of conspiracy to encourage draft law violations. Even as the American military’s 10,000th airplane is lost over Vietnam, the first successful human heart transplant takes place. “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die,” sings Johnny Cash. The song is Folsom Prison Blues, which, on Jan. 13, he finally performs at Folsom Prison, a concert that will become one of his most popular albums. Three college students are killed during a civil rights protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina, while students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Boston University protest the war with a hunger strike. More disturbances take place at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A group of Columbia students will protest what they see as the school’s racist policies by taking three officials hostage for a day. In President Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union address, he wishes for a peaceful solution that would allow him to call off further bombing, asserting “that we have ... the physical strength to hold the course of decency and compassion at home, and the moral strength to support the cause of peace in the world.” In 1968, the last day of January begins the Vietnamese New Year, known as Tet – a time when it is assumed military activities will pause. Instead, some 70,000 North Vietnamese troops take part in offensive actions throughout South Vietnam, including an invasion of the American Embassy in Saigon. American anti-war sentiments rise sharply, further inflamed by a photograph taken the following day by reporter Eddie Adams, showing South Vietnamese
police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner at point-blank range. The photo will win a Pulitzer Prize. On Feb. 2, Richard Nixon declares himself a presidential candidate and enters the New Hampshire primary. Soon afterward, senator Robert F. Kennedy also enters the race. He’ll give an eloquent speech in the wake of King’s murder, and then succumb to an assassin’s bullet himself two months thereafter. In entertainment, 25-year-old Frankie Lymon, a doo-wop star in his teens, dies of a heroin overdose. Current stars The Beatles, Mike Love, and Donovan seek insight with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India. And the very first episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood airs on PBS predecessor NET. Television news comes into its own, commanding longer broadcast time and proving unexpectedly influential in the hands of reporters like Walter Cronkite, who travels to Vietnam in the wake of the Tet Offensive and produces a program severely critical of U.S. policy. On March 31, President Johnson gives an Address to the Nation promising limitations of U.S. bombing raids, and announces that he will not seek re-election. On April 2, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey premieres. … On April 3, King flies back to Memphis and checks into room 306 of the Lorraine Motel.
SHOW DESCRIPTION + Prices On the eve of his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. cools down in a lonely Memphis hotel room after delivering the speech of a lifetime — when an unexpected visit from a feisty, young hotel maid pushes King into a confrontation with his doubts, fears, and haunting premonitions. The man behind the public image and the great ideals that formed a new America come alive in this soulstirring hit from London and Broadway. The Mountaintop’s humorous, magical storytelling fuses theatricality with spirituality to reach a summit that will leave audiences breathless. *The Mountaintop Contains Strong Adult Language
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The Broadway Hit!
by Katori Hall || JAN 17 - feb 16
Joe Schuyler has been capturing our shows for over 25 years “I tend to like plays that are a little off-kilter and visually interesting,” says Joe Schuyler, which, if you know his work, is no surprise. And you do know his work. It hangs in the lobby of Capital Repertory Theatre and greets you on the company’s web page. He’s the company’s resident photographer, and has been capturing its signature moments since 1988 [seven years after its founding]. Which gives him a longer association with the theater than anyone else now working there.
Joe’s entry into photography as a career had a more complicated beginning. “It was in the early ‘70’s. I had just graduated from college and was teaching high-school English in Boston to students who couldn’t read. So, I took a multimedia approach, including video, sound recordings, and photography. And I was about a week ahead of them learning how to use the equipment. I discovered I liked photography because it was comparatively inexpensive and you could be in control of the whole process.”
“The first play I did was Saint Florence, by Elizabeth Diggs,” he says. “I’d already been photographing shows for Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts (ESIPA) in the ‘70s, and Soho Rep and the Lake George Opera. I even did a season at Williamstown. Of course, unless you’re doing Broadway and Off-Broadway, it’s not a lucrative gig. You have to have some reason other than a monetary one to do it.”
