Musicals, Comedy, Drama and Something Brand New at IWU in 2018-19

The School of Theatre Arts at Illinois Wesleyan University has announced five shows (and one "To Be Announced" notice) for its 2018-19 season, with two musicals, one drama, a Shakespeare comedy, a dance concert and a new piece to be written and directed by a SOTA senior.

For the Jerome Mirza Theatre, the first show offered in the fall will be Stop Kiss, Diana Son's 1998 play about two women who meet, start to fall for each other, and kiss on the street, with a whole lot of fallout afterwards because of that one small kiss. The scenes in Stop Kiss are played out of order, with Son telling her story in pieces as fragmented as the lives of the two women. Professor Nancy Loitz will direct this story of love and compassion trying to find a way in today's world.

Next up in the Mirza, Professor Jean Kerr will direct the Broadway musical Curtains, which ran for over 500 performances at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2007 and 2008. It was nominated for eight Tony Awards, with David Hyde Pierce winning Best Actor in a Musical for his performance as a Boston police lieutenant who just happens to be a major fan of musical theater. The plot's afoot when he is called upon to investigate a murder that happened during the curtain call for a very bad musical in an out-of-town tryout. The score of Curtains was written by the legendary Kander & Ebb, with the book by Rupert Holmes, who won a Drama Desk Award for his efforts. Curtains has a curious creative history: Kander and Holmes provided additional lyrics after the death of Fred Ebb, and the entire show is based on an idea from Peter Stone, who also passed away with only part of the story finished.

Spring at the Mirza will feature A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's fantasy of fairies and mortals mixing it up in the woods, directed by Visiting Professor Christopher Connelly.

The spring season will finish up with the annual dance concert, directed by Sheri Marley, in the Mirza Theater.

Two other shows have been announced for the E. Melba Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre. The "To Be Announced" show, written and directed by Nick Valdivia, a senior in Design & Technology, will fill the Lab Theatre in the fall, while Violet, a musical drama based on the short story "The Ugliest Pilgrim" by Doris Betts, with music by Jeanine Tesori and lyrics and book by Brian Crawley, will take the Kirkpatrick space in the spring, in a production directed by Associate Professor Scott Susong.

Violet has a history both on and Off-Broadway, with a Playwrights Horizon production in 1997 that won best musical honors from the Lucille Lortel and Drama Critics Circle awards along with a special Obie for Jeanine Tesori, and then a one-night Encores! staging and a Broadway production in 2014 that starred Sutton Foster, Colin Donnell and Joshua Henry. Foster played Violet, a bitter, wounded young woman who suffered a terrible accident when she was a child. Violet's last hope is that a TV evangelist on the other side of the country can heal her horribly disfigured face, so she gets on a bus to find her miracle. Along the way, she meets (and plays poker with) two soldiers who have their own stories to tell. Violet is set amidst the byways and highways of America in 1964 and its score reflects that setting with bluegrass, blues and gospel styles.

Opening Tonight: SOUTH PACIFIC at IWU

Long before Hamilton piled up all those Tony Awards and took home the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, before it started a dizzying war for tickets that fueled scalpers and prompted outrage at its high prices, Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific did it all first. After its Broadway opening in 1949, it ran for five years and 1925 performances, with Tony Awards for Best Musical, director Joshua Logan, its score (Rodgers), libretto (Hammerstein and Logan), producers (Hammerstein, Rodgers, Logan and Leland Hayward) and scenic design (Jo Mielziner) as well as for stars Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza and supporting performers Juanita Hall and Myron McCormick. The original cast recording sold over a million copies.  


South Pacific represented Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical translation of the short stories in John Michener's Tales of the South Pacific. Michener's stories focused on the cultural, financial and military interaction between indigenous peoples, immigrants and the global powers setting up operations on top of them, all things he saw when he himself was stationed in the South Pacific during World War II.

The musical South Pacific offered songs like "Some Enchanted Evening," "Younger Than Springtime," "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," "There Is Nothing Like a Dame," and "Bali Ha'i," as characters Michener had created fell in love and faced danger against a multicultural backdrop. Its messages of tolerance and acceptance, of looking for understanding instead of hatred, is why South Pacific won its Pulitzer.

For Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Theatre Arts, professor Scott Susong directs a cast that includes Emily Hardesty and Madison Steele rotating in the role of Ensign Nellie Forbush, the cock-eyed optimist from Arkansas with a racist streak hidden under her nurse's uniform, with Timothy P. Foszcz as Emile de Becque, the wealthy planter Nellie falls for. There is, of course, a conflict between them -- the fact that he has two biracial daughters. As Nellie's "carefully taught" prejudice is revealed, the show's themes come into focus.

