2009-2010 News and Announcements
Alum nominated for Tony Awards
MSUM Theatre Alum Jan Maxwell has been nominated for the following
Tony Awards:
- "Best Performance by Leading Actress in a Play": - Jan Maxwell in a Play in THE ROYAL FAMILY
- "Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Play" - Jan Maxwell in LEND ME A TENOR
Overall, THE ROYAL FAMILY is up for five awards, LEND ME A TENOR is up for three.
Jennifer Tuttle film accepted to Canadian film festival
89 Second Productions, a production company co-founded by Jennifer Tuttle (Associate Professor, Theatre Arts) had a short documentary film "The Collector," directed by Ryan Kipp, accepted to the Canadian Film Centre's World Wide Short Film Festival. As a co-producer, Jennifer will be traveling to Toronto the first week of June for the screening and promotion of the film at the Festival. While there, she will also be participating in Master Classes, such as "Director-Actor Relationships," and "The Poetics of Transmedia Storytelling" throughout the week.
MSUM Theatre Arts Major Selected by National Company
Sean Palmer, MSUM Senior Theatre Arts major, has just been selected as a member of the 2010-2011 Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Acting Apprentice Company.
Now in its 46th season, Actors Theatre of Louisville (ATL), the State Theatre of Kentucky, is internationally acclaimed as one of America’s most consistently innovative non-profit professional theatre companies. Founded in 1964, it has won a host of coveted awards and worldwide recognition for excellence. For over 30 years it has been a major force in revitalizing American playwriting, with over 300 Actors-debuted scripts now in publication.
In its 38th year, the Acting Apprentice Company is one of the nation’s oldest continuing pre-professional companies. Each year ATL audition nearly 2000 young artists and choose 22 to spend a season-long residency at the Tony Award-winning home of the Humana Festival of New American Plays.
Theatre Arts Department Receive National Accolades
MSUM Theatre Arts received commendations from the national selection team of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for its recent production of How Will You Know Us Now, or Anytime? The entire departmental faculty and staff were recognized for high production values in the development and support of student-written work. Additional notices went to MSUM students Joy Dolo for her performance of Janice, and Richard Paul Klein for Playwriting.
MUSIC THEATRE FARGO-MOORHEAD presents THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE
Music Theatre Fargo-Moorhead (MTFM)* is proud to announce the regional premiere of THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE by William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin. MTFM’s production of this Tony Award-winning musical will perform March 4, 5 & 6th at 7:30pm and March 7th at 2:00pm at the Fargo-Moorhead Community Theatre.
Quirky, yet heartwarming, THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE hilariously chronicles the angst and joy of six adolescent outcasts, their “mentors,” and four special audience guest spellers during the spelling championship of a lifetime. Letter-by-letter, the roster of participants soon find that winning isn't everything and losing doesn't necessarily make you a loser.
MTFM’s cast of SPELLING BEE features Katie Adducci, Matt Berdahl, Craig Ellingson, Kathy Hanson, Ted Horan, Bill Lucas, Adam Pankow, Angie Schulz, and Ellery Tofte. Julie Adams accompanies and leads the pit orchestra.
Tickets for this PG-13 rated musical are $15 for adults, $12 for seniors and $10 for students. For ticket reservations, or for additional information about the production, call the MTFM/FMCT Box Office at 701-235-6778 or at www.fmct.org.
WHAT: THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUTY SPELLING BEE
WHO: Music Theatre Fargo-Moorhead (MTFM)
WHEN: March 4, 5, & 6 at 7:30pm and March 7 at 2:00pm.
WHERE: Fargo-Moorhead Community Theatre, 333 4th Street South--Fargo
TICKETS: $15 Adults/$12 Seniors/$10 Students
Reserved seating available at the door or by calling 701-235-6778 or www.fmct.org
Music Theatre Fargo-Moorhead (MTFM) is among the area’s newest theatre organizations. With a commitment to producing professional quality musical theatre for the audiences of Fargo-Moorhead and its surrounding areas, MTFM aims to stage a mix of classic, audience favorites as well as contemporary shows and local premieres. Now in their 4th season, previous MTFM productions have included: You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, The Last Five Years, Working, A Year With Frog and Toad, two editions of their signature musical revue, 24 Songs, and Christmas Holiday 2008, a collaboration with FM Ballet.
MSUM faculty and alums prepare CATS
The West Fargo High School (WFHS) Drama Department will present Andrew Lloyd Weber’s world-renowned musical, CATS, February 12, 13, 18, 19 & 20 at 7:30pm with a Sunday matinee, February 14 at 2:30pm.
