Tag Archives: Arkansas Repertory Theatre

Arkansas Heritage Month – Robert Hupp

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HuppRobert Hupp is in his final months of his seventeenth and final season as producing artistic director of Arkansas Rep.  In recognition of all of his service and artistic excellence, in 2013 he was the Individual Artists recipient of the Governor’s Arts Awards.

During his tenure in Little Rock, Hupp has overseen continued growth and development at The Rep. Since he assumed the producing artistic director’s position in 1999, the theatre has tripled its budget (currently at $4 million annually), increased contributed income by 100%, completed a successful capital campaign, and broadened the company’s artistic and economic base through co-productions with other nonprofit theatres and partnerships with institutions of higher education and community organizations. Under Hupp’s leadership, the theatre and actor housing apartments underwent a complete renovation in 2011. The Rep also renovated a new downtown scenic construction facility and recently opened The Annex, a black box theatre and education space, in Main Street’s Creative Corridor.

Hupp’s artistic stewardship at The Rep has been marked by seasons that reflect the great diversity of the theatrical canon. Shakespeare and American classics join new and contemporary works, and seasons always include musicals or plays with music. The current season contains the regional theatre premiere of The Bridges of Madison County, a new adaptation of The Little Mermaid, as well as a new comedy, Windfall, directed by Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander. The theatre also recently produced a new musical, Because of Winn Dixie, by Duncan Sheik and Nell Benjamin. Hupp has directed 28 productions while at The Rep, including The Grapes of Wrath, God’s Man in Texas, Les Miserables, August: Osage County, and all of The Rep’s recent Shakespearean productions.

In addition to his duties at The Rep, Hupp has shown a strong commitment to serving the central Arkansas community. He has served on numerous civic committees in Little Rock, including Little Rock’s Arts and Culture Commission, the Advisory Board of the ACANSA Arts Festival, and Vision Little Rock. He has collaborated with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Wildwood Park for the Arts, and the Arkansas Arts Center.  In 2012, he was named “Nonprofit Executive of the Year” at the Arkansas Business of the Year Awards, and also received the Arkansas Public Relations Society of Arkansas (PRSA) Diamond Award. Hupp has also been a panelist and on-site evaluator for the National Endowment for the Arts and has served in various capacities for the Theatre Communications Group, including a term as vice president of the Board of Directors. Hupp has taught and directed at several Arkansas colleges and universities, including Hendrix College, University of Central Arkansas, and University of Arkansas at Little Rock where he also served as the Interim Chair of the Department of Theatre in 2005.

Arkansas Heritage Month – Cliff Baker

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cliffCliff Fannin Baker is one of only two people to have been recognized with two Governor’s Arts Awards. He was honored at the first awards in 1991 with an Individual Artist Award and in 1999 with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

He has nearly a half-century of work in the professional theatre.   He was the Founder of Arkansas Repertory Theatre in 1976. He previously was associated with a professional theatre at the Arkansas Arts Center in the 1960s and the Arkansas Philharmonic Theatre in the 1970s prior to his founding the Rep.

Baker has directed over 200 productions of every genre in cities as far flung as Beijing (Peking University) to Portland Center Stage, from Houston’s Alley Theatre to the Theatre of the Open Eye in New York. He has a particular passion for new plays, having directed or produced over thirty world and regional premieres.

For five years, he served as Creative Director of Wildwood Park for the Arts. When not directing, he is a corporate leadership consultant for Goss-Reid Associates in New York. Baker is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers and the Dramatists Guild.

Baker will return to the Arkansas Rep in July to be the Interim Artistic Director while a replacement for Bob Hupp is being selected.  He will also serve as the production director for Sister Act in the Rep’s 2016-2017 season.

Arkansas Heritage Month – Jeane Hamilton

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Photo taken for SOIREE

Photo taken for SOIREE

Happy Mother’s Day.  Today as part of Arkansas Heritage Month, we salute Jeane Hamilton — the “mother” of the Arkansas Arts Center.  In 2007, she was awarded the Arkansas Arts Council’s Lifetime Achievement Governor’s Arts Award.

Arriving in Little Rock a young wife in 1952, she immediately set about to become involved in her new community as she and her husband James set up a household.  In the mid-1950s, the Junior League of Little Rock tapped her to chair the initiative to create a new art museum for Little Rock.  The two decades old Museum of Fine Arts was threadbare through years of neglect and unfocused programming and collecting.

Hamilton, along with Junior League President Carrie Remmel Dickinson and Vice President Martha McHaney, approached Winthrop Rockefeller (then a relatively new resident) to lead the fundraising effort for the new museum.  He agreed on a few conditions: one was that a base amount had to be raised in Little Rock first, and second that the museum would be for the entire State of Arkansas and not just Little Rock.

Hamilton and her colleagues set about to raise the funds. They raised $645,000 at the same time Little Rock’s business climate was stymied by the aftereffects of the Central High crisis.