The other plotline with a culture clashe at its heart features Holden P. Ginn as handsome young American Lieutenant Cable and Megan Lai and Juna Shai alternating as Liat, his local love interest. Paola Lehman and Kira Rangel also alternate as Liat's mother, Bloody Mary, the Tonkinese woman who makes a living selling trinkets and junk to U.S. servicemen, with Connor Wildelka donning the coconut bra of Luther Billis, the rowdy Seabee who always has his eye on the main chance.

South Pacific opens tonight at 8 pm in the Jerome Mirza Theatre at McPherson Hall on Ames Plaza on the IWU campus in Bloomington. Performances continue until the matinee on Sunday, November 19 at 2 pm. For more information on this production, click here or here. For ticket information, call the School of Theatre Arts box office at 309-556-3232 or visit this box office page online.

IWU School of Theatre Arts Announces Mainstage Choices for 2017-18

Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Theatre Arts has announced via Facebook what will be on stage for the mainstage part of their 2017-18 season. No dates yet and the official IWU Theatre page is still showing last year's schedule, but at least we know what we'll seeing if not exactly when. I'm guessing checking back on that page periodically should yield a schedule at some point.

If the order of the photos indicated the order of the shows, first up will be Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel's wistful, haunting memory play set in County Donegal in Ireland in 1936.  The Lughnasa in Dancing at Lughnasa refers to the August harvest festival. The five Mundy sisters are struggling to get by, from the eldest, Kate, a tightly wound schoolteacher, to Christina, the youngest, who has a child but no husband or other means of support. Their lives only get more difficult when their older brother, who'd been a Catholic missionary and chaplain in Africa, returns for unspecified reasons, but has trouble mentally balancing the world he left behind and the one he's reentered. Christina's son Michael is the narrator of the play, standing in for Friel. He appears as an adult to step back into the action of his childhood. Dancing at Lughnasa was first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, thereafter transferring to London, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Play in 1991. On Broadway, it also took the Tony for Best Play, along with awards for director Patrick Mason and Best Featured Actress in a Play for Brid Brennan, who played Agnes, the shy, tentative sister somewhat overshadowed in the middle of the family, in its Dublin, West End and Broadway productions.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical South Pacific comes next in the picture scroll. Everybody knows "Some Enchanted Evening," "Bali Hai" and "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," right? Based on James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, this South Pacific features music by Rodgers, lyrics by Hammerstein and book by Joshua Logan, telling the stories of Americans stationed on islands in the Pacific. There's Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, who faces her own prejudices when she falls in love with a French plantation owner named Emile de Becque who has mixed-race children; a squadron of rowdy Seabees led by Luther Bills; and Lieutenant Cable, a forthright young officer in the midst of dangerous missions and a love affair with a native woman. As a child, I remember thinking Nellie was an idiot for her bigotry against two kids who were half-Polynesian, but that's the point of South Pacific, that our prejudices are not innate or logically justifiable but "carefully taught." The original Broadway production won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and piled up ten Tony Awards, including winning Best Musical along with awards for its book, score, director, producer and scenic design, and sweeping the acting categories, with wins for leads Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, who played Nellie and Emile de Becque, and featured actors Myron McCormick, who played Billis, and Juanita Hall, who played Bloody Mary, the enterprising mother of Cable's beautiful love interest.

Next on the list in Eugene Ionesco's absurdist drama Rhinoceros, wherein the citizens of a French town inexplicably start turning into stampeding rhinoceroses. One by one, they sprout horns and hoofs, as a lone man, Berenger, tries to hold out against the onslaught. Rhinoceros was written in 1959 and is widely regarded as a cautionary tale about how mass movements like Fascism and Nazism can take over and turn people who were once reasonable human beings into fanatical monsters. In other words, it's perfect for our current international political landscape. Although actor/producer/director/mime Jean-Louis Barrault played Berenger in the original French production and Laurence Olivier took the role in London, it was Eli Wallach who made Berrenger (now with an extra R) his own on Broadway, with Zero Mostel as his intellectual friend John (originally Jean) who turned rhino in front of his eyes. In the showier role, Mostel was the one who won the Tony as Best Actor. In the 1973 film, Gene Wilder played a new version of Berenger called Stanley, with Mostel reprising his role.

In a real change of pace from the politically and personally provocative to just plain fun, the last show in IWU's mainstage season is the roller disco musical Xanadu, based on the 1980 film that starred Olivia Newton-John as a Greek muse. On Broadway, Kerry Butler took the Newton-John role, while Cheyenne Jackson played the man she's trying to inspire. Douglas Carter Beane spruced up the book from the film script, adding more mythology and a whole lot of parody to send up the campy movie. Along with the roller skates, songs from the movie like the title song and "All Over the World" came with it from screen to stage, with added hits like "Have You Never Been Mellow?" and ELO's "Strange Magic." Click here to see Jackson, Butler and the rest of the cast perform "Don't Walk Away" on the Tonys.

In case you're wondering, it was Kelli O'Hara who was nominated but did not win the Tony for the 2010 revival of South Pacific, whose poster image you see up top, while Kerry Butler -- the blonde in the poster just above -- was nominated but did not win for Xanadu in 2008.

