Ready for Their Closeup, Drama Students Give Tuesday Preview of Fall Shorts Season

Catch a sneak preview of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School’s upcoming fall theatre workshops on Tuesday, Oct. 30, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Theatre department students will perform free on the theatre room’s black box stage, offering a conceptual tour of the very dramatic year to come. Kate Murray, director of theatre and television at the high school, will speak about her goals for student enrichment and how the community can be a part of those dreams.

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Auditions This Weekend For ITW Winter Musicals

Island Theatre Workshop will hold auditions Saturday, Nov. 3 at 2 p.m. at the Federated Church parish hall in Edgartown for two coming musical productions.

Amahl and the Night Visitors, by Gian Carlo Menotti, a one-act opera directed by Lee Fierro and Peter Boak, will be performed for two weekends in January 2008.

Needed are people to play three kings and a page (one tenor and three baritones) and a chorus of women and men (soprano, alto, tenor bass.) The roles of Amahl and his mother already have been cast and are in rehearsal.

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Prepare Ye the Way: Kids To Perform Godspell Jr.

The Oak Bluffs School drama department presents the musical 1970 musical Godspell Jr. by John-Michael Tebelak with music by Stephen Schwartz next weekend. The cast and crew have been working hard since September to put together this rock musical inspired by the Gospel of Matthew. The show includes colorful costumes, story theatre and the famous songs including the hit Day by Day. The show is part of Musical Theater International’s Broadway Jr. series, which adapts famous Broadway musicals and makes them accessible to young performers and audiences.

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Free Performances from Award-Winning Drama Students

Free Shakespeare is available this weekend, from the awardwinning drama department at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. Shaking up their usual fall program, the student thepians are performing selected scenes from the Bard and other playwrights instead of a single play.

Tonight at 7 p.m. it’s selected scenes from As You Like It, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet.

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Creative Drama Sessions Launched for Children

Phyllis Vecchia begins another of her popular creative drama workshops for children ages four and half to eleven, this fall at the Oak Bluffs School. The classes will be held on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons from 3:30 to 4:45 p.m. Classes begin on Tuesday, Oct. 2, and Thursday, Oct. 4, and run for eight weeks.

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Embedded Comedian Stands Up for Troops

To many, the idea of doing a tour of duty in Iraq is no laughing matter. Yet for Jim McCue, along with fellow Boston comedian and friend Joey Carroll, that’s exactly what it is, as they perform stand-up comedy to bring smiles and laughter to the troops’ otherwise very serious lives.

Now the Boston comedian and author of book Embedded Comedian, Jim McCue, performs with The Sopranos’ Frank Santorelli and the Island’s Marty Nadler, on Saturday, Sept. 22, at Outerland at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport.

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Playhouse Toys With Great Elizabethan Nerd
Holly Nadler

There are two kinds of Shakespeare fanatics: The first group is down with the concept of William Shakespeare having written all the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. The second group believes anyone but William Shakespeare wrote the canon of sonnets and plays: It could have been Will’s young patron, the third earl of Southampton, or the proven Christopher Marlowe, or even Queen Elizabeth I in a secret need to hone another dimension of her marvelousness.

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Island Theatre Workshop Kicks off Children’s Class

Island Theatre Workshop, Inc. announces the start of its Island children’s winter drama season. Winter Children’s Theatre (formerly Apprentice Players) begins on Monday, Oct. 22, after school at Grace Church parish hall.

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English Channel Will Appear at Playhouse

The Vineyard Playhouse is extending its season through September with a limited run of Robert Brustein’s new play The English Channel, a comic and provocative imagining of William Shakespeare’s coming of age as a playwright.

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Brustein’s Shakespearean Dreams Alight in The English Channel
Lauren Martin

The playwright steals — lines, plots, anything that works. The playwright uses historical events, fashioning his own take on the characters within those happenings. He finds whole scenes come to him in his dreams. He writes fluidly in iambic pentameter. He doesn’t mind getting bawdy. The playwright is?

William Shakespeare, sure. But there is another correct answer: Robert Brustein.

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