New Route Theatre's VOICES OF PRIDE Starts Friday

New Route Theatre's Voices of Pride Festival of new plays begins this week, with staged readings presented Friday, Saturday and Sunday at Bloomington's First Christian Church at 401 West Jefferson Street. Tickets will be available at the door for a suggested donation of $10. This event is dedicated to the memory of Phil Shaw.

This festival, which consists of four new plays with LGBT themes, is presented in conjunction with the Prairie Pride Coalition. Illinois State University Assistant Professor Duane Boutté curated the program and directs two of them. Here's the schedule of events:

APRIL 22 
7 pm
garbage can blues, written by Paula Ressler, Associate Professor in the English Department at Illinois State University. Directed by Duane Boutté.

8:30 pm
ReConnect, written by DC Cathro, a playwright from Maryland. Directed by New Route Theatre Artistic Director Don Shandrow.

APRIL 23 
7 pm
Thingification, written and performed by Duriel E. Harris, a Creative Writing Associate Professor in the English Department at Illinois State University. Directed by Duane Boutté and assistant directed by Gina Cleveland.

8:30 pm
Bedfellows, written by Daniel Kipp, a playwright from Rock Island who is also a graduate of Illinois Wesleyan University. Directed by Don Shandrow.

APRIL 24
2 pm
garbage can blues  

4:30pm
ReConnect

6 pm
Thingification

7:30 pm
Bedfellows

Peg Kirk and Troy Schaeflein are the cast of Paula Ressler's garbage can blues, described as "the haunting tale of a lesbian mother struggling to come to terms with the circumstances of her son's demise as she questions any role she may have played. Performed in a single act, garbage can blues reads with artful precision. Mrs. Ressler's careful strokes paint a mother-son relationship that delivers enduring questions about society's judgement of non-traditional families, and its affect on modern youth."

Cathro's ReConnect features Nathan Brandon Gaik, Brigette Richard, George Jackson, Joseph Johnson, Samuel James Willis, Daniel Esquivel, Marya Manak, Kelsey Brunner, Rachel Hettrick, Anastasia Ferguson and Graham Gusloff in a "a delightfully poignant series of six short one act plays that center on the reunions of eleven different people and the surprise, pain and awareness that reconnecting brings.

Thingification expands on performance poems by Harris called "Phaneric Displays," and it includes excerpts from other published works from Harris like "Amnesiac: Poems, and Drag." In Thingification, Harris will perform "a progression of vivid characters from southern cotton fields to big city dance clubs, resulting in a compelling discourse on African American identity and empowerment."

Duane Boutté and Dave Krostal are featured in Kipp's Bedfellows, which covers three different moments in the lives of two men, focusing on "their relationship during moments of dynamic political change. They meet on election night of 1992. We then see them just before the election in 2000 and then finally just after the election in 2008. A bittersweet exploration of how time and politics influence a relationship."

New Route Theatre and Artistic Director Don Shandrow have indicated that they hope to make this an annual event to go along with the Black Voices Matter festival presented in February.

For more information regarding New Route Theatre and the Voices of Pride Festival, you are asked to contact Shandrow at new.route.theatre@gmail.com or visit the New Route Facebook page.

New Route Theatre Offers Two New Festivals for Black and LGBTQ Playwrights

New Route Theatre has two exciting projects coming up, with a playwriting competition aimed at producing staged readings of winning works written by LGBTQ authors and a second program of fully staged works by African-American playwrights from Illinois under the banner "Black Voices Matter: New Voices, New Plays, New Directions."

As of January 14, New Route is looking for new plays by Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, or Queer playwrights for a LGBTQ festival of staged readings scheduled for April. New Route will select three plays to be presented in readings April 22 through 24 in Bloomington-Normal. They are asking for submissions to be in by February 20, 2016, and they'd like to see materials submitted by email at new.route.theatre@gmail.com.

Duane Boutté

If you're submitting, you are asked to include "Attention: Duane Boutté" on your email. Duane Boutté , who is acting as the curator of this series, is a member of the faculty at Illinois State University's School of Theatre and Dance. A performer, director and playwright, he has appeared on Broadway and off-Broadway, at theaters across the United States, including the Goodman in Chicago and Arena Stage in Washington DC, and in film and television, as well. In 2015, Boutté directed Cabaret and Fences at ISU.

This festival of LGBTQ voices is presented in partnership with Bloomington-Normal's Prairie Pride Coalition.