He stayed at the school long enough to get tenure, “and then I immediately quit. I wanted to study photography and I didn’t want to do it in a school, so I decided to seek out the people I most respected in the field.” Among his mentors were Minor White, who stressed the aesthetics both of the subject and the photographer; photojournalism specialists Mary Ellen Mark and Peter Turnley; Paul Caponigro, whose work is in the collections of the Guggenheim and Whitney among other museums; and Jay Maisel, who shot Miles Davis for the Kind of Blue cover.
In his case, he confesses, he loves the world of theater because he married an actress. “I started photographing plays in Boston, then New York, now here.” Eileen Schuyler is known to area audiences for her work with a number of companies, including the REP’s recent 33 Variations. She spent many years working for the Empire State Institute for the Performing Arts and its successor, the NYS Theatre Institute. Most recently, she played the title role in The Old Mezzo at Pittsfield’s WAM Theatre.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH, 1995
“I started taking jobs,” says Joe, “and let the work lead the way. I ended up doing commercial work, which means you do a bit of everything: product photography, architecture, public relations, portraits, events, interiors, catalogues, college brochures, all kinds of things.” He worked for Manhattan’s New School for 20yrs,
Dancing at LUGHNASA, 1996
shooting classes and putting together brochures. “It wasn’t a big money-maker, but it was a great excuse to go to New York for a few days. Then the school got too budget conscious. This was when I was starting to shoot digital and told them, ‘you’re going to have to start dealing with this.’ I showed them what to do with it and they decided, ‘That’s easy! Students can do this.’ So I talked myself out of a job.”
“When you look at his work,” adds Eileen, “you see that he does photography for publication, not for individuals. Except headshots. They’re different - they’re a part of theater.” Although Eileen and Joe have the ease with each other that comes from many years of marriage, they have contrasting natures. She is organized and energetic; he is charmingly laconic, often seeming distracted until he raises the camera at his side and captures whatever it was he’d been mentally framing.
“Basically, you’re photographing the light,” he explains, but that doesn’t explain the superb composition and textures of his work, work that’s excellent enough to hang in area galleries. Although he now calls himself semi-retired, theater photography remains a passion. “It’s like street photography, but in a controlled environment,” he says. And he challenged himself to go beyond the straightforward. “Most
FENCES, 1991
TAKE ME OUT, 2006
theater shots we see are setups, they’re not done on the fly. Technically, they’re going to be more perfect, with everything perfectly balanced. They can lack a certain authenticity. A theatre performance is not the same every night, and you want to capture that sense of spontaneity.” Eileen amplifies the appeal from an actor’s perspective: “It feels like you’re being invited in to something special. It’s very intense for a short period of time, and then it’s gone.” As an example of the challenges Joe sets for himself, he points to his work on the REP’s Laughing Wild, a show he shot in 1991. “I had Matt Desiderio working with me then,” he says, “and we decided that the show’s two characters, who couldn’t get their lives together, were kind of scattered. So each of us took one of the actors to photograph in parts. I had the guy. I’d take shots just of the arm, just of the hand, a section here, a section there. When we did the display, we printed all those sections and built the person out of them, with the pictures spaced slightly apart. They were something like ten feet high and 20 feet long, those two characters.” Another early favorite was 1993’s Gang on the Roof. “That was visually incredible. Albany Steel constructed a three-story framework on the stage with gates that slammed shut. It was a Vietnam-era play set on an aircraft carrier, where the most dangerous jobs were on the roof of the ship. And that’s where all the black sailors were
sent. It led to a mutiny, which failed. I shot it in the black-and-white era, and it was very stark.”
ensemble piece. It makes a tremendous amount of difference to the pictures.”
A significant change in Joe’s recent work for the REP - and for photographers and their subjects everywhere - was the transition from black-andwhite to color. “It happened around 2002,” he recalls, “which is when we were all finally moving from film to digital. I started with digital around 1999, but you only had a one-megapixel camera back then. At that time, not only was I learning it, but I also had to train Cap Rep and my other clients. They didn’t know how to deal with it. They were used to slides and negatives. Now blackand-white and color cost the same.”