Watch this space for more details on all these shows as dates are added. Check here for IWU's Laboratory Theatre schedule once that's added.

New in November!

A sweet Swedish movie called A Man Called Ove, with the quintessential "Get Off My Lawn" cranky neighbor as the main character, comes to the Art Theater Co-op in Champaign tomorrow and Thursday. A  Man Called Ove puts the curmudgeon, a retiree and a widower whose main pursuit in life is enforcing neighborhood regulations, in conflict with a noisy, disorderly family that moves in next boor. Rolf Lassgård stars as Ove; he earned two Best Actor awards, one at the Seattle International Film Festival, for the role. A Man Called Ove will be screened at the Art Theater tomorrow at 6 and 8:30 pm and Thursday, November 3 at 7:30 pm.

Community Players brings out the puppets in November with Avenue Q, the irreverent Broadway musical that mixes Muppet-like characters with adult situations represented in songs like "It Sucks to Be Me" and "The Internet Is for Porn." George W. Bush was president when Avenue Q opened in 2003 and he got a mention in the song "For Now," which celebrates the temporary nature of problems and annoyances. The lyrics to that song have changed since Bush left the presidency in 2009, including a Donald Trump reference earlier this year. No word on whether the Community Players cast will sing about Trump being only "For Now," but we can hope. Brett Cottone directs a cast that includes Aaron Wiessing as Princeton, the puppet who moves to Avenue Q and meets his neighbors, human and puppet alike, and Erin Box as Kate Monster, his love interest. Avenue Q opens at Community Players with a preview performance on November 3, with performances continuing through November 20. For information, click here, or to purchase tickets, click here.

Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, a creepy play from 1964 about a malevolent family and the son (and his wife) who visit, comes to Heartland Theatre beginning November 3. The last time I reviewed The Homecoming, I called it "a surreal domestic dumping ground." That's as good a description as any, I suppose. Since then, I've learned that Pinter thought it was a feminist play, while I fall more on the side of those who think it's really, really misogynistic. If you're a Pinter fan, you'll probably want to decide for yourself if the sole female character, Ruth, represents female power, a combination of the Madonna and the whore, or she's just a "disgusting, distinctively masculine, sexual fantasy." Sandra Zielinski directs a cast that includes guest actor David Kortemeier, who has played many roles for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival and last appeared at Heartland in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1991. After a Pay What You Can Preview on Thursday, November 3, The Homecoming will run till November 19. For showtimes, check this link.

Emergency Prom will give freshman actors at Bradley University a chance to strut their stuff from November 10 to 13 at the Hartmann Center for the Performing Arts. And when I say "strut their stuff," I mean swaying to "Stay" or doing a little Bump N' Grind or whatever else was in fashion with outsiders in 1994. That's the premise of the play -- a group of not-exactly-popular kids in 1994 decide that last weekend's prom was so terrible that they need to stage a do-over, a new prom, an Emergency Prom. Check out the details here.

Arts at ICC presents David Landau's Murder at the Cafe Noir beginning November 11. As you might expect from the title, there are mysterious doings afoot in this play, involving a hard-boiled PI named Rick Archer. If you know your Bogart movies, both pieces of that name will sound familiar. Murder at the Cafe Noir is part Casablanca, part Maltese Falcon, and part Choose Your Own Adventure, with audience interaction to decide what Rick should do. If you're interested in seeing Murder at the Cafe Noir at ICC, pay special attention to the times of performances. Fridays and Saturdays, the curtain is at 6:30 pm, Sundays it's at 2:30 pm, and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the show opens at 7:30 pm.

When you think of songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, something like "My Funny Valentine," "Blue Moon" or "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" may be the first song that comes to mind. But the Rodgers and Hart score for The Boys from Syracuse is pretty swell, too. This musical version of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors has "Falling in Love with Love," "This Can't Be Love" and "Sing for Your Supper," songs which were popular at the time and are still popular enough to show up often in revues and concerts. George Abbott directed the first Broadway production in 1938, with Eddie Albert starring as Antipholus of Syracuse. (That's the poster you see at left.) Classic material with a sparkling score is perfect for Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Theatre Arts and its talented students, and also perfect for IWU Associate Professor Scott Susong, who directs the production opening November 15 at the Jerome Mirza Theatre inside MacPherson Hall. Susong's cast includes Conor Finnerty-Esmonde and Tim Foszcz as the two Antipholi, Eli Miller and Kenny Tran as their identical twin servants, both named Dromio, Jackie Salgado as Adriana, who is married to the Antipholus from Ephesus but mistakes his twin bro for her husband, and Yuka Sekine as her sister, Luciana. The Boys from Syracuse will play at IWU for six performances between the 15th and the 20th. For more information or to reserve tickets, contact the School of Theatre Arts box office at 309-556-3232.