Now a lifetime honorary member of the Arkansas Arts Center Board, Hamilton has spent much of her life working on Arkansas Arts Center projects since that visit in 1959.  She has served on the Board, chaired committees, chaired special events, served hot dogs, helped kids paint and danced the night away at countless fundraisers.  She was on the committee which hired Townsend Wolfe as executive director and chief curator.  Jeane has led art tours for the Arts Center to a number of countries over the years.

When she is not at the Arts Center, she is often seen at the Rep, the Symphony or any number of other cultural institutions.  While she enjoys seeing old friends at these events, she also loves to see a room full of strangers – because that means that new people have become engaged in the cultural life of Little Rock.

Today is #ArkansasGives Day

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Arkansas GivesIf you are like me, you’ve been receiving notifications about Arkansas Gives Day for months.  Well, today is the day!  From 8am until 8pm, you can help grow the love for Arkansas’s nonprofit organizations by making a donation to the charity of your choice.  The event is sponsored by the Arkansas Community Foundation.

As a special incentive to give, each gift made through ArkansasGives on April 7, 2016 will be matched with additional bonus dollars; the more you give, the more bonus dollars your favorite charity will receive.

Nonprofit organizations and other tax-exempt charitable organizations may participate if they:

  • Are headquartered in Arkansas or have a base of operations in Arkansas.
  • Are a member of the Arkansas Nonprofit Alliance.
  • Have 501c3 tax exempt status under IRS code AND are qualified as a 509(a)(1), (a)(2) or (a)(3) organization or as a private operating foundation.

The minimum amount is $25; there is no maximum amount you may give. You may designate up to 10 charities per transaction.

Accepted Forms of Payment: Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express credit cards online.
You will receive an email receipt of your gift; please retain it for tax purposes. Unless you choose to remain anonymous, your donor information will be sent to the nonprofits to which you give.

Here is a list of cultural organizations which offer services within the boundaries of the City of Little Rock.

There are MANY MANY MANY other worthy nonprofits which are participating. But since this is a culture blog, only the cultural institutions are listed.  But please consider visiting the website and perusing the entire list.

AN ILIAD takes stage at Arkansas Rep in Black Box

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Rep IliadAudience favorite Joe Graves returns to The Rep for Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s production, An Iliad. This one-man production adapts Homer’s Trojan War epic into a compelling monologue that captures both the heroism and horror of warfare, and answers the question: “What has really changed since the Trojan War?”

Performances are February 24 through March 5. Showtimes are 7pm Wednesdays through Sundays with 2pm matinees on Sundays.

This production makes the western world’s oldest extant work of literature not only intelligible, but immediate, relevant and eerily fascinating—as if a storyteller were telling the oldest story in the book and making you believe it is being told for the very first time. Gods and goddesses, weak-tendoned heroes and the face that launched a thousand ships…it’s all just another (incredibly engrossing) yarn in O’Hare* and Peterson’s one-man adaptation, developed at the Sundance Theatre Institute.

Willamette Week calls Graves’ performance one “that can honestly be described as spellbinding.”

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, An Iliad will include Arkansas Stories of War, a series of six talkbacks featuring local service members and their families who will share their personal stories of war.

Today at noon at the Clinton School – A conversation about the upcoming Ark Rep productionof AN ILIAD

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Arkansas Repertory Theatre producing artistic director, Bob Hupp, will host a conversation with Joe Graves, star of the upcoming one-man show, “An Iliad.” This production adapts Homer’s Trojan War epic into a compelling monologue that captures both the heroism and horror of warfare, and answers the question: “What has really changed since the Trojan War?”

This production makes the western world’s oldest extant work of literature not only intelligible, but immediate, relevant and eerily fascinating—as if a storyteller were telling the oldest story in the book and making you believe it is being told for the very first time. Gods and goddesses, weak-tendoned heroes and the face that launched a thousand ships…it’s all just another (incredibly engrossing) yarn in this one-man adaptation, developed at the Sundance Theatre Institute.

Graves has appeared at Arkansas Rep in many productions including RED, OF MICE AND MEN, ALL MY SONS and MY FAIR LADY.

This weekend the Rep presents An Evening with Rebecca Wells and the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

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resized_99263-wells_2_90-20728_t300This weekend, February 19 to 21, join actor and author Rebecca Wells for the debut performance of a new solo work for theater based on her #1 New York Times bestseller Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

Wells looks back at her beloved tale of lifelong friendship in the Deep South, and sees it anew. Rebecca brings the sassy, touching girls of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood into vivid view, then with humor and unflinching honesty chats about how she sees her own work twenty years later, sharing her changing views on racism, feminism and life. An utterly original storyteller, Rebecca will fold you into her inner circle, share the secrets behind the Divine Secrets, make you laugh, invite you to feel, and leave you talking. Intimate, hilarious, and unforgettable, this show has its fingers on the pulse.

A classic Southern tale of hilarity set in a sleepy Louisiana parish, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood follows a group of lifelong friends who stage a rather unorthodox intervention to help a young playwright unravel the truth about her complicated, eccentric mother. Along her journey, she finds forgiveness and acceptance, and learns to let go of her painful past.

Performances are at 7pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.