On one particularly special night each year, Jellicle Cats come to unite and celebrate who they are. As they emerge from the darkened surroundings, the cats are at first suspicious and proud, reluctant to welcome an audience into their secret domain. However, each cat soon reveals their unique abilities and character through song and dance as they hope to be selected to ascend into the Heavy Side layer.
A true musical theatre phenomenon, CATS opened at London’s New London Theatre on May 11, 1981 and ran for a record-setting 21 years. The London success of CATS was nearly matched on Broadway where it ran at the Wintergarden Theatre for just over 18 years. The production is based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and includes the show-stopping song, “Memory”.
WFHS’s production marks the show’s amateur premiere in the state of North Dakota and features over 100 students in its cast, crew, and orchestra. Karen Morrison and Sue Jordahl serve as co-vocal directors with Morrison also conducting the pit orchestra. Assistant Director, Sean Palmer (MSUM Senior Theatre Arts student), joins a team of choreographers including Carrie Hubbard (MSUM alumus) and MSU-Moorhead theatre and dance professor, Craig A. Ellingson. CATS is directed and designed by WFHS and MSUM alumnus Adam Pankow. Gate City Bank proudly sponsors West Fargo High’s production.
Tickets are $8.00 for adults and $5.00 for students and can be reserved by calling 701-356-2050.
MSUM's Warne takes on CAMELOT - http://www.theatermania.com/los-angeles/reviews/01-2010/camelot_24214.html
46 MSUM Theatre Arts Students & Faculty Attend KCACTF
Our cup runneth over! This past week 46 MSUM theatre arts students and faculty attended the Region V Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) in Overland Park, KS. Our students and faculty received top honors for work in several areas.
The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCATCF) offers a tremendous opportunity for theatre arts students to compete in the areas of acting, directing & theatrical design; to audition for professional theatres: and to partake in workshops with major theatre artists. Students learn more about their craft with some of the most respected names in American Theatre. We have been participating in this regional festival for many years and many of our faculty have taken major roles in festival administration.
MSUM Theatre Arts received special commendations for each and every one of our of academic year’s mainstage productions eligible for this year's festival:
COMPLEAT FEMALE STAGE BEAUTYShelly Gaza, Achievement in Direction of Period Style
Ricky Greenwell, Achievement in Costume, Hair and Makeup Design
THE PRODUCERS
Katie Korynta, Achievement in Stage Management
RENT
Maxwell Heesch, Achievement in Film Production
Dani Collier, Achievement in Stage Management
PINOCCHIO
Tyler Michaels, Achievement in Direction
It was a tremendously productive and rewarding week, and we are grateful for the support of SABC, the Office of Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, and the Theatre Arts Department.
Eleven MSUM Students nominated for Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship Audition
MSUM theatre students, Brianna Lucas, Steve Molony, Tyler Michaels,
Sean Palmer, Ivan Olson, Carolyn Schmitz, Meagan Kedrowski, Jake
Larson, Joy Dolo, Bob Guck, and John Rian were nominated for and
competed in the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship Audition.
MSUM theatre students Briann Lucas and her partner Katie Adducci, and Bob Guck and his partner Caroline Stommes, advanced to the semi-final round in the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship Audition.
Senior Theatre Arts student Tyler Michaels won the prestigious Region V Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship Competition. The competition started on Monday morning with more than 280 competitors; Michaels and his partner sophomore Matthew Englund took top honors on Friday night after advancing through several rounds of competition. Their work featured a musical theatre selection from TITLE OF SHOW (accompanied by MSUM Music faculty member Julie Adams), an original piece penned by Michaels entitled THE COVER UP, and a monologue from Shakespeare's OTHELLO. Tyler and Matthew will travel to the Washington, DC Kennedy Center in April to compete with other regional winners from across the nation. Their all-expense paid trip will also afford them the opportunity to attend world-class master classes with top theatrical artists from around the globe. They will also be eligible for major cash scholarship awards.
MSUM has a production at KCACTF
MSUM's
own Richard Paul Klein's stunning production of HOW WILL YOU KNOW US,
NOW OR ANYTIME-- one of only four invited productions to the
festival--performed to standing ovations. This production was written,
produced, and performed by students -- the only production at the
festival to boast such a claim. The production also received the
runner-up award for professionalism in load in/load out and is still in
the running to travel to the Kennedy Center in April. Directed by
senior Theatre Arts student Sean Palmer, the production also featured
student work from Jay Triggs (Lighting Designer), AJ Wilson (Costume
Designer), John Vavrin (Sound Designer), Dani Collier (Stage Manager),
and a complete running crew of over 15 additional MSUM students.