It's Way Past Time for October News

It's a busy month on local stages and screens and I'm already a few steps behind. I took a trip to the Stratford Festival in Canada, and it was wonderful, but it means I wasn't here to put together all these bits and bobs on October 1. I hope you can all handle not finding out till October 5. Let's get this October party started, shall we?

I'm a little late getting the news out about the Illinois Wesleyan production of Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone, which opened earlier tonight in the Jerome Mirza Theatre in McPherson Hall. Dead Man's Cell Phone begins when a woman in a coffee shop hears a ringing phone that just won't stop, sending her off in search of answers about the person who owned the phone. She finds a lot more questions, which turns out to be a good thing for all of us in this inventive, unsettling play about love, life and technology. Dead Man's Cell Phone plays October 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 at 8 pm and October 9 at 2 pm. 

The documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, the Touring Years, called "Ron Howard's vibrant, joyous musical journey with The Beatles," is on screen at Champaign's Art Theater Co-op tomorrow and Thursday. This film takes a look behind the scenes at the phenomenon that was The Beatles as they played in venues from Liverpool's Cavern Club in their earliest years to San Francisco's Candlestick Park in 1966. The Art Theater is offering The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, the Touring Years at 7 pm on October 5 and 4 pm on October 6. For more information or to get a look at the film's trailer, click here.

Eureka College Theatre looks to Jordan Harrison's 2014 play The Grown-Up, a piece I saw at the Humana Festival of New American Plays, for its October entry, with performances October 6 through 15 at Pritchard Theatre. The Grown-Up is an adventurous romp somewhere between Alice and her Lookingglass and Peter Pan and his pirates. In this instance, the child in search of adventure is a boy named Kai who runs off to see where a magic crystal doorknob takes him. As Kai bends time and imagination, he runs into a salty old seafarer, his sister and maybe even his own future as a grown-up. For Eureka College, Cody Wirth plays Kai, with Garrison Green, Vic Griffith, Haley Joseph and Kendall Katz along on his journey.

The Normal Theater picks up weeks 3 and 4 of its Six Week Film School, focusing on Murder My Sweet on October 12 and The Postman Always Rings Twice on October 26. They're both deadly, delicious mystery movies, with the first following PI Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) on a search for the double-crossing girlfriend of a mug named Moose Malloy and the second looking into the seamy private lives of an unhappy wife (Lana Turner) and the drifter (John Garfield) she gets to do her dirty work. Both films begin at 7 pm on their respective Wednesdays and they will be followed by a discussion led by ISU professor William McBride. For all the details, click here.

You get a second chance to see Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, the Anne Washburn play that riffs on The Simpsons as a cultural icon and possibly a religious text in our dystopic future, when it begins at the University of Illinois October 13. Lisa Gaye Dixon directs this Illinois Theatre production in performance through October 23. Mr. Burns and friends will play in the Colwell Playhouse, but you can also see Nathan Alan Davis's Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea, which began last week, through October 14, and Anna Ziegler's take on The Minotaur beginning October 27, both in the Studio Theatre.

Waiora continues at Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts through October 9, while the second and third shows of the ISU season -- two short plays performed together in one evening of theater -- open October 21 in Westhoff Theatre. Those short plays are The Coffee Bar and The Walls, with The Coffee Bar hailing from Egypt and The Walls from Argentina. They are both provocative and political, with plenty to say on issues of privilege, freedom, repression and art. Janet Wilson directs The Coffee Bar with a cast that includes Gina Cleveland, Daija Nealy and Simran Sachdev. Bruce Burningham directs The Walls; his cast includes Daniel Balsamo, Daniel Esquivel and Ryan Groves.

Entering the Halloween entertainment sweeptstakes, the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts is offering the silent film version of The Phantom of the Opera, played with live organ accompaniment just like it would've been back in 1925, at 7 pm on October 25. Lon Chaney (the original, not Lon Chaney, Jr.) may've been silent, but he set the bar high for all the Phantoms who followed with his portrait of a sad, swirling Gothic monster. As Roger Ebert put it, "[T]he Phantom is invested by the intense and inventive Lon Chaney with a horror and poignancy that is almost entirely created with body language." All it takes is one hand gesture to convey "great weary sadness." And it's that "great weary sadness" that makes his a Phantom to remember.

October 27 to 29 finds the return of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival's annual ShakesFEAR event, combining some of Shakespeare's scary characters with the haunted house concept, except in this case it's the grounds around Ewing Manor getting haunted. Tours leave every ten minutes between 7 and 9:30 pm and last approximately 25 minutes. If you want to get tickets ahead, check out this page for all the information.

As always, I will add individual pieces on other shows and events I find out about in the meantime.

Hang on Tight -- October's Getting Scary!

October is brimming over with Things to Do, ranging from a little musical comedy and a big announcement to a whole lot of drama.

