Opening Tomorrow: SEND THE LIGHT at ISU's Westhoff Theatre

An all-new, all-electric version of Send the Light, an original musical about bringing electrical power to rural communities with a script by Don Shandrow and music and lyrics by Phil Shaw, opens tomorrow night at Illinois State University's Westhoff Theatre. Performances begin at 7:30 pm on October 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25 and 26, with a 2 pm matinee on October 19.

This is how the show is being billed for this ISU production:

A world premiere script with a rural setting in the American heartland of 1936. The action of the play concerns the controversy surrounding the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) and its impact on farm communities. Many groups, especially utility companies, opposed the federal government's involvement in developing and distributing electric power. Onstage, conflicts arise within families and communities as they argue the pros and cons of "sending the light" to rural farms. This play is a community outreach project with Cornbelt Energy.

Associate Professor Connie de Veer and Assistant Michael J. Vetere III are co-directing Send the Light, with a cast that mixes community members like Clark Abraham and Susan Palmer with ISU actors like Kate Klemchuck, Andrew Rogalny and Levi Ellis. For the complete cast list, click here.

You can read more about Don Shandrow and the story behind Send the Light at ISU's Illinois State Stories, see the production's Facebook page here, or get ticket information here or here. Sara Ilene Shifflet has also uploaded behind-the-scenes videos about Send the Light to Youtube, and you can choose from lighting design information from David Warfel and some of the cast (seen above), the scoop on scenic design from designer Megan Lane, or an "official trailer" for the show.

What's Up in October?

It's October 1. It's the 123rd anniversary of the designation of Yosemite as a National Park. But October 1 is also the day the Republicans in Congress decided to shut down the government, which means you can't see Yosemite Park at the moment. Happy birthday, Yosemite! Hope you survive till Congress decides to wake up and smell some sanity!

In the meantime, while the Theatre of the Absurd rages on in Washington (apologies to Absurdists everywhere for using their label this way) you do have other options to take your mind off that particular melodrama. There are all kinds of new television shows premiering and all kinds of old shows returning. If you are finished mourning the end of Breaking Bad, you can try Sleepy Hollow or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, the two early success stories (in terms of ratings, anyway) of the new fall season, or tune in to see what in the world Olivia Pope's dad is up to when Scandal returns on Thursday, October 3. If only Olivia could knock some sense into the House of Representatives...

If you'd like to venture out of the house, you can try Illinois State University's production of Spring Awakening, the angst-rock Broadway musical about kids, repression and raging hormones in turn-of-the-century Germany, which continues through October 5 at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts. Matthew Scott Campbell directs a cast led by Carlos Kmet, Colin Lawrence and Gloria Petrelli.

Next up at ISU is Glyn Maxwell's The Forever Waltz, a modern verse play inspired by the Eurydice and Orpheus story from Greek mythology. MFA candidate Leah Cassella directs Maxwell's play, called "surreal, electrifying and poetic" when it played off-Broadway, in ISU's Centennial West 207 space. Cassella's cast features Eddie Curley as a mysterious guitar-playing guide to the world of memory, Lizzy Haberstroh as Evie, the beautiful woman who died on her wedding day, and Martin Hanna as Mobile, who can't remember how he got where he is or what he's looking for. Performances of The Forever Waltz are scheduled for October 3-5 and 8-12 at CW 207. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster or by calling the ISU CPA box office at 309-438-2535.

Circus performer Harry Green

The McLean County Museum of History, Illinois Voices Theatre and Bloomington's historic Evergreen Cemetery, take a look back at another crew of Bloomington-Normal citizens from the past with the annual Discovery Walk. This year's folks include a pair of daring young men who plied their trade on the flying trapeze, a Red Cross nurse from World War I who became a landscape architect, a man who held many jobs and fought discrimination in all of them, an immigrant woman who made trousers for the troops during the Civil War, a sheriff, a man who loved a good parade, and a former president of the local NAACP. You can choose to take this walking tour through Bloomington history at 11 am or 2 pm on Saturday or Sunday, October 5, 6, 12 or 13, with tickets for sale at the Museum, Evergreen Cemetery, the Garlic Press or Casey's Garden Shop. And it all happens at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery.