When starting on a show, he always reads the script to prepare for the photographer’s multiple requirements. “First we have pre-production publicity, so we take a few actors to a studio location with costumes and do setups for press. They’re one-shot things; they’re not really the play. They go out with the publicity material. Then I watch a rehearsal. Usually it’s during tech. It lets the actors know you’re there again, establishing rapport. You see lighting, you see sets, you meet the designers. Then I actually shoot the show, at a dress rehearsal. That’s what you’ll see with the reviews.” As Eileen points out, the shows that yield the most successful photos “all have solid emotional content. Even the funny ones.”
How the show is designed plays a part in its visual appeal, of course, but for Joe it goes beyond that. “A lot of it happens when the cast really jells and is having a good time together. They work together, socialize together. It has the atmosphere of a family. That doesn’t always happen, especially if you have a lead with a big ego, who wants the play to be about him or her. And you need a cast in which every person is engaged.”
“I do some of the post work,” adds Eileen, “which means I’m looking at two or three hundred photos of a show, you can see who is involved, who’s engaged - you can see when a connection is tight among people.” “If they’re not paying attention, and just waiting their turn,” says Joe, “you know it’s not an
“Theater is a microcosm,” says Joe, “a cocoon that’s a whole complete world of very talented people. I believe that when you’re photographing people who are not playing characters, you’re going to discover a lot more about them than you can with real live people. Real people in real life tend to hide a lot, whereas actors as characters are revelatory. I think you learn more about people in the theater than you do about people anywhere else.”
Peek into the audition room of any professional production calling for children and you’ll see an army of determinedly ambitious mothers. Stage moms are such a presence in the entertainment world that Noël Coward, who was besieged by their entreaties, wrote a song about it:
“The profession is overcrowded and the struggle’s pretty tough, and admitting the fact she’s burning to act, that isn’t quite enough.” – “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington” (1933) None of which dissuaded Rose Horvick from pushing her three daughters onto the stage, and one of them wrote a book about it. Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir went on to inspire what’s been called the greatest American musical. “The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s the best damn musical I’ve seen in years,” wrote Walter Kerr in his New York Herald Tribune review when the show opened in 1959. It gives us a classic portrait of a brash, controlling stage mother – and it came from the unlikely source of the autobiography of a strip-tease artist. Capital Repertory Theatre is proud to present the legendary Gypsy, the iconic musical that brought the genre to its artistic peak in the postOklahoma! years. The songs, by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim, include such Broadway standards as Let Me Entertain You, Small World, and Everything’s Coming Up Roses, and the story will remain timeless as long as there are overbearing parents. We have whimsical names for them now: Tiger Mom. Helicopter Dad. Stage Mother. But they’ve been hovering long before being captured in cutesy nomenclature. The halls of mythology are littered with misbehaving moms – Orestes and Oedipus both were saddled with lulus – but it was Niobe, Queen of Thebes, who wouldn’t stop bragging about the terrficness of her dozen children. She was particularly fond of annoying Apollo’s mom, Leto, so handsome, overprotective son wiped out Niobe’s brood. Until recently, you had to be goddess or queen to get your antics recorded by history. It’s safe to assume that there were moms in ancient Babylon imploring their tykes not to go out in the rain without wearing whatever the Egyptians