Also coming up in February for New Route is their "Black Voices Matter: New Voices, New Plays, New Directions" festival, which has been created to showcase brand-new work written, directed and performed by African-Americans from Bloomington-Normal and Chicago.

New Route's three-day event will feature original poetry and plays, intended to "give voice to the current #‎BlackLivesMatter‬ movement." The pieces that form the "Black Voices" festival are Shades by Leola Bellamy, Black by Kamaya Thompson, and Glass Half Black by Matty Robinson. Dates and times are:

SHADES
By Leola Bellamy
Thursday, February 18 at 7:30 pm

BLACK
By Kamaya Thompson
Friday, February 19 at 7:30 pm

GLASS HALF BLACK 
By Matty Robinson
Saturday, February 21 at 2:30 and 7:30 pm.

Performances will take place at the First Christian Church, 401 West Jefferson Street in Bloomington. Audiences will be offered an opportunity to interact with actors, playwrights and directors Jamelle Robinson and Gregory D. Hicks following each performance. New Route is encouraging audience members to attend all three shows to experience the full spectrum of voices. They're are presented free of charge, with a suggested donation of $5 at the door.

New Route Theatre’s mission -- to present "professional-quality theatre using a broad spectrum of artists who represent the community in all of its diversity" -- is clearly reflected in both festivals.

For more information about New Route Theatre or either of these projects, please contact Don Shandrow, Artistic Director or Jamelle Robinson, Development Director at new.route.theatre@gmail.com or check them out on Facebook.

ISU 2015-16: From NYC to Chicago, From Troy to El Salvador and Never Never Land

It's that time! Spring for theaters -- even college theater departments -- means it's also time to put together schedules for the fall. For playwrights, it means lots of rejections (and maybe a few acceptance letters) in their mailboxes. For actors and designers, it means looking ahead to decide what they most want to work on.

In that spirit, as well as to give local audiences something to look forward to, Illinois State University has released their tentative schedule for fall 2015 and spring 2016. Although dates are not carved in stone, this is what the School of Theatre and Dance has planned:

Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs will open in late September in the Center for the Performing Arts. MFA directing candidate Jonathan Hunt-Sell, who just finished up his run of Moliere's School for Wives, will direct this warm comedy about a Jewish family living in Brooklyn in the 1930s, with son Eugene (based on Simon himself) dreaming of girls, baseball and a life not bound by his crazy relatives. Brighton Beach Memoirs is the first play of three Simon wrote about Eugene Jerome, moving on to his military years in Biloxi Blues and the beginnings of his comedy career in Broadway Bound. Brighton Beach originally starred Matthew Broderick as Eugene on Broadway. It's a sweet play, full of Depression-era atmosphere and eccentric characters, with good roles for both men and women.

The action moves from New York to Chicagoland in October with Grease, the 1950s musical with book, music and lyrics by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. This trip to Rydell High, with its hotrods, Pink Ladies and summer lovin', will be directed by Lori Adams. The stage musical, which played for 3388 performances in its first Broadway incarnation and then came back for 1500 more in the 90s, spawned the hugely successful movie with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. If you know all the words to "Beauty School Drop-Out" and "Greased Lightning" (and let's not kid ourselves -- who doesn't?), you will be first in line to see Grease at ISU's CPA.

Also in October, Duane Boutté will direct August Wilson's Fences, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, in Westhoff Theatre. Like Grease, Fences is set in the 1950s. Like Brighton Beach Memoirs, it has a connection to baseball. More importantly, it's part of a larger collection of plays. Fences is the sixth decade Wilson dealt with in his century of plays about African-Americans trying to find their way in the United States. The original Broadway production starred James Earl Jones as Troy, now a garbage man, but once a promising baseball player before he was sent to prison for robbery.

That will be followed by The Trojan Women, a tragedy from Greek playwright Euripides that focuses on the horrific after-effects of war for the women left behind after their world has been destroyed. Their husbands, fathers and children are dead. Their homes are gone. And they face a future of grief, death, rape and slavery. Connie de Veer will direct Ellen McLaughlin's adaptation of The Trojan Women in Westhoff Theatre. McLaughlin, an actress best known for originating the role of the Angel in Angels in America, has come back to the Greeks again and again, with works like Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Helen, The Persians and Oedipus on her resume. Her Trojan Women has not made it to Broadway, although Gilbert Murray's translation played at the Cort Theatre in 1941. A 1971 film version drawing from Edith Hamilton's translation starred Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave, and those are the faces you see in the poster here.

The Trojan Women will be followed by a dance concert in November to finish up the 2015 part of the schedule.