A revue called The Best of the Second City, "celebrating over 50 years of cutting-edge satire," shows up at the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts for one performance only on October 5, promising the Second City brand of irreverent sketches, songs and improv. Will you see tomorrow's Steve Carrell, Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bill Murray, Amy Poehler or Martin Short? Maybe! They all got their start at a Second City somewhere.

The musical A Class Act takes the stage at Illinois Wesleyan University's McPherson Theatre from October 8 to 13, opening the fall season for IWU's School of Theatre Arts. The musical also lends its name to IWU's entire 2013 Homecoming, which is organized around the theme "It's a class act." Associate Professor Jean MacFarland Kerr directs and choreographs the show, which is a musical look at the life and career of composer Edward Kleban, whose songs form the score. "Fourteen years after his death, one of the theater's unsung champions finally got the recognition he always deserved in this vibrant musical about musicals," says the Rodgers and Hammerstein Company.

ISU's School of Theatre and Dance offers a third show in October with Send the Light, a collaboration among Don Shandrow and Phil Shaw, who created the show, co-directors Connie de Veer and Michael Vetere from ISU's theatre faculty, and a cast that includes actors from the Bloomington-Normal area as well as from the university. Look for area actors Clark Abraham, Leola Bellamy, Holly Klass, Wes Melton, Susan Palmer, George Peterson-Karlan and Terri Ryburn on stage alongside ISU students like Molly Briggs, Levi Ellis, Kate Klemchuk, Andrew Rogalny and David Zallis, all there to tell the story of what happened when electrification came to rural communities in the 1930s. It sounds like a no-brainer to let regular people get electricity right in their homes, but there was a major controversy over the intrusion of the federal government on the local level. The more things change... Read more about Send the Light here or here. Performances will take place in ISU's Westhoff Theatre from October 17 to 19 and 22 to 26, and tickets are available from the CPA box office at 309-438-2535.

The Champaign-Urbana Theatre Company, also known as the CUTC, takes on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, that appealing, appalling musical about two Roman slaves, their hen-pecked master, the virgin next door, a house of ill repute and a hero named Hero. There's also a soldier named Miles Gloriosus and a pimp named Marcus Lykus. Larry Gelbart and Burt Shrevelove wrote the book, which mixes the classic farce of Plautus with comedy right out of old vaudeville, while Stephen Sondheim wrote the score. There's "Comedy Tonight!" as well as "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid," and "I'm Calm," sung by Hysterium, who is anything but calm. For the CUTC, John Tilford will play Pseudolus, the slave who longs for freedom, a role famously filled in the past by Zero Mostel, Nathan Lane and Whoopi Goldberg. Forum is directed by Matt Fear and plays October 17 to 20 at Champaign's Parkland Theatre.

IWU alum Kate Tombaugh

Kate Tombaugh, a powerhouse vocalist who starred in Annie Get Your Gun a few years ago, comes back to Prairie Fire for a one-woman show called It Just Takes One from October 11-13 and 18-20 at Fellowship Hall in the First Christian Church on West Jefferson Street in Bloomington. Tombaugh will sing about the trials and tribulations of dating with a program suitable for "all ages and stages of romancers."

On October 26 and 27, Community Players will hold auditions for It's a Wonderful Life, a stage radio-play adaptation of the Jimmy Stewart movie, all about a small-town guy who thinks about ending it all until he gets a visit from an angel who shows him how much his life has meant to everyone around him. Director Sally Parry will be looking for actors who can play multiple roles for performances scheduled for December 12 to 15.

And just in time for Halloween festivities, the Normal Theater will offer two not-that-scary films with spooky overtones. First up is The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, a 1947 movie starring Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney, about a widow who starts to get ghostly visitations from a handsome sea captain, and then Mel Brooks' horror movie spoof Young Frankenstein, with Gene Wilder as the descendant of the Dr. Frankenstein (it's pronounced Fronk-un-steen, thank you very much) who created the monster. Peter Boyle is hilarious as the new monster, who does a dandy tap routine to "Putting on the Ritz." Mrs. Muir hits the screen on October 24 and 25, while Young Frankenstein plays on the 26th and 27th.

