Vineyard Playhouse patrons might be forgiven for a feeling of deja vu when viewing the lineup of mainstage shows Cambridge’s new Central Square Theatre selected for its first season. Two shows opened this past weekend — QED: An Evening with Richard Feynman and Coming Up for Air, An AutoJazzography — and both productions were developed on the stage on Church street, Vineyard Haven.
The Vineyard Playhouse and the Martha’s Vineyard Library Association continue a five-year tradition of presenting an exciting live theater experience for Island children.
The Playhouse’s troupe, The Fabulists, will perform The Call of the Cuckoo, an entertaining stage adaptation of a folk tale from Afghanistan, written by Elizabeth Wojtusik. There is one performance on Saturday morning, March 22, at 11 a.m. at the Vineyard Playhouse, 24 Church street in downtown Vineyard Haven.
Kaf Warman, professor in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama and associate artistic director of Island Theatre Workshop, will offer her popular adult acting class again this summer.
The class will explore personal material in a theatrical context, incorporating movement, mask work, poetry and music. The class is of particular interest to actors, dancers, writers, teachers, therapist, painters and anyone age 16 and up interested in the visual, performing and healing arts.
Every summer the Vineyard Playhouse presents a Shakespeare play in the al fresco amphitheatre at the Tashmoo Overlook in Vineyard Haven, and those in the know about one of the very “funnest” things to do in the high season, are on hand to appreciate it.
A suicidal husband, a vaudeville act down on its luck, a pair of commedia dell’arte clowns, two morbidly sensitive shepherds, and a train passenger trapped in the loo with an idiot conductor on the far side of the door. What do these characters have in common? Well, brought together in one-act plays under the aegis of Island Theatre Workshop, they represent a fruitcake slice of the human predicament. They are also, as samples of the absurdist tradition, a whole bunch of fun.
Verdi on Middle Road? You wouldn’t think anything almost subversively original in the arts could possibly be percolating up this country road. You think you might come upon a corn patch or a pen of prized goats, but not a synthesis of dance, theatre and opera combining Broadway actors, celebrated choreographers and, well, Verdi.
A dragon created by art and technology teacher Paul Brisette and his art students at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School will fly high and terrorize a young prince as the centerpiece of the Magic Flute scenes in the OperaFest 2008 performance, Saturday, July 26, at 8 p.m. at Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs.
Tonight is the benefit opening of Island Theatre Workshop, Inc.’s latest production, Gian Carlo Menotti’s beloved family opera Amahl and the Night Visitors. The curtain goes up at 7:30 p.m. in the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven.