were sporting as overshoes back then. But the 19th-century Duchess of Kent’s over-protectiveness was too fascinating to be ignored. Because of the many flipflops characterizing succession to the British throne, the daughter born to her in 1819 had a shot at the crown, if a not-likely one. Nevertheless, this tiger mom slept in the same bedroom with her daughter until the kid became Britain’s Queen Victoria in 1837. Victoria’s son, Prince Albert, married Empress Alexandra of Denmark who would herself gain a reputation for being far too child-controlling as her own family grew – but wouldn’t you do the same with a mother-in-law like that? Show biz seems to stoke a unique type of maternal fire. We wouldn’t have had the Marx Brothers without the relentless push of their mother, Minnie – celebrated in another musical, Minnie’s Boys. A couple of early talkies gave variations on the theme. Applause, from 1929, reverses the formula, as burlesque star Helen Morgan attempts to shield daughter Joan Peers from the stage, while 1933’s Stage Mother casts Alice Brady as a former trapeze artist who swings daughter Maureen O’Sullivan away from the father’s respectable family and onto Broadway. As for child actors back then, young Jackie Coogan, who co-starred in Charlie Chaplin’s film The Kid, was so exploited by his parents that they bankrupted him. By the time Coogan created the role of Uncle Fester in TV’s The Addams Family, a law named for him protecting acting childen, had been in effect for a quarter-century. Although such cultural touchstones as Toddlers & Tiaras may have persuaded today’s stage mom that she need only raise a beauty queen for that shot at vicarious stardom, back in the Golden Age of Broadway and Hollywood dreaming, that child had to sing and dance. Judy Garland made her stage debut before the age of three, and she and her sisters continued to be pushed by a vaudevilleperforming mom, while Shirley MacLaine recalls being hauled off to dance classes by her mother. Gypsy Rose Lee veered from vaudeville to burlesque, making her name as much for her wit as for what flesh she revealed.
Her memoir is a classic of the domineeringmom genre, but Gypsy book writer Arthur Laurents took it a step further by crafting a character in Rose who reveals an unexpected vulnerability, and this is what gives the musical its heart. Although Stephen Sondheim had hoped to write both music and lyrics for the show, he was persuaded by mentor Oscar Hammerstein to take what would be his second lyrics-only job after West Side Story. He quickly saw the appeal of the challenges the story presented. Gypsy was my first chance to write lyrics for characters of considerable complexity,” Sondheim writes in his book Finishing the Hat. “Rose was that dramatist’s dream, the self-deluded protagonist who comes to a tragic/triumphant end ... Rose is the classroom example of self-delusion, a showbiz Oedipus.” Gypsy has thrived for over half a century, through two movies (and a rumored aboutto-be third) and four Broadway revivals, because the spirit of show business that it captured is the essence of our mixed-bag Let Me Entertain You culture – the show is subtitled A Musical Vaudeville – and there’s nothing more American than a spirit of optimism in the face of setback and defeat. We’re inviting you into a world of such heightened emotion that we know you’ll be well entertained. You’ll certainly be moved to laugh, and, as Walter Kerr declared in that 1959 review, “If you don’t cry, I’m through with you.”
SHOW DESCRIPTION + Prices “You’ll be swell…You’ll be great…Gonna have the whole world on a plate… Starting here, starting now, everything’s coming up roses!” Immortal lyrics from the Broadway hit often saluted as the greatest musical of our time! Let us entertain you with the rags to riches story of ugly-duckling, Louise, the tomboy who rose to national fame as Gypsy Rose Lee: the entertainment queen who put class into Burlesque. You’ll share the joy and heartbreak of Mama Rose, the pushy backstage mother who lived through her daughters, but paid a high price.
Tue - Thu $20/45/55 fri - sun $20/55/65
BROADWAY SMASH MUSICAL
A Musical Fable
music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim & book by Arthur Laurents || MAR 14 - APR 13
Once Upon a Reading
Our relentless, 24-hours-a-day-news environment places candidates for public office under unprecedented scrutiny. It’s not just the positive stuff that has legs: we know every gaffe and contradiction. We have more detailed portraits of political candidates than ever before, large components of which are pieces of information so personal – or so trivial – that we’d never have the nerve to ask such things in person. Not surprisingly, candidates for the highest national offices suffer the most microscopic study of all.