IWU finishes up October with Treasure by Tim Slover, a play about politics, sex and blackmail in our nation's capital. This time it's Alexander Hamilton in hot water. Hey, he may've stolen money from soldiers, but he didn't shut down the entire government like a spoiled baby. Treasure is directed by guest artist Michael Cotey, who also directed The Comedy of Errors for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival last summer, and will continue into early November at the E. Melba Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre.

That's not nearly all of what's happening in October, but I've tried to cover some of the highlights, anyway. Stay tuned for more info on your many and varied entertainment options...

ISU Theatre and Dance Ready to Spring Forward into 2013-14

Illinois State University's School of Theatre and Dance has announced the 2013-14 season. That means we now know what shows will be keeping ISU's directors, designers and actors busy from next fall through spring 2014.

First on the list is the angst-rock musical Spring Awakening, with music composed by Duncan Sheik and book and lyrics by Steven Sater, scheduled for performances in ISU's Center for the Performing Arts. The musical is based on an 1891 play by German author Frank Wedekind which ISU produced as part of the 2007-08 season. The Sheik/Sater musical stays fairly close to Wedekind's plot, about the dangers looming for German turn-of-the-century teenagers with raging hormones whose parents purposely keep them ignorant about sex, sexuality, and the consequences of both. Glee star Lea Michele got her big break in the Off-Broadway and Broadway productions of the show in 2006, while her costars Jonathan Groff (also in Glee and then Boss as well as numerous stage roles) and John Gallagher, Jr. (recently of The Newsroom on HBO) took home two of the show's eight Tony Awards. For ISU, MFA director Matthew Scott Campbell will take the reins of Spring Awakening.

Dancing at Lughnasa at the Old Vic

Also slated for the CPA is Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, a memory play about five Irish sisters who live in the fictional town of Ballybeg in 1936. Our narrator, the son of one of the sisters, remembers a summer when he was seven, when each of the sisters yearned for something more, even though it would ultimately end in dashed dreams for each of them. Dancing at Lughnasa has been well performed regionally and since it opened at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1990, with a Broadway run and numerous Irish and English productions, including a 2009 London production with real-life sisters Niamh, Sinéad and Sorcha Cusack. There was even a movie version starring Meryl Streep as oldest sister Kate in 1998. Fresh off her Off-Broadway triumph with Falling, Lori Adams, ISU's Head of Acting, will direct.

The only fall show in Westhoff Theatre will be Send the Light, a docudrama about the coming of electricity to the countryside, created by Bloomington-Normal resident (and ISU alum) Don Shandow, with songs by another Bloomington-Normalite (and ISU alum) Phil Shaw, and incidental music by David Berchtold. Shandrow, who is also the artistic director at New Route Theatre here in town, previously produced Send the Light in 2007 and again in 2011, with a cast that included local actors like Rhys Lovell and Irene Taylor. I believe it first played at the McLean County Museum of History, and then the Eaton Gallery as part of New Route's One Shot Deal series. This time it will find itself inside the black box known as Westhoff Theatre, directed by ISU faculty Connie de Veer and Michael Vetere.

Glyn Maxwell's The Forever Waltz, a contemporary verse play that retells the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, will be the first show of the season in Centennial West 207. Maxwell is a British poet and playwright whose plays Wolfpit (written in iambic pentameter) and Broken Journey played at New York City's Phoenix Theatre Ensemble. MFA director Leah Cassella will direct The Forever Waltz, which Talkin' Broadway reviewer Lindsey Wilson called "surreal, electrifying and poetic" as well as "more precarious than any murder mystery, more intelligent than any run-of-the-mill updated myth, and certainly more twisted and intriguing than any show I have seen in quite some time."

Centennial West 207 will also house the second half of Tony Kushner's "Gay Fantasia on National Themes," also known as Angels in America Part II: Perestroika, one of the best plays of all time. Angels in America won Kushner a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two Tony Awards for Best Play (for its two separate pieces), and it hit No. 7 on the American Theatre Critics Association list of "most significant" plays of the 20th Century. And it won another boatload of prizes -- Emmy Awards this time -- when it was made into a stunning 2003 HBO miniseries directed by Mike Nichols and starring (wait for it) Meryl Streep, along with Al Pacino, Justin Kirk, Mary Louise Parker, Emma Thompson, Ben Shenkman, Patrick Wilson and original Broadway star Jeffrey Wright.