In February 2015, we'll see Street Scene, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes, based on the 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Elmer Rice, in the Center for the Performing Arts. Rice also wrote the book for this "American opera," which focuses on two swelteringly hot summer days on the steps of a tenement on New York's East Side. The people who live inside the tenement -- a variety of cultures and ethnicities, ages and genders -- fall in love, have affairs, argue, struggle to pay the rent, celebrate and despair.

Also in February, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and its star-crossed lovers will come to Westhoff Theatre in a production directed by Kevin Rich.

Bocon!,  by Lisa Loomer, a dark piece of magical realism about a Salvadoran boy who notices that everyone he knows who speaks out disappears, will be directed by Cyndee Brown for Westhoff in March. The image you see above comes from a New Mexico production of the play.

That will be followed by Wendy and Peter Pan, a different take on the Peter Pan story, adapted for the stage by Ella Hickson, directed by Jessika Malone in the CPA in April. This version of the boy who didn't want to grow up comes from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

And with one final dance concert in April, the Illinois State University School of Theatre and Dance closes out another eclectic season.

Catching Up With Casting: ISU's CABARET

If you think a musical set in Berlin just as Hitler and the Nazis are rising to power sounds like a terrible idea, you've never seen Kander and Ebb's Cabaret. There are dark and dangerous ideas at play, with pointed social commentary running underneath the plot(s) and the show's musical numbers, like the romantic song with a woman in a gorilla suit ("If You Could See Her Through My Eyes") and the ménage à trois number ("Two Ladies").

After Christopher Isherwood wrote about his experiences in 1930s Berlin in a series of short stories collected in a volume called Goodbye to Berlin, John Van Druten turned the stories into a stage play called I Am a Camera. Isherwood and Van Druten both focused on the seamy part of Weimar Germany, "a society in decay," as George Orwell put it. Their Berlin is a place where low-rent entertainment like the Kit Kat Club thrives, bringing together people on the edges. The denizens of the Kit Kat Club are at risk from the Nazis because they are different, they are decadent, and they aren't playing along with the rules. In the middle of it all is Sally Bowles, a nightclub singer who wants life to be a cabaret, a mysterious and creepy Master of Ceremonies who runs the entertainment at the club, and a somewhat distant English writer whose entrance serves as our introduction to the world of Sally Bowles.

The stage play and the subsequent musical, adapted from the play by Joe Masteroff, were both hits (and then some) on Broadway, with Tony Awards for both Julie Harris, who played Sally, and Marian Harris, who played Jewish heiress Natalia for 1952's I Am a Camera, and eight Tonys, including Best Musical, Best Director (Harold Prince) and Best Featured Actor (for Joel Grey, as the Master of Ceremonies) for the 1967 musical version, Cabaret.

The film version, directed by Bob Fosse, was just as impressive, with eight Oscars. Fosse and Company lost Best Picture to The Godfather, but took home Best Director, Best Actress (Liza Minnelli) and Best Supporting Actor (for Joel Grey again).

And Cabaret has been revived on Broadway again and again, with another pile of awards in 1998 and 2014. The show seems to get seedier and darker every time it comes back, with scantier costumes and more overt references to the evils inside and outside the Kit Kat Club.

Actors Alan Cumming (above, right) and Neil Patrick Harris have famously cycled through as the Master of Ceremonies, while the array of actresses playing Sally Bowles ranged from Natasha Richardson, who originated the role in the 1998 revival, to Michelle Williams, who took it in 2014, and Emma Stone, who'll be there till February 1, 2015. Along the way, Susan Egan, Joely Fisher, Gina Gershon, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Molly Ringwald, Brooke Shields have all played Sally.

Cabaret was produced at Illinois State University in 1997, but this time out, Assistant Professor Duane Boutté will be at the helm. Boutté's cast will feature Paige Brantley as Sally Bowles, Alex Levy as the Emcee and Jimmy Keating as Cliff, the writer who meets Sally and falls in love. Alex Gould and Gloria Petrelli will play Herr Schultz and Frau Schneider, the older couple who run afoul of the Nazis, Garrett Douglas will be Ernst, a double-dealing German who befriends Cliff, Andrea Williams will portray Fraulein Kost, a woman of dubious reputation, and Dan Esquivel will take the roles of Max, the owner of the Kit Kat Club, and a customs officer.

To see the complete cast list, including Kit Kat Boys and Girls and the on-stage orchestra ("Even the orchestra is beautiful," after all), click here.

Cabaret will play at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts from February 12 to 21, 2015.