This first weekend in October is a big one for local theater, with events that include Fences, the August Wilson play about a garbage collector who once dreamed of becoming a major league baseball player, opening in Westhoff Theatre at Illinois State University, Little Shop of Horrors and its big green carnivorous plant from Outer Space at Eureka College Theatre unfurling its leaves, and eight characters in the annual McLean County History Museum/Evergreen Cemetery Walk showcasing local history taking their places grave-side in Bloomington. Over in Champaign, Parkland College presents Jennifer Haley's video-game-based scary story Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom tonight through October 10, while the Station Theatre offers Will Eno's The Open House, a quirky and strange dysfunctional family drama, from tonight through the 17th.

Fences is one of Wilson's "Century Cycle," with a play devoted to each decade of African-American life in the 20th century. This one takes place in the 1950s; its original Broadway production earned four Tony Awards, including Best Play, Best Director for Lloyd Richards, Best Actor for James Earl Jones and Best Featured Actress for Mary Alice. Like James Earl Jones and Mary Alice before them, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis won Tony Awards in the 2010 Broadway revival for their performances as Troy Maxson, a garbage man with thwarted dreams, and Rose, his second wife. In a related August Wilson note, Denzel Washington recently announced his intention to produce filmed versions of all ten plays in the "Century Cycle" for HBO, with Fences -- which Washington will direct, produce and star in -- up first. Viola Davis will be there for Fences, as well.

ISU's Fences is directed by Duane Boutté, with a cast that includes Hannaniah Wiggins as Troy, Marixa Ford as Rose, Emmanuel Jackson as their son Cory, Gregory Hicks as Troy's younger brother Gabriel, Bryson Thomas as Lyons, Troy's son from a previous marriage, Timothy Jefferson as his friend Bono and Janiya Franklin as Raynell, a late addition to the family. Performances are scheduled for October 2 to 4 and 6 to 10. For ticket information, click here.

Illinois Wesleyan enters the fall theatrical fray with the Midwest premiere of Blown Youth, a play that serves as playwright Dipika Guha's response to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Guha muses, "It was borne out of my desire to challenge the notion that Hamlet (the character) is the embodiment of human consciousness when he is, in fact, a man. Where Hamlet’s madness smacks of genius, would a woman in his shoes be seen as just as stunningly witty and seductive -- or just a pain in the ass hysteric?" IWU's production of Blown Youth is directed by Nancy Loitz and opens with a performance at 8 pm on October 6. Call 309-556-3232 to reach the box office.

October 6 is also the date for the big announcement of what the Illinois Shakespeare Festival has planned for next summer. They promise a "spectactular" season coming up in 2016, but you'll have to wait till after the 6th to find out exactly what that entails.

The theatre program at University of Illinois kicks off its fall season with Michael Gene Sullivan's 2006 adaptation of George Orwell's 1984 opening October 15 in Colwell Playhouse at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Tom Mitchell directs this stage version of the classic science fiction novel that introduced concepts like "Big Brother," "doublespeak" and "thought crimes" to the lexicon. Click here for more information.  

You can also catch a free concert version of the musical Dreamgirls at Krannert Center presented by the Banks, Bridgewater, Lewis Fine Arts Academy on Sunday, October 18th. Local C-U singers Noah Brown, Crofton Coleman, Sherrika Ellison, Tyra Nesbitt and Erica Smith will light up the Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen score, which features big pop hits like "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," "One Night Only" and "I Am Changing."

Whose Live Anyway? with a cast that includes Jeff B. Davis, Greg Proops and Ryan Stiles, as well as Nashville heartthrob Charles "Chip" Esten, returns to the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts on October 17 for one performance only at 7:30 pm.

On October 23, Illinois State University's School of Theatre and Dance is back with Dale Wasserman's stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, directed by Lori Adams for the Center for the Performing Arts. Cuckoo's Nest was an award-winning (and frequently banned) book written by Ken Kesey before it became a play, and an award-winning movie directed by Milos Forman afterwards. The role of rebellious mental patient Randle McMurphy, played by Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson on stage and on film, will be played by Kyle Fitzgerald for ISU, with Kate Vargulich as his nemesis Nurse Ratched, and Josh Pennington and Matt Frederick as fellow inmates. I haven't seen an image for the ISU production, so that is Ken Kesey's book cover you see here.

Walking With My Ancestors, Ama Oforiwaa Aduonum's powerful examination of the ghosts of slavery as expressed in song, dance and words, returns to New Route Theatre, again directed by Kim Pereira, for one night only on October 23. This time, Walking With will be presented at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington at 7:30 pm on the 23rd. Tickets are available in advance by e-mailing New Route at New.Route.Theatre@gmail.com or at the door on a first come/first served basis for a suggested donation of $10.

And that's what I have for you to pencil into your calendars right now. Stay tuned for updates as I get them!