Featured actors were Bob Guck, Joy Dolo, and John Rian.
MSUM Faculty Present Workshops at KCACTF
MSUM
faculty members Ricky Greenwell, Jennifer Tuttle, and Craig Ellingson
presented several workshops ranging from theatre make-up and design, to
Shakespeare and musical theatre styles dance. Greenwell's costume
design work for last year’s MSUM production of COMPLEAT FEMALE STAGE
BEAUTY was featured at the festival, and Ellingson was the coordinator
and emcee for the Region V Showcase of Invited Scenes.
Senior Theatre Arts student Rachel Palashewski
Senior Theatre Arts student Rachel Palashewski competed in the Stage
Society of Directors and Choreographers Directing Competition and made
it to the finals. She presented a ten-minute scene from EURYDICE by
Sarah Ruhl with actors Caroline Stommes, Jay Triggs, Haley Boyd, Austin
Haarstad, and Nick Kaspari.
Kimberly Miller work with the Faculty Directed Showcase
Kimberly
Miller, sophomore Theatre Arts student, was selected by Region V to be
one of four students to work with the Faculty Directed Showcase.
Kimberly Miller served as Assistant Director to Ryan Morehead from
Benedictine College and worked on the piece STREET DISH.
Seniors Kendra Cashmore and Klarissa Pudwill were featured in the Faculty Directed Showcase in the play WHO IS CHASING WHOM! Directed by Theresa Mitchell from Emporia State University, this scene won the overall Faculty Directed Showcase.
Congratulations to MSUM’s Ricky Greenwell
Congratulations to MSUM's Ricky Greenwell for recognition by
the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for his costume design of Compleat Female Stage Beauty.Greenwell's designs are now up for
presentation at the regional festival in Overland Park, Kansas in January.
Theatre students at Minnesota State University Moorhead raised $2,700 for AIDS patients during perfor
mances of Rent, a Broadway musical about young artists and musicians struggling to survive poverty and disease in New York’s Upper East Side.
“Everyone was incredibly generous once they heard where the money was going,” says MSUM Box Office Manager Amanda Citrowske.
Following each performance, cast members stood in the lobby with red buckets and collected donations from audience members. Funds raised go to the Minnkota Health Project to help local AIDS patients with food, rent and medication costs.
“We got a lot of thanks for bringing Rent to the area,” says Citrowske. “The show opened a lot of eyes.”
Two panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt were displayed at the performance hall, and several AIDS education events took place on campus and through collaboration with community agencies during the show’s run. The rock opera sold out all eight performances in October.
MSUM’s Theatre Department also raises money every year for the Rape and Abuse Crisis Center through its February production of The Vagina Monologues. Last year’s show raised more than $800.
“I want to be a real boy!”
An adventurous MSUM production of Pinocchio is set for Nov. 21 at 1 and 4 p.m. in Hansen Theatre on the MSUM campus. The show, created and directed by senior theatre arts major Tyler Mic
haels, features 24 student actors and 15 student technicians. The production has involved more than 75 theatre arts majors.
MSUM’s annual children’s theatre production also entertains and educates students in area schools. This year, a week of daytime performances Nov. 16-20 and Nov. 23 will bring nearly 8,000 elementary school students from numerous rural communities and the Fargo-Moorhead area to campus.
The story of Pinocchio originated in 1883. Carved from a piece of pine by a woodcarver named Geppetto in a small Italian village, the puppet Pinocchio dreams of becoming a real boy.
For tickets to the public performances, call the MSUM Box Office Monday through Friday from noon to 4 p.m. at (218) 477-2271 or purchase at the door. Tickets are $8 for adults; $5 for seniors, MSUM faculty, staff and alumni; $3 for children and students; and free for MSUM students with student identification.
Former Theatre student gets the star role she has long deserved and fills it to the fingertips
October 9, 2009Hard-core disciples of the religion known as the Theater are scarce on the grounds these days. But two evangelists of that embattled creed have set up camp at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater to attest that the faith lives on. Portraying 1920s stage stars in the Manhattan Theater Club’s Broadway revival of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s “Royal Family,” which opened on Thursday night, Jan Maxwell and Rosemary Harris are giving the kinds of performances that turn agnostics into true believers.
Ms. Harris is Fanny Cavendish, the matriarch of an acting dynasty, and Ms. Maxwell is her daughter, Julie, the reigning goddess of Broadway. And when, in the play’s second act, this mother and daughter start to preach the family gospel to an apostate in their midst, something close to a miracle occurs.
