Island Theatre Workshop opens a new production this weekend at Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven. It’s the Tony award-winning comedy and musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, directed by Taffy McCarthy and Linda Berg. This fun, high-energy show opened last night and continues through August 8.
New, original short plays will be presented by the Tisbury and West Tisbury schools on Saturday, Feb. 6 and Saturday, Feb. 13 at the Vineyard Playhouse, 24 Church street, Vineyard Haven. Performance times for both dates are 2 and 7 p.m.
The Tisbury School plays are Calculated Risk, by Pam Herman’s class, and Tornado Fourth Grade-O! by Veronika VandeGeer’s class. The plays from West Tisbury are Digging for Clues, by Rebecca Solway’s class, and A Map For Freedom, by Mary Boyd’s Class.
Tisbury becomes Dublin on Wednesday night as Arts and Society — which organizes what is apparently the oldest continuous celebration of Bloomsday on the planet — presents its 32nd annual Bloomsday Celebration of Music and Drama based on the texts of James Joyce.
The program is on June 16, at 8 p.m. at Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven. All tickets are $15 and may be purchased at the door.
IMP, the Island’s youth improv troupe, has been selected to perform at the 2010 Teen Chicago Improv Festival, and will be in the spotlight for two nights in a row this weekend in an effort to raise funds for the trip to the Windy City.
A grand puppet parade down Main street, Vineyard Haven on Saturday will be a highlight of the fourth annual weekend-long Martha’s Vineyard Puppet Festival. The parade will begin at 5 p.m., but anyone who would like to join the parade can bring a puppet friend and meet at Katharine Cornell Theatre at 4:30, or come at 3 p.m. to a free puppet-making event and make a parade puppet to follow the giant puppets — Mother Earth, Mother Ocean and Father Sky.
Kids’ Creative Theater classes at The Yard in Chilmark, featuring fun and skills with veteran teaching artists as well as the opportunity to participate alongside professional actors, dancers and singers in The Yard’s Saturday family matinee, begin July 5.
There are six different week-long sessions for children entering first through eighth grades, and a trainee program for high schoolers. Sessions meet 9 a.m. to noon, Monday to Friday and 3 to 5 p.m. on Saturdays for the matinee. There is an open class for family and friends on Friday mornings.
This has been a remarkably satisfying season for Island theatregoers. We have available not only our regular offerings — the Vineyard Playhouse’s mainstage season and Shakespeare in the amphitheatre, Camp Jabberwocky, Children’s Theatre, special events at the Yard — but also an energetic new theatre company, ArtFarm Enterprises, which has presented some glorious work in collaboration with Vineyard Arts Project and will soon be presenting more with the Actors Shakespeare Project from Boston.
It’s six days before opening night of the Vineyard’s first production of Rent — that’s about 8,000 minutes, for fans of the Broadway musical’s company song Seasons of Love, which poses the question, how do you measure a year, and answers it with the surprisingly catchy refrain, “five-hundred, twenty-five-thousand, six-hundred minutes..”
Director MJ Bruder Munafo is seeking little fairies and wood sprites for this season’s Vineyard Playhouse production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Girls and boys ages 5 to 10 and under 4’9” tall are invited to apply for up to 12 open roles in the production. The children will perform an average of twice a week on a flexible rotating schedule agreed upon by the parents and the stage manager.