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS FRANK SPARROW? Find Out at IWU Feb 17-22

Let's get the title out of the way right off the top... Where in the World Is Frank Sparrow? is both a dramatic question and the title of a 2012 play by an Australian playwright named Angela Betzien. Frank Sparrow was commissioned for an Irish theater, the Graffiti Theatre Company in Cork, Ireland.

Betzien is frequently referred to as "Australia's foremost writer for teenage audiences" in press materials for Frank Sparrow. She is a founding member of an independent theater company called Real TV, and her plays have been performed at Belvoir Theatre in Sydney, the Sydney Opera House, Melbourne Theater Company, Cortile Theater im Hof in Italy, Dschungel Wien Theaterhaus in Austria, and the ASSITEJ world congress for children’s theatre.

Director Thomas Quinn will bring Betzien's work to the Illinois Wesleyan School of Theatre Arts with Where in the World Is Frank Sparrow?, which sends a young hero on a journey through mean streets and a mythic underworld. So far, it sounds a bit like Naomi Iizuka's Anon(ymous) and Polaroid Stories put together, but IWU is adding puppetry to the mix to create a very different mood.

Milwaukee artist Brandon Kirkham has created the "elaborate" puppets for this event and he also conducted a puppetry workshop with the cast and crew. To give the puppets movement, IWU Associate Professor Jean MacFarland Kerr worked with the cast on choreography, with her colleague in costume design, Marcia McDonald, adding that visual element to the tableau.

Wesleyan's production will feature a cast of eighteen students led by sophomore Kenny Tran as Frank. Others in the cast include seniors Elizabeth Albers, Nick Castellanos, Casey Cudmore, Jenia Head and Debra Madans, juniors Julia Cicchino, Bucky Emmerling, Nick Giambrone, Chris Long, Carlos Medina Maldonado, Caitlin McManus and Alec Sutton, and sophomores Dean Carlson, Elizabeth Ferris, Trev Gabel, Yuka Sekine, and Kristin Solodar.

Where in the World Is Frank Sparrow? opens with an 8 o'clock performance on Tuesday, February 17, followed by evening shows at 8 pm on the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st, and a matinee at 2 pm on Sunday the 22nd.

For ticket information, visit IWU's season box office page or call 309-556-3232.

Heartland Welcomes IWU WEEKEND WITH DEANNA JENT

Heartland Theatre's production of Deanna Jent's Falling continues this week, with performances at 7:30 pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and a 2 pm matinee on Sunday. Although it's standard operating procedure for Heartland to do three weekends of performances, Falling stands out for Heartland in several ways.

For one, this production features the same director (Lori Adams) and scenic designer (John C. Stark) as the productions in St. Louis (the play premiered at the Mustard Seed Theatre) and New York City (off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre).

For another, there are short talkbacks -- post-scripts -- after almost every performance, allowing audience members a chance to hear more about how families and society deal with autism, since that is the challenge for the family in Falling, and to allow a backstage look at how director Adams, scenic designer Stark and the cast and crew have brought Falling to life in Bloomington-Normal. The complete schedule of post-script topics and speakers is available here.

Deanna Jent

But the biggest news about Falling this weekend is that playwright Deanna Jent, an alumna of Illinois Wesleyan University who now lives in St. Louis, will be in town for a series of events grouped under the heading IWU WEEKEND WITH DEANNA JENT. Jent's visit has been made possible by Illinois Wesleyan University and Provost Jonathan Green.

As the mother of an autistic child, Jent balances her time with a thriving theatre career. She is artistic director of the Mustard Seed Theatre, a professor at Fontbonne University and also a working director and playwright. Jent acted as the commencement speaker at last spring's IWU graduation ceremony, when her son graduated, and she wrote a piece for the IWU Magazine in 2013 about some of her Falling experiences. 

On campus, Jent will speak to theater and psychology students about Falling and her life and career, and at Heartland, she will be in the audience for the Saturday night and Sunday afternoon performances of her play on November 15 and 16. She will also be present after the show on both Saturday and Sunday to speak to audiences and take questions. And she will be there on Sunday evening for a reading of her new play, Blood Lines, which takes place in a group home for adult autistic women. That reading will feature actresses from Illinois State University, Illinois Wesleyan University and from Heartland's pool of actors. Actors Olivia Candocia (ISU), Alexa Eldridge (IWU), Debra Madans (IWU), Melissa James Shrader (Heartland) and Jaimie Taylor (ISU) will take part under the director of Dr. John Ficca, Emeritus Professor from the IWU School of Theatre Arts.

The talkback sessions with Deanna Jent will follow the performances, with the Saturday night discussion beginning at approximately 8:50 pm and the Sunday session starting at about 3:20 pm. The Sunday night reading of Blood Lines will begin at 7:30 pm. Both post-show discussions and the reading of Blood Lines will take place at Heartland Theatre, and all three are free and open to the public.

For Heartland Theatre reservation information, click here. To read more about Deanna Jent and Falling, you will definitely want to check out this essay, written by Jent in 2013.