The lovely DVD cover of the HBO miniseries

Angels in America is an epic tale, set in the 1980s, concerning the AIDS plague, Mormons, Jews, human pustule and power broker Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, a drag queen turned night nurse, too much valium, the world's oldest living Bolshevik, and, of course, angels. Both parts of Angels in America have recently been revived, with critically acclaimed productions at New York's Signature Theatre (starring Star Trek's Zachary Quinto and Smash's Christian Bohrle) and Chicago's Court Theatre. I've seen both pieces of Angels in a small black box theatre -- Steven M. Keen directed them both at Urbana's Station Theatre some years ago -- and they worked beautifully. The intimacy of the setting provided challenges for Kushner's magical effects but also brought the sweetness and the pain in the story up close and personal. So we'll see what MFA director David Ian Lee does with his Perestroika in CW 207.

Angels in CW 207 and then... Fairies in the Center for the Performing Arts! ISU professor (and stage movement guru) Paul Dennhardt will direct Benjamin Britten's opera version of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the beginning of 2014. Britten composed the music for this Midsummer, while Peter Pears wrote the libretto based on Shakespeare's play. Although there was a very well-regarded production of Midsummer the Opera at Chicago's Lyric Opera in 2010 (seen above), I am afraid I've never seen it. I did see (and hear) bits of Britten's Noye's Fludde in the movie Moonrise Kingdom, however, and that was charming and wonderful. This season's Midsummer (the play) should wet your whistle for the opera next year.

So who is the Mrs. Packard in Emily Mann's Mrs. Packard, scheduled for the CPA after Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream? According to materials at New Jersey's McCarter Theatre, where Mrs. Packard premiered in 2007, she was a real person sent into an insane asylum by her husband in Illinois in 1861. "Based on actual historical events, Emily Mann, author of Having Our Say, Execution of Justice, and many other acclaimed plays, creates a gripping and ultimately triumphant account of one woman's determination to right a system gone terribly wrong." This one will be directed by MFA director Vanessa Stalling, who was at the helm of The Maids last semester.

Director Leah Cassela will tackle Diana Son's Stop Kiss, an Off-Broadway hit in 1998 that explores the relationship between two women, Callie and Sara, who are attacked and beaten when they kiss on the street in New York City. Callie walks away with minor injuries, but Sara is more seriously hurt, causing repercussions that fuel the rest of the play. In an interview with Asian Week, Son said, "In the play, Callie and Sara are having their own private interaction when somebody in public is stopping them and saying, 'I have an opinion about you, I’m going to identify you.' That’s an experience I’ve had because of my ethnicity and gender, and certainly, one I’ve had because of my perceived sexuality. One day, my husband and I were walking on the street, and because I have short hair and I had on a suede jacket and jeans, when we stopped to kiss, a guy called us 'faggots.' So I can’t say that only because I am Korean American do I know what this is like; I know it from many points of view." Stop Kiss will play in Westhoff Theatre in 2014.

ISU's seasons always include Shakespeare, but the choice for 2014 will be the lesser-known Pericles, which was probably a joint effort between Will S. and a contemporary named George Wilkins. It's got all kinds of maritime mishaps, with pirates and storms and shipwrecks and a missing child named Marina (because she was born at sea). I've enjoyed Pericles both times it's appeared at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival in recent memory, and I look forward to seeing what David Ian Lee does with it in Westhoff Theatre.

And finishing up the season will be The Exonerated, the gripping true story of six men and women wrongly sent to Death Row put together from interviews, letters and official documents by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. "Moving between first-person monologues and scenes set in courtrooms and prisons, the six interwoven stories paint a picture of an American criminal justice system gone horribly wrong and of six brave souls who persevered to survive it." After a successful run on stage, The Exonerated was turned into a TV movie in 2005 directed by Bob Balaban, with a cast that included Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Delroy Lindo and Susan Sarandon. The poster image you see at left is from that version of The Exonerated. For ISU, Cyndee Brown will direct this chilling docudrama about everything that can go wrong in the American criminal justice system.