The God Game gives us just such a dilemma. The governor of Virginia is making a run for President, and wants to invite a popular senator to join the ticket as candidate for V.P. But there’s a problem: The senator isn’t sure he believes in God. “You just need to signal that you’re a believer,” says the governor’s campaign. The problems are both personal and philosophical and invite no easy answers – just the kind of dilemmas that make for an absorbing stage drama. Suzanne Bradbeer’s The God Game was chosen through the Next Act! New Play Summit that took place in November 2012, an event that saw readings of two plays, one musical, and the first 15 minutes of six more plays.
“The script was given to me from someone who’d performed a reading of it,” says Maggie MancinelliCahill, the REP’s Artistic Director, “someone I’ve worked with who said, ‘I think this is right up your alley. It’s thoughtful, political, and the characters are well-drawn.” “Because we were doing Next Act, I decided to put it through the selection process. I took off the cover page and put it in with all the other plays and had our people read it.”
The play worked its way even closer to the summit in the Next Act! final rounds. “It was in everyone’s top three,” says Mancinelli-Cahill. “I think the play spoke to each person in that collective. So it went into our season because a whole lot of people, including myself, saw it as an important play for now.”
Playwright Bradbeer’s work was last seen in the area when Barrington Stage presented God in the Goat as part of its 2012 10x10 on North New Play Festival, and Stageworks/Hudson’s 2011 production of Okoboji. Her newest work, Shakespeare in Vegas, was presented by Dreamcatcher Rep in early 2013. The God Game is a three-character study of love and politics. The setting is Richmond, Virginia, where Tom is taking a day off from his job as a senator to celebrate his 20th wedding anniversary with Lisa, for whom this ritual has become almost as sacred as the spiritual life she ardently pursues. Surprise visitor Matt is an old friend, but not, as far as Lisa is concerned, a necessarily welcome one. The deadline-intense nature of campaign politics intensifies the examination of issues of friendship and faith, told with compellingly complex character portraits.
As Mancinelli-Cahill explains, by the time the script arrived, “it had been through a workshop at the Lark Theater in New York, so Suzanne had the benefit of that process. Which I think is very helpful. As I call it, it gives the play air.” Even more refinement will occur before the show arrives at the REP: it will have been on its feet in Florida.“The Gulfshore Playhouse in Florida approached me about the play, knowing we had the world-premiere rights to it. They asked if we could do a ‘rolling premiere.’ This would be their first world premiere, while it’s our 23rd, so I thought, why shouldn’t they have that opportunity?” Mancinelli-Cahill will work with the team for its premiere there in January, “and the same cast will be here in May. It’ll also be nice for the playwright, and I love the fact that the play can get a larger life.” A show about the ruthlessness of politics has never been more timely, especially when it’s crafted, as is The God Game, with a careful eye to the nuance of character and the potentially divisive nature of issues of faith. The result is an evening bound to provoke insight and discussion, and it certainly will change the way you look at TV news.
‘Here’s a play that should have attention paid to it,’” Mancinelli-Cahill.
SHOW DESCRIPTION + Prices When he’s tapped to serve as the running mate for a conservative Presidential candidate, Tom’s life takes a major turn. A popular, moderate Senator, he would add balance and appeal to the ticket. There’s just one little hitch: he needs to sound just a bit more Christian. Trouble is, Tom is an agnostic, who thinks religion is a private matter, not to be mingled with public life or politics. His devout Christian wife, Lisa, will stand by her man, as long as he doesn’t lie on the campaign trail just to get the job. The favorite from the 2012 NEXT ACT NEW PLAY SUMMIT, Bradbeer’s play reveals the private dilemmas that sometimes guide politics and asks the question, “Does the public have the right to know everything about a candidate’s private thoughts?”
Tue - Thu $20/40/50 fri - sun $20/50/60
the favorite from the 2012 next act! new play summit
world premiere!
THE GOD GAME BY SUZANNE BRADBEER || MAY 2 – JUN 1