Catch HAY FEVER This Week at IWU

Achoo! I don't recall anyone sneezing in Noel Coward's Hay Fever, although it would be in character if it were the biggest, most over-the-top sneeze ever. Hay Fever, which first played in London in 1925, is one of those blithe and witty comedies about crazy theatrical people who pull a few unsuspecting "normal" people (i.e., not theatre people) into their orbit and the hijinks that ensue when they do. It's sort of The Royal Family by way of Private Lives.

This one involves Judith Bliss, grande dame of the English stage, and her husband, David, a novelist, who decide to spend a weekend at their country home, with their equally flaky children, Simon and Sorel, in tow. Each of them has asked along a potential romantic partner, but once their guests are there, the Blisses pull all sorts of parlor games and silly tricks that baffle the newcomers. There are misunderstandings when flowery dialogue from one of Judith's hit shows is inserted into real conversations, feigned mad passion, emotional outbursts and all sorts of tempests in teapots. The Blisses are charming, eccentric and self-indulgent, with a sort of 1920s "tennis, anyone?" elegance along with their madcap antics.

Hay Fever may not be revived as often as Private Lives or Blithe Spirit, but it has enjoyed four Broadway productions since it opened in 1925 with Laura Hope Crews (Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind) as Judith Bliss and multiple British productions in London and the provinces. Over the years, actresses as different as Shirley Booth, Constance Collier, Judi Dench, Lindsay Duncan, Edith Evans, Rosemary Harris and Diana Rigg have all played Judith, while Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and Sam Waterston have done Simon, and Maggie Smith has played both Myra and Jackie, the female guests in the party.

Illinois Wesleyan professor Nancy Loitz directs the McPherson Theatre production of Hay Fever that opens tomorrow, with Kate Fitzgerald as Judith, Ian Scarlato as David, Abby Dryden and Will Henke as Sorel and Simon, Joey Chu, Jenna Haimes, Forrest Loeffler and Priscilla Moy as the confused guests who wander into the Bliss household, and Alexa Eldridge as the family housekeeper. Debra Madans completes the cast as an understudy.

IWU's production begins Tuesday November 19 and continues through Saturday November 23, with performances at 8 pm each night. There will also be a Sunday matinee at 2 pm on the 24th. For ticket information, you can click here for the box office site, visit the the School of Theatre Arts Facebook page, or call the box office directly at 309-556-3232.

IWU's TREASURE Brings History Alive (Including Its Seamy Underbelly)

Tim Slover's Treasure, in performance through Saturday at Illinois Wesleyan University's E. Melba Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre, illustrates exactly why history matters. It may seem like dusty data from crumbling pages, but the issues, the choices, the drama is oh-so-very current as it unfolds.

Treasure is all about Alexander Hamilton, a familiar name from the early days of the United States of America, from the time when a new nation was finding its way and forging a path for its future. Who would decide what America would be? Would it be Federalists like Hamilton who wanted a strong central government based on a national bank and national debt, strong manufacturing and tariffs? Or Jeffersonians, who wanted power to remain in the South with its rural and plantation-based economy? In the play, Hamilton tells us that his primary concern is money, as the first Secretary of the Treasury in American history, as well as someone who himself came from nothing but traded on his intelligence and insight to carve out a position at the top of the heap in American politics.

Hamilton wants opportunity for everyone through manufacturing, so that hard work and brain power will mean more than family name or inherited wealth.

North vs. South, Industrialists vs. Landowners, Bootstraps vs. Inheritance, National power vs. State's Rights, the 1% vs. the 99%... It couldn't be more current, could it? And while the arguments about who is right and who is wrong to lead America may form the crux of the debate, what turns everything upside-down is not political ideals, but personal weakness. Like so many other politicians, Hamilton thought his personal life -- and marital infidelity -- couldn't touch his political reputation. And he was very, very wrong.

Treasure works as a piece of dramatic literature because Slover was careful to build the tension and to weave the larger issues into Hamilton's personal story. Director Michael Cotey gives his young cast -- three sophomores, a junior and two seniors in Illinois Wesleyan's School of Theatre Arts -- the tools to home in on the story, to communicate the complicated theories of wealth and governance by focusing on the characters and their conflict instead. Treasure is staged in the round inside the Kirkpatrick Lab Theatre, a tricky proposition in any space, but here it serves to keep the action right in front of you.

Zachery Wagner has the profile for Hamilton, a handsome man as you can tell from your ten-dollar bills, and he also does well with the hard intelligence that bound Hamilton to his principles even as it blinded him to his own failings. He is well-matched by Elizabeth Albers as Betsy Hamilton, his loyal wife, who has spirit and a mind of her own. When push comes to shove and tempers fly inside the Hamilton marriage, Wagner and Albers do their best work.

