James Lapine (pictured) has won the Tony Award three times for the best book of a musical, for Into the Woods, Passion and Falsettos. His list of other Broadway and Hollywood credits is long and illustrious.
Mandy Hackett is the associate artistic director of the Public Theatre in New York city, one of the most vibrant and important performance spaces in New York city and therefore, by extension, the world.
From the streetfront, the Vineyard Arts Project appears to be another large house on Main street. There is no hint that past its picket fence is unfolding, in turn: life on the Texas-Mexico border; family drama at a racially-charged estate; and people singing and dancing about the financial crisis.
B allerinas dance with their feet, balancing on pointe shoes with their limbs elongated to expose the intricate workings of muscles, or leaping across stage, leaving only a slight noise on the floor. But this week at the Vineyard Arts Project, they were dancing with their hands. Wrists became entangled, thumbs circled other digits, and knuckles discovered unexplored crevices.
The folks responsible for the musical Witness Uganda were seated in a circle of folding chairs in a large mirrored Vineyard Arts Project studio Tuesday afternoon, taking a needed break from their rehearsal schedule to talk about the origins of their project. Writer and director team Matt Gould and Griffin Matthews offered tales of their travels to Africa, shared stories of the Ugandan university students around whom the script is based, and introduced two of their star actors, Leslie Odom Jr. and Nicolette Robinson.
Three plays in development will debut with pay-what-you-can performances this weekend at the Vineyard Arts Project in Edgartown. Each play runs Thursday, Friday and Saturday, in a rotating schedule so viewers can see three different plays in one day, or one each day, or any other combination.
You’ve almost certainly seen the shingled building, sitting obvious yet unobtrusive between the dentist and the hair salon on Upper Main street in Edgartown. Perhaps you have heard the skinny: that it’s a dance studio built by a fabulously wealthy man so his daughter, an aspiring ballerina, would have a place to take private lessons for two weeks every summer. According to this tale, the hotel-sized building sits empty the other 50 weeks of the year, and the daughter gave up dancing to study political science anyway.
