IMP presents theatre by kids, for kids at the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven Jan. 21 through 23.
The performances will include 40 young actors ages 8 to 13 creating spontaneous theatre based on audience suggestions.
The actors will also present Sugar Rush, about the short but sweet life of a gingerbread boy. This musical play was written by Ross Mihalko, Donna Swift and Brian Weiland.
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.
The Screenwriter’s Daughter, the current Vineyard Playhouse production written and directed by Larry Mollin, is more than a performance — it’s a resurrection of history.
The stage was set with its characteristic flare of color. The cabin was packed, as always, with kids and adults pouring off the seats and onto the floor. Everyone knew what to expect from Camp Jabberwocky’s annual play — an uplifting spectacle well worth a hardwood seat. This year the Camp put on The Great Gatsby.
A member of the Moth’s general council recently checked in with the Gazette. She had a story to tell. But it wasn’t just any story. It was THE story. The Moth is coming to the Vineyard.
For those still basking in their chrysalis and unaware of the Moth, it is a storytelling series birthed about a decade ago in the bars of the lower East Side in New York city. True stories told live is their mantra, and now the Moth flies freely in many cities and on NPR as the Moth Radio Hour.
Featherstone Center for the Arts is paying homage to the Island’s rich theatre history with its current exhibit, The Art of Costume Design: Celebrating 30 Years at the Vineyard Playhouse. The exhibit is being guest-curated by Vineyard Playhouse artistic director MJ Bruder Munafo.
First it was a book, then a movie and now a play being staged by the folks at Island Theatre Workshop. The story in question is I Sent a Letter to My Love, written in 1975 by Bernice Rubens, a Welsh writer who won the Booker Prize in 1970 and was again short-listed for the prize in 1978.
IMP turns ten and it’s hard to believe. It’s sort of like that little sister, the one who just yesterday could always be seen wearing her underwear on her head, is now all dressed up in a corsage and headed to the prom.
Good thing about IMP, though, is that even though the program is now firmly established as an Island institution, it never really grows up. For an improv group, wearing underwear on your head never goes out of style.
