Tag Archives: Arkansas Repertory Theatre

Rep SMTI Performers go SINGIN’ ON A STAR

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Tonight and two times tomorrow, the performers from the Arkansas Rep’s Summer Musical Theatre Intensive will perform Singing’ on a Star.  It is this year’s Young Artists’ Production, an annual performance by The Rep’s SMTI (Summer Musical Theatre Intensive) theatre training program. The Summer Musical Theater Intensive, under the direction of Nicole Capri, The Rep’s Resident Director and Director of Education, is an audition-based theatre training program designed for motivated young artists who are serious about musical theatre.

The SMTI staff is comprised of professional directors, choreographers, musicians and designers. Daily rehearsals are structured similarly to a professional summer stock experience and include instruction in musical theatre techniques, multi-media, costume and stage makeup, dance and vocal coaching. Each session culminates in a public workshop performance of a selected musical or musical revue on the Arkansas Repertory Theatre MainStage.

Following the summer workshops, the production is refined, reworked and remounted at The Rep in the fall for patrons of all ages. This fall’s production is conceived and directed by Capri, and it’s all about the actor’s journey from stardust to stardom. With song selections from the pop charts and the Great White Way, The Rep’s young artists sing about big dreams in the Big Apple this fall!

Next up at Arkansas Rep: William Inge’s A LOSS OF ROSES

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The original version of William Inge’s A Loss of Roses will open this Friday on June 15, 2012, at Arkansas Repertory Theatre. The revival will be directed by Tony nominee and Obie winner Austin Pendleton.

“I discovered A Loss of Roses a few years ago. I thought: this is a forgotten beautiful American play, full of colorful people and rich, juicy humor, and full of tragedy,” says Pendleton. “Since I read it, I’ve wanted to do it. I’m thrilled a theatre as good as Arkansas Rep is letting me do it.”

Pendleton directed a staged reading of A Loss of Roses featured in TONGUES at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre in 2010. Pendleton has served as artistic director of the Circle Repertory Theatre Company in New York and is an ensemble member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

Pendleton says several of Inge’s plays have been revived by theatre artists wanting to tackle the playwright’s well-made plays. However, A Loss of Roses has remained mostly on the shelf since it closed on Broadway in 1959.

Arkansas Rep’s production will feature Jean Lichty as Lila Green, Tony nominee Jane Summerhays as Helen Baird and Bret Lada as Kenny.

“Bringing a rarely-produced work by William Inge to the stage is cause for celebration; doubly so when the creative team is led by Austin Pendleton,” says Arkansas Rep Producing Artistic Director Robert Hupp. “He’s assembled a dynamic cast for this fascinating play. Arkansas Rep is honored to introduce A Loss of Roses to a new generation of theatregoers and to re-examine Inge in the context of what he spoke of as his favorite among his many works.”

A Loss of Roses was Inge’s first big setback after a string of critical and commercial successes with Bus Stop and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Picnic. The production was plagued by cast and script changes, earned poor reviews and closed after only three weeks on stage. Inge felt the play was one of his best, and was said to be stung by the criticisms.

“This play is not the play that was produced in New York last November,” Inge writes in his foreword in 1960. “It was greatly changed by the time the play opened at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. Now I can’t remember why all the changes were thought necessary at the time, but working under the pressure that exists in theatre today, people become excited and mistrust their best instincts.”

A Loss of Roses will run June 15 – July 1, 2012, at Arkansas Repertory Theatre at 601 Main Street, Little Rock?

Clinton School presents panel on Ark Rep’s A LOSS OF ROSES

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The University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service will host a panel discussion with Tony Award-nominated director Austin Pendleton and cast members of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s production of A Loss of Roses.  The panel will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, June 13 at 12 noon at Sturgis Hall in Clinton Presidential Park. The program is free and open to the public.

A Loss of Roses is a little-known William Inge masterpiece that tells the story of two women struggling to make their lives bearable in a small Kansas town. Penned in the intimate style of Tennessee Williams, who was Inge’s mentor, A Loss of Roses is a bittersweet romance about the loss of innocence which garnered a young Warren Beatty a Tony Award nomination in the 1959 Broadway production. The play will run on The Rep’s stage from June 13 to July 1.

Director Austin Pendleton starred in the original cast of Fiddler on the Roof (and can be heard on the original cast recording). Since the 1960s he has had successful careers as an actor, playwright, director, lyricist, teacher and administrator.  In addition to his Tony nomination for directing Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton in The Little Foxes, he has received the Clarence Derwent Award (for Hail Strawdyke) and Obie Award (The Last Sweet Days of Isaac).  Among his many films are What’s Up Doc? and the Academy Award winning My Cousin Vinny.