A production that up to that point has seemed merely a handsome, stilted revival of a dated comedy (a genre all too common in Manhattan’s institutional theaters) is suffused with the radiance of the pure, inexhaustible love of an ancient craft. All the usual clichés associated with the thrill of stage acting — from the paralyzing precurtain jitters to the revitalizing embrace of an audience — are not so much spoken as exhaled, as if they were the breath of life.
That Ms. Harris, 82, played Ms. Maxwell’s role in a fondly remembered Broadway production in the mid-1970s adds another layer of sentiment. But even those who know nothing of her history may find themselves moved to tears. What is happening is a blurring of illusion and bone-deep conviction that is peculiar to live theater, as two actresses playing actresses spin hokum into moonlight, just as their characters are said to do.
As reported earlier this week, it briefly looked as if another, less felicitous, melding of art and life might have befallen Doug Hughes’s production of this 1927 comedy. Fanny speaks proudly of her husband’s performing in sickness as well as health. And in a preview on Sunday, Tony Roberts, playing the Cavendish family’s business manager, experienced a minor seizure and became noticeably ill in his first scene, causing the matinee’s cancellation. His understudy, Anthony Newfield, filled in for him for several performances, but Mr. Roberts returned to the production on opening night. (His entrance was received with hearty applause.)
Mr. Roberts, a confident veteran of stage and film, gave a likable, restrained performance at the preview I attended. But it is only when Ms. Maxwell and Ms. Harris are center stage (and this is a play in which everyone vies for that spot) that the show moves from sepia-colored past into flesh-toned present. A satire notoriously inspired by the Barrymore clan, “The Royal Family” has always been a favorite of theater folk, for obvious reasons.
Like Noël Coward’s “Hay Fever” and the musical “Kiss Me Kate,” other larky portraits of people who live and die by the theater, “The Royal Family” allows performers to caricature the narcissism, self-dramatizing and infantile craving for attention that were once said to characterize their profession (and of course have nothing to do with actors as we know them today). It also pulses with the door-slamming farcical sound and fury found in the liveliest of Kaufman’s collaborations (like “You Can’t Take It With You” and “Once in a Lifetime”).
Yet in recent years I haven’t seen a fully satisfying production of “The Royal Family.” Too often the characters become the strutting sum of their affectations, as if they themselves came out of the parody-ready melodramas in which they were sometimes reduced to appearing.
As staged by Mr. Hughes (“Doubt,” this season’s revival of David Mamet’s “Oleanna”), this “Royal Family” takes a while to find its natural rhythm and even then doesn’t always hold on to it. Not all the cast members seem equally at home in John Lee Beatty’s lush rendering of the Cavendish family’s two-tiered apartment, a deluxe playpen for grown-up babies. (Catherine Zuber has provided mouthwatering period costumes to match.)
Fun and games at the Cavendish household include boxing lessons, furniture-toppling fencing matches, random piano playing and dodging the madding crowds that assemble outside once Tony Cavendish (Reg Rogers), a childlike Lothario modeled on John Barrymore, comes home from Hollywood, trailed by a process server with breach-of-promise papers. But the favorite activity for this family’s members is emoting for and at one another, which can grow wearisome if it’s not rooted in real emotional substance.
Mr. Rogers brings a zestful touch of Marx Brothers mania to the swashbuckling Tony, and he combines worldliness with innocence in a way that makes you understand why his mother dotes on him. And the estimable John Glover (late of “Waiting for Godot”) exudes a touching, broken dignity that helps lubricate the stiff-jointed role of Herbert, Fanny’s less successful thespian brother.
But Kelli Barrett, suggesting a standard-issue ingénue from the 1970s instead of the ’20s; Ana Gasteyer, who overdoes the shrillness of Herbert’s tootsie of a wife; and David Greenspan, as the loyal family butler, all seem to have arrived from different planets. (So does Larry Pine, as a rich suitor from Julie’s youth, but then that’s what his part asks for.) They’re not bad, but they’re not credible, either. And their self-consciousness is fatal to farce. (In fairness, I don’t think anyone could do much with the lovers’ dialogue between Ms. Barrett and Freddy Arsenault, as her society swain.)
Joe Orton, the great, subversive comic playwright of swinging London, insisted that farce worked only when played sincerely. Ms. Maxwell and Ms. Harris prove how right he was. Ms. Harris’s Fanny is an artfully subtle creation. Age hasn’t withered her, but it has subdued her, and the actressy poses of a lifetime have become gentle reflexes. You’re aware of the gap between eager spirit and weaker flesh, yet there’