Capital Rep Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Black Theatre Troupe of Upstate New York (BTTUNY)

Eclipsed

On June 21, 2021, it was announced that the Black Theatre Troupe of Upstate New York (BTTUNY) will be a Resident Community Company at Capital Repertory Theatre (theREP) (251 N. Pearl Street).

“For eleven years of programming, [BTTUNY] (formerly named Soul Rebel Performance Troupe) has had no permanent performance space, which necessitated an ongoing search for venue availability for every show the company produced. With dedicated headquarters in Capital Repertory Theatre for their upcoming productions, Founding Artistic Director Jean-Remy Monnay states, ‘…it is very exciting to know that BTTUNY has a secure home base for all of our shows this season and into the future. To know that we can plan a full season of work because we don’t have to worry about ‘where’ the next production will take place, is just so wonderful. With this residency, BTTUNY can grow. Our programming can grow, and so can our audience base.'”

This is way cool. My wife and I have spent a fair amount of time in the “new” CapRep building. For the past few Octobers, it has hosted the Readers Theatre fundraiser for Wizard’s Wardrobe, an afterschool tutoring service in Albany’s South End .

Support

“In addition to providing space on both of their new stages (the Lauren and Harold Iselin Studio and the theatre’s Main Stage) – Capital Repertory Theatre (and the Proctors Collaborative) will provide some support to BTTUNY such as ticketing, marketing, and development support, and some production support as outlined in the agreement between BTTUNY and the Proctors Collaborative. However, BTTUNY remains its own company. All programming and decisions for BTTUNY remain in the hands of Monnay and his board of directors.”

Part of that ticketing support this year included offering season ticket holders of Cap Rep and Proctor’s Theatre in Schenectady – this year, we took both! – complementary Try Me tickets. The Proctors Collaborative, including the Universal Preservation Hall in Saratoga Springs, uses this method to promote programs that might not have as much visibility. BTW, I’ve never been to UPH and need to rectify that.

On the list of Try Me tickets was a BTTUNY production of Berta, Berta. What’s that? From playwright Angelina’ Cheri’s website: “After committing an unforgivable crime, Leroy is granted one final wish: a chance to make amends with his long-lost lover Berta. Their reunion swells from a quarrelsome conjuring of the past to an impassioned plot to escape their impending fate.

Song

“The play is inspired by the prison chain gang song ‘Berta, Berta’, which originated on Parchman Farm, Mississippi State Penitentiary. It is a fictional origin story.”

The CapRep /BTTUNY description is slightly different. To my mind, it’s more accurate: “Set in 1920s Mississippi, ‘Berta, Berta’ tells the story of Leroy, a Black man sent to jail for following a White woman down the street to help her–a supposed crime that never existed. Prison changes him, and upon getting out, he finds himself to be a true criminal. Before giving himself back up to the police, however, he is determined to make amends with his long-lost girlfriend, Berta. The play highlights themes of doomed love, tragic misunderstandings, a flawed and biased prison system and magical realism.”

Review

The review in the Berkshire Eagle by J. Peter Bergman is spot on. “On director Michael A. Lake’s three-room set, Sadrina Renee and Alvin Kershaw play their story with grace and passion and their very professional abilities. You can’t help falling in love with these troubled people as they live through their traumas and their needs…

“This is a play like no other I have seen, and I have seen a lot of plays in my lifetime. There is rarely a moment when the two players are still, and those are all utterly romantic. Lake has kept Berta as active as a person could be at two in the morning. Leroy, on the other hand, facing disgrace and arrest, is as calm a human being as possible, an amazing feat of control. The way in which he responds to her would make him as fidgety as Berta, but instead, his calm is sometimes chilling.”

