Offscript - Summer Stock
Make your summer more dramatic during the off season
In summertime, it’s hard to keep your play-going muscles from getting flabby. Despite such choices as Georgia Shakespeare’s summer repertory and both parts of Angels in America at Onstage Atlanta, local theater proves more sparse than usual this summer. To maintain your theatrical frame of mind throughout the off-season, here are some ways to think outside the Atlanta box office.
1) Check out the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The spacious Montgomery playhouse offers a spiffy venue for polished productions of classics and new plays throughout the year - and is close enough for a day-long road trip. Its current repertory, running through July 10, features three Shakespeares (Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It and Coriolanus), Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival recently named Geoffrey Sherman as its new producing artistic director. Sherman, who directs Coriolanus, specialized in new plays at Michigan’s BoarsHead Theatre, so it’ll be interesting to see how the festival develops under his leadership.
2) Take a class. Why wait around to watch someone else’s show when you can learn to put on your own? Taking classes in theatrical arts helps you appreciate the work that goes into a professional show. The options can be a little lighter in the summer, but one of the most intriguing courses is Georgia Shakespeare’s Comic Timing and Playing Humor taught by veteran Atlanta actor John Ammerman Aug. 15 and 22. Ammerman teaches the finer points of physical comedy, “reaction response” (i.e., double-takes), working with props and funny business with partners. The course even has practical applications: At the office, you can entertain your favorite co-workers - and annoy the rest.
3) Listen to a CD. If you’re driving on vacation, take a show on the road. Broadway original cast soundtracks make great listening on long trips, and it can be fun to compare, say, the Bebe Neuwirth Chicago with the recent film version. A benefit of hit movies-turned-musicals, like The Producers and Hairspray, is that if you’ve seen the original film, you can clearly envision how the stage version works just by hearing the songs. The newly released Spamalot! soundtrack features musicalized scenes familiar from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (song titles include “I’m Not Dead Yet” and “Run Away”), as well as straight-up parodies of Broadway musicals. “The Song that Goes Like This” effectively encapsulates everything wrong with Andrew Lloyd Webber in two minutes and 53 seconds.
4) Rent a play. Put the “theater” in your home theater by bringing home a classic stage play on video or DVD. Particularly intriguing is Kino International’s recent DVD rerelease of The American Film Theatre productions from the 1970s, which presented film versions of acclaimed stage productions, often with their original casts. The 14-film series could be a time capsule of Broadway’s best, featuring Lee Marvin in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield in A Delicate Balance, and Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright in Three Sisters. Plus, such DVD extras as actor and playwright interviews serve educational value, and aren’t just Hollywood hype (www.kino.com).
5) Prepare for next season. You can enhance your experience of 2005-06 shows by doing a little homework. Since the Alliance Theatre presents Jon Jory’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in January, why not read the Jane Austen book? 7 Stages’ new season could feature its own reading list: The UnPossessed in March makes a carnival-style riff on Don Quixote, while Nickle and Dimed in April adapts Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling book about American minimum wage labor. Listen to Robert Johnson blues for Robert Earl Price’s loosely biographical play Come on in My Kitchen in February.
And perhaps some deep breathing and concentration exercises would help you brace yourself for 7 Stages’ fall festival of head-spinning plays by Caryl Churchill, including the cloning drama A Number.
Upstairs, Downstairs For the first season programmed by new artistic director Kate Warner, Dad’s Garage Theatre sticks to the tried-and-true on its mainstage while taking more chances on its smaller Top Shelf space. The mainstage season follows a formula set by earlier years: a campy fall musical (The Rocky Horror Show in September), a Chick and Boozy Christmas show in December, another installment of the short play festival 8 1/2 x 11 in January, and a drag-heavy summer comedy (Die Mommy Die by Psycho Beach Party playwright Charles Busch).
The Top Shelf theater features more intriguing world premiere plays such as Lawrenceburg by Travis Sharp, and Sleepy, a one-act by Creative Loafing contributor Steve Yockey. Perhaps the most daring is April’s theatrical chestnut One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which seems out of place among the hip, new plays - and thus all the more intriguing.