Reel Classics with The Rep: PICNIC

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Tonight at Laman Library, the Arkansas Repertory Theatre continues “Reel Classics with the Rep.”

Join The Rep for a discussion with The Rep’s Producing Artistic Director, Bob Hupp as he discusses The Rep’s upcoming production of A Loss of Roses by American playwright William Inge.  Following the discussion, Laman Library will screen the 1955 the Academy Award-winning romantic drama “Picnic” starring William Holden and Kim Novak based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by William Inge.

Reel Classics With The Rep runs the second Monday of every month at Laman Library, 2801 Orange in North Little Rock and is free and open to the public.

Call Laman Library for more details (501) 758-1720.

Ballet Arkansas honors Kolb, announces 2012-13 season

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Earlier this month, Ballet Arkansas hosted its annual spring soiree.  At the evening, Joseph F. Kolb was presented with the “Above the Barre” award.  Kolb was recognized for his past leadership on the Ballet Arkansas board.  In the early 2000s, Kolb served as the producer of the annual Ballet Arkansas production of The Nutcracker when there was no staff available to do so.

Joe and Cindy Kolb

Kolb has also been an active board member of the Arkansas Repertory Theatre and Historic Arkansas Museum. He and his wife Cindy have two daughters. The oldest one is taking dance classes, so he now his most important connection is a ballet dad instead of being a ballet board member.

Also at the soiree, Ballet Arkansas announced its 2012-2013 season and featured dancers presenting preview moments.   The season will kick off with American Images on October 12 – 14, 2012. The dancers will interpret iconic pieces of art in dance. The performances will take place at Wildwood Park for the Arts in conjunction with Wildwood’s Harvest Fest.

Next up will be the annual production of The Nutcracker from December 7 – 9, 2012 at Robinson Center Music Hall.  This holiday tradition will featured not only Company members and Ballet Arkansas II but also dozens upon dozens of local dance students.

Ballet Arkansas spring into Spring at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre. From April 5 – 7, 2013, it will present Spring into Motion which will feature a variety of dances.

Throughout the season, the Company tour beyondCATEGORY throughout the state. In conjunction with this tour, the Company will also offer workshops.

Lauren Quick Strother is the Executive Director of Ballet Arkansas.  The guest artist and artistic advisor is Michael Bearden, courtesy of BalletWest.  Guy Couch is the Tour Director. The 2012-2013 Company includes: Leslie Dodge, Lauren McCarty Horak, Toby Lewellen, Anna Maris, Sean Porter, Laurel Dix, Paul Tillman, Katchiri Feys Tillman and Amanda Sewell.

2012 Arkansas New Play Fest

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The Arkansas Repertory Theatre presents TheatreSquared’s 2012 Arkansas New Play Fest on Thursday, May 17 and Friday, May 18 at The Oxford American building at 1300 Main Street.

Arkansas New Play Fest features professional staged readings. Each script is rehearsed, staged and performed by professional artists, script in hand, for the public and playwright.

Following each reading, there will be a talk back session with the playwright and the cast.

Thursday, May 17
7 p.m. Uprooted by Clinnesha Dillon Sibley
9 p.m. The Ballad Of Rusty and Roy by Troy And Jonny Schremmer

Friday, May 18
7 p.m. The Spiritualist by Robert Ford
9 p.m. The Football Project by Samuel Brett Williams

Featured Plays

UPROOTED
by Clinnesha Dillon Sibley
A richly drawn treatment of a timeless scenario by an award-winning Arkansas playwright. What happens when long-separated siblings reunite after the death of a parent? When successful film actress Venus Kettle returns to Indianola, Mississippi, to her mother’s “home going,” she is greeted by her sisters with a wide range of emotions, from enthusiastic glee to cold-shoulder resentment. In the meantime the play follows the parallel story of Venus’s brother, who is incarcerated in a facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Uprooted is moving tribute to the redemptive power of family.

THE FOOTBALL PROJECT
by Samuel Brett Williams
November, 1998: a high school football team boarded a bus to travel to play in the state championship game. The entire town came out to see the team off—but the bus never left. One third-string player who played for mere seconds in the previous game forged his grades and caused the team to be disqualified from the championship. The town’s response was unprecedented. There were death threats, thoughts of suicide, vandalism and then a surprising amount of goodwill and even a bit of unexpected heroism. A snapshot of a town in crisis, examining one of the rare places that the ordinary and the epic, the petty and the profound collide: high school football.

