The 31st annual Arts and Society Bloomsday Celebration — of music and drama based on the text of James Joyce — will be performed Tuesday, June 16, at the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven. Curtain time is 8 p.m.
It’s the season of The School Play, the least cynical theatrical event in the business. Behind the curtains — that is, where there are stage curtains — schoolkids across the Island have been cooing over each other’s costumes, sketching each other’s faces with greasepaint, and studying lines and stage directions as well as for their math and science tests. Cue the butterflies, the beaming parents, the misty eyes and the magic that can’t be captured anywhere but on those boards.
Tony award-winning Def Jam poet Lemon Andersen brings his one-man spoken-word show, Excerpts from County of Kings: The Beautiful Struggle, to the intimate barn theatre at the Yard, July 10 and 11. It’s a jarring and poignant coming-of-age stage memoir that flows from hard-edged drama to urban poetry, creating a vivid portrait of growing up in New York city during the birth of hip-hop.
On Wednesday, May 20, the performing and visual arts students at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School will present Evening of the Arts, an evening of art, music and drama. Doors open at 6 p.m. Admission is free.
The halls will be filled with student art work ranging from sculpture to photography to painting to architecture and more; meanwhile, the Performing Arts Center will be filled with song, dance and drama.
There’s a sleep-away camp feel to the Yard off Middle Road in Chilmark: office over here, summer-blooming party tent over there, and modest, grey-shingled, single-story cottages for visiting dancers, choreographers, singers and other artistes scattered throughout the woods.
All Island teens aged 12 to 16 are welcome for pizza and improv theatre games with Nora Laudani, from 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday, June 20, at the Chilmark Public Library.
The WIMP/IMPers Get the IMPers to the Chicago Improv Festival Benefit has moved its performance to April 11 at the Grange Hall Theatre in West Tisbury. The show will still feature WIMP originals Jamie Alley, Christopher Brophy and Laura Silber alongside the IMPers, Martha’s Vineyard’s teen professional improv troupe.
A man and a woman meet and sparks fly, but not necessarily sparks beneficial to the pair’s mental health; you might almost say the incendiary materials explode in a region of dry brush during a California August. We’ve all experienced volatile relationships, or have known people who’ve weathered them. When it’s someone else, we almost need to place our hands over our eyes.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival — it’s the biggest arts festival in the world, and the drama department at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, under the direction of Kate Murray, has been chosen as one of the U.S. representatives for its 2010 lineup.
The students will be part of the American High School Theatre Festival troupes at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, for 2010.
