The Young Playwrights’ Festival celebrates 20 years this weekend of giving early voice to writers, bringing their seven short works to the stage for a full production. Over the years its participants have gone on to became authors, artists and published professional playwrights.
“It’s amazing, this program,” says Gioia Marchese, who is directing all the plays this coming Saturday.
When Out of the Box’s Samantha Eve put out the call for actors for “The Wild Party,” Andrew Lippa’s musical based on Joseph Moncure March’s Prohibition Era poem of the same title, she got a surprise.
“We had responses from people all over the place. I had someone write me from Florida (who wanted to audition).” Turns out that “The Wild Party” is on many musical actors’ to-do lists, with its wealth of meaty roles and its smart lyrics. Everybody wants to get invited; it’s that kind of party. It’s also an Out of the Box production in which a majority of the cast members are new to the company.”
When Out of the Box’s Samantha Eve put out the call for actors for “The Wild Party,” Andrew Lippa’s musical based on Joseph Moncure March’s Prohibition Era poem of the same title, she got a surprise.
“We had responses from people all over the place. I had someone write me from Florida (who wanted to audition).” Turns out that “The Wild Party” is on many musical actors’ to-do lists, with its wealth of meaty roles and its smart lyrics. Everybody wants to get invited; it’s that kind of party. It’s also an Out of the Box production in which a majority of the cast members are new to the company.”
I feel like we always say this, but this is the hardest show we’ve ever done!” says the always chipper Samantha Eve, the executive director of Out of the Box Theatre Company. She’s talking about the 15-plus cast members of “Bare: A Rock Opera” that opens at Center Stage Theater this Thursday. Ms. Eve has worked with large casts before, like Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins” and the hippie collective of “Hair.” But this musical, a story of two Catholic boarding school boys who fall in love and question their faith and identity — with some surprising consequences — is calling on local high schoolers for the job.
“We’re dealing with a lot of scheduling conflicts,” Eve says. “But we’re lucky because they’re bringing a lot of great energy to the show. They’re extraordinarily talented.”
Many a theater major, high school or college, has done their time in a production of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” that ol’ farce about the Brewsters, the “family that slays together, and therefore stays together.” The ghosts of Cary Grant and Peter Lorre hover over the play, despite the two stars only appearing in the film version, even seven decades later. (Blame Turner Classic Movies.) It hurtles along at a brisk pace, indulges in some black but not bleak humor, and still has some clever twists in it.
On the last weekend of its run at SBCC’s Garvin Theater, Katie Laris’ production of Joseph Kesselring’s play still manages to get some mileage out of this jalopy.
When writer Joseph Kesselring first imagined the story of “Arsenic and Old Lace” he saw it more as a Gothic tale, based on a notorious case of the time where the owner of a boarding house poisoned guests to get their pensions. But, rumor has it, Broadway producers Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse convinced Kesselring to make it a comedy and so he did. The play is now a classic, community theaters everywhere still putting on productions, including SBCC’s Theater Group, who premiere the comedy this coming Wednesday.
In the play, the Brewster family is largely composed of homicidal maniacs except for the youngest, drama critic Mortimer Brewster (Jay Carlander), who comes home to marry the girl he loves, fend off police, and wonder how he’s related to everybody else. The heads of the house are two spinster aunts who murder lonely old men with elderberry wine laced with arsenic, helped by Mortimer’s brother (Christopher Lee Short) who is under the delusion he is Theodore Roosevelt and helps dig the graves for their victims. There’s a murderous older brother, too (John Bridle) who is living with a botched plastic surgery job to hide from the police.
While a new version of the blood-soaked prom queen, “Carrie” blows up the box office this Halloween season, Out of the Box Theatre Company has brought their own production of Stephen King’s classic horror tale to the stage. Yet, “Carrie: The Musical” is not new. Instead, it’s a story of growing pains.
A dozen years after Brian De Palma’s film, the Royal Shakespeare Company workshopped a musical version, but it was beset by tech problems, and the 1988 Broadway production closed after five performances. It was the definition of a flop. Or so everyone thought. Remade as an off-Broadway musical without the special effects and with fewer characters, the revivals began to happen, first illegally, with companies performing without the rights. Then a proper, 2012 revival occurred with new songs from the writers. “Carrie” had risen from the grave.
Samantha Eve and her Out of the Box Productions have a penchant for the outre, blood, and … presidents it seems. Over their short production history, they’ve shot cannons of “blood” into the audience for their Halloween “Evil Dead” musical, and revived Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins,” his paean to the mentally unbalanced killers and would-be murderers. So this Thursday’s opening of the musical “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” at the Center Stage Theater, is keeping with tradition.
“I think his legacy is haunted by a lot of blood, death and destruction,” Ms. Eve says. “And he’s a fascinating choice for a musical. Out of all the presidents, to make a punk musical about him? Because if you think about it, so much of that emo, punk craze is with the adolescents. And when Andrew Jackson was president, technically the United States was a teenager, a rebellious state of mind.”
As the flower children saunter onstage and take their places on the crazy quilt of blankets, the band strikes up the opening bars of “Aquarius.” Suddenly, the question arises: Is this the right time to be celebrating the Woodstock generation? With such a grim economy outside, the cheery and hopeful up-with-people overture of this now-classic musical seems less like a balm for our ills and more like a poke in the eye from the past.
But last Saturday night at Center Stage Theater, Out of the Box Theatre Company managed to pull off this revival without sinking into irony, and it did so with talent, vitality and some self-deprecating humor.