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.
There is a journey of the imagination happening this weekend and next at Featherstone center for the arts. PigPen Theatre Company, is presenting its site-specific play, Mountain Song, written for and inspired by the amphitheatre in the field behind the arts center. With music, puppetry and comedic acting, and centered around an epic quest of love, the play is for the whole family.
Running 45 minutes long, the play is a short and fun-filled evening. It is produced by Artfarm Enterprises and Vineyard Arts Project.
“My dad has a barn,” chirped a wide-eyed, hyperactive Mickey Rooney. “And my mom can sew the costumes,” the pigtailed, pinafore-bedecked Judy Garland replied. And off they went, hand in hand, singing and dancing their way across the barnyard.
Well, it was something like that and they didn’t even live on the Vineyard where the performing arts culture has grown and grown. No more drafty barns here and mom can now sit in the audience and not have to sew costumes.
In a group of 10 men, you might think egos could run high and competition would ensue. But the only thing running high in the dancers of Balletboyz are their legs carving out space midturn, and their energy to work with each other on stage.
The Vineyard Playhouse once again presents Shakespeare for the Masses, tonight and tomorrow night, this time with a lively reading of Troilus and Cressida, one of the Bard’s lesser-known plays, a tragedy.