THE SPIRITUALIST
by Robert Ford
TheatreSquared Artistic Director Robert Ford brings The Spiritualist back to the Arkansas New Play Festival for a second year of development, adding new revisions and, for the first time, original music. Inspired by true events, this comedic drama introduces Rosemary Dunn, an English widow who cooks for the school lunch service and communes with the spirits of dead composers. When an enterprising American reporter tries to unmask the self-proclaimed psychic as a fraud, he finds there may be more at play than simple musical sleight-of-hand.

THE BALLAD OF RUSTY AND ROY
by Troy and Jonny Schremmer
This new play with live, original music, follows the story of two half-brothers, both musicians with roots in Texas who have found their way to New York City along starkly divergent paths. One has an enthusiastic following on the New York music scene, the other among toddlers at the neighborhood church playgroup where he works. Circumstances reunite the two brothers, but a deeply troubled past involving a boyhood road trip threatens to tear them apart once again. Featuring songs – and performances – by Dusty Brown, who himself has a burgeoning career as a singer-songwriter in New York, an early version of The Ballad of Rusty and Roy was featured at the New York Fringe Festival.

Tickets are $7 per show or $20 for a two-day pass to all four readings.

Arkansas Rep’s NEXT TO NORMAL

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Deb Lyons in NEXT TO NORMAL. Photo by Dero Sanford

One of the best lines in the American Theatre in the 21st century is “Valium is my favorite color.”

It comes from the musical Next to Normal which opens tomorrow night and runs through May 27 at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre.  In addition to winning the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (one of the few musicals to nab that prize), it also won three 2009 Tony Awards.

With music by Tom Kitt and a book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey, Next to Normal is a powerful rock musical about a mentally ill suburban mom who struggles with worsening bipolar disorder and the effects that illness has on her family. The Arkansas Rep production is directed by Nicole Capri. The cast features Deb Lyons as Diana — the mother of the family, Jonathan Rayson as her husband Dan, Kristin Parker and Will Holly as their children, Mo Brady as a friend of the family and Peter James Zielinski playing a pair of physicians.  Zielinski was last seen at the Rep in The Full Monty.

Helen Gregory is the Musical Director. Other members of the creative team include Mike Nichols (scenic designer), Shelly Hall (costume designer), Michael J. Eddy (lighting designer), M. Jason Pruzin (sound designer) and Lynda J. Kwallek (properties designer).

In conjunction with this production, there are several special events.

MainStage Sponsorship Night

Tuesday, May 8 | 7 p.m.

Preshow Panel, Foster’s | 6 p.m.

Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 601 Main Street, Little Rock

Chenal Family Therapy has purchased a “Night at The Rep” and will host a MainStage Sponsor Night on Tuesday, May 8. A portion of the ticket sales for this performance will benefit a number of local non-profit ministries in the Little Rock area. Prior to the show, Chenal Family Therapy will host a panel discussion in Foster’s on the overlap of faith and psychology, featuring prominent local therapists, ministers and professors. Tickets are $35 for general admission seating. For more information or to purchase tickets to this night, contact Chenal Family Therapy at (501) 781-2230 or email Events@ChenalTherapy.com.

SIGN INTERPRETATION

Wednesday, May 9 will be sign interpreted for the hearing impaired.

Reel Classics with The Rep: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”

Monday, May 14 | 6:00 p.m.
2801 Orange, North Little Rock 

Reel Classics With The Rep runs the second Monday of every month at Laman Library, 2801 Orange in North Little Rock and is free to the public. Call the Laman Library at (501) 758-1720 for more information.

MainStage Sponsorship Night

Tuesday, May 15 | 7 p.m.

Preshow Reception, Rep Lobby | 5:30 p.m.

Conversation with Clinicians after the Performance

Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 601 Main Street, Little Rock

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Psychiatric Research Institute has purchased a “Night at The Rep” and will host a MainStage Sponsor Night on Tuesday, May 15. This event is open to the public. Tickets are $40. For more information or to purchase tickets to this night, contact Cary Wilson at (501) 526-8100 or visit the first floor reception area at the UAMS Psychiatric Research Institute.

MainStage Sponsorship Night

Tuesday, May 22| 7 p.m.

Preshow Reception, Rep Lobby | 6:00 p.m.

Arkansas Repertory Theatre, 601 Main Street, Little Rock

The Arkansas Repertory Theatre’s Young Artist Guild has purchased a “Night at The Rep” and will host a MainStage Sponsor Night on Tuesday, May 22. This event is open to the public. Tickets are $25. For more information or to purchase tickets to this night, contact The Rep Box Office at (501) 378-0405.