The Vineyard Playhouse will hold open auditions for its summer main stage season on Saturday, April 30, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the playhouse on Church street in downtown Vineyard Haven.
Creative drama teacher Phyllis Vecchia has an innovative way to get history across to sixth graders: Rather than talking about suffragettes Amelia Bloomer and Susan B. Anthony, and the abolitionist Henry Stanton, she has them BE Amelia Bloomer and Susan B. Anthony and Henry Stanton. In a rousing half-hour in Amy Reece’s sixth grade class at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School on Thursday of last week, Ms. Vecchia guided the entire class through improvised paces of the women’s rights movement from 1840 to 1860.
Everyday life can easily turn into theatre. Political theatre, familial theatre, personal theatre: We encounter it all the time. But good writers and directors can translate that onstage and make the audience connect with a scene they may have never encountered before.
Even better, playwrights, directors and actors can translate it into one-act plays.
Shakespeare for the Masses is free. It’s also the quickest way to get your Billy the Bard on. Shows clock in at under an hour. Some thee’s and thou’s, here a sonnet, there a sonnet, hopefully a beheading or two and, of course, love olde English style and then you’re back out on the streets of Tisbury pleasantly buzzed if not a bit bewildered by a sudden thirst for vengeance at the injustice some rival king has played upon you.
Mrs. Baker, played by the irrepressible 10-year-old local pop diva Samantha Cassidy, wants a baby and Mr. Baker, the similarly pre-teened Oliver Carson, does not. (On alternate days last weekend these characters were performed by Danielle Hopkins and Jesse Dawson.) Mr. Baker wants a big fat, gingerbread cookie to eat. They fight/sing about it: “Food feeds all your problems unless your problems are food.”
Although most of the Island is concerned with saying hello to the birdies as spring begins to unfold, the Tisbury School seventh and eighth graders are riding against the grain by saying goodbye to the birdies.
Well, actually no real birds are involved at all. Nor pinkletinks, crocuses or snowdrops.
The art of improv is the art of saying yes. In other words, whatever is offered up during the performance by the audience or fellow actors, the main ingredient to success is to go with it.
Sounds like a sound philosophy for life or at least for getting through the tough, or merely odd moments, that pop up each day. And what better time in one’s life to embrace this message than when we are young.
The scent of mothballs had no chance to cling to Chris Abbot. Last year he retired from his teaching job, which included directing the annual school play at the Tisbury School. But only a few weeks ago, school principal Richie Smith inveigled him to return to the boards for Mr. Abbot’s third pass, rolled out this past weekend, of the musical Bye Bye Birdie.
The newly formed song-and-dance group MV Glee will debut next Sunday, Feb. 13, with a 7 p.m. show at Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven.
The show includes the IMPers, IMP’s high school improv troupe, who will create a never-before-seen Glee episode based on audience suggestions.
MV Glee is directed by musician/composer Mike Benjamin and dancer/choreographer Sandy Stone Benjamin. The IMPers are directed by IMP founder Donna Swift.