On the political side of the equation, Elliott Plowman is an audience favorite as Frederick Muhlenberg, the Lutheran pastor who was the first Speaker of the House of Representatives and someone who found himself on both sides of the Congressional conflict, here offered for comic relief,  and Steven Czajkowski is a little scary as future president James Monroe, the villain of the piece, who is willing to lie, cheat and manipulate muckrakers to get what he wants, which is keeping all the nation's wealth in the hands of a privileged few.

The other villains are more low-rent, with Nick Giambrone as a thug named James Reynolds who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty, and Anna Sciaccotta as his wife, Maria, who looks sweet and pitiful, but plays both sides of the game extremely well. Playing the bait in a blackmail trap, Sciaccotta negotiates the turns in Maria's motives nicely.

Sydney Achler's scenic design is simple -- a rug or two, a desk, a chair -- but effective, and Laura Gisondi's lighting design enhances the mood and shifts scenes appropriately.

I hope today's students who know nothing of Colonial America, who think the 21st Century Tea Party and state's rights demagogues either sprang up out of nowhere or reflect the beliefs of our Founding Fathers, will pay attention to what's really happening underneath the sex scandal in Treasure, where ambition, greed, carelessness, righteousness, honor, betrayal and potential (the words in Cotey's director's note) and a fight for America's future lie.

TREASURE
By Tim Slover

E. Melba Johnson Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre
Illinois Wesleyan University

Director: Michael Cotey
Scenic Designer: Sydney Achler
Costume Designers: Kelsey VonderHaar
Lighting Designer: Laura Gisondi
Sound Designer: Michael Cotey

Cast: Zachery Wagner, Elizabeth Albers, Elliott Plowman, Nick Giambrone, Anna Sciaccotta and Steven Czajkowski.

Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes including one 15-minute intermission

Remaining performances: November 1 and 2 at 8 pm

For reservation information, click here.

Alexander Hamilton Exposed in TREASURE at IWU, Opening Tomorrow

What do you know about Alexander Hamilton? Founding father, on the ten-dollar bill, mortally wounded in a duel with Aaron Burr... That's about all I know, although the ten-dollar bill thing reminds me that he was the first Secretary of the Treasury in the new United States and created the foundation for the nation's entire financial system.

Tim Slover's play Treasure, opening on Halloween night at Illinois Wesleyan's E. Melba Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre, takes a more personal look at Alexander Hamilton, focusing on his marriage and the political ambition -- as well as the sex scandal -- that almost ruined it.

In the IWU press release for the show, guest director Michael Cotey compares Hamilton to the likes of President Bill Clinton, saying, “Treasure dramatizes the United States’ first political sex scandal... Our history is full of ambitious politicians who have tested the fates with their own indiscretions.”

And it wasn't just that Hamilton had a fling while he was married and while he was at the height of his political power under George Washington. Hamilton had the bad fortune -- or bad taste -- to pick one Maria Reynolds, who had been married to a ne'er-do-well named James Reynolds since she was 16, as the partner in his transgression. Hamilton's and Mrs. Reynolds' sex-on-the-side arrangement lasted some three years, and during most of that time, her husband was blackmailing Hamilton, threatening to expose the affair. If you watch a lot of movies or television shows about con artists, you might recognize this sort of thing as a long form of the badger game.

Reynolds was also involved in other nefarious schemes, including counterfeiting and a scam involving speculation on unpaid wages to veterans. He used his leverage over Hamilton to keep himself out of trouble for those offenses, but some of the Secretary of the Treasury's political rivals found out, anyway, and Hamilton was accused of being a participant in the veterans' wages scheme. Hamilton eventually admitted his relationship with Maria Reynolds and published a very long defense with a very long title -- Observations on Certain Documents contained in Nos. V. and VI. of The History of the United States for the Year 1796, in which the Charge of Speculation against Alexander Hamilton, late Secretary of the Treasury, is fully refuted -- with all kinds of detail about his illicit love affair.

That scandal put all kinds of pressure on Elizabeth Hamilton, his wife, and severely damaged Hamilton's reputation on all fronts. It also created a dandy little story about how the world worked behind the scenes in the early days of American politics, one which playwright Tim Slover digs into in Treasure.

For IWU, Zach Wagner will portray Alexander Hamilton, with Elizabeth Albers as Elizabeth "Betsy" Hamilton, and Anna Sciaccotta as Maria Reynolds, the "other woman." Others in the cast include Nick Giambrone as James Reynolds, Steven Czajkowski as James Monroe, and Elliott Plowman as Reverend Frederick Muhlenberg, the first Speaker of the House.

Director Michael Cotey comes to Illinois Wesleyan from Milwaukee, where he was Founding Artistic Director of Youngblood Theatre Company. Cotey's directing credits include The Comedy of Errors at last summer's Illinois Shakespeare Festival, and he also worked as an actor at the ISF in The Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus.

For ticket information, click here or call 309-556-3232 for the IWU School of Theatre Arts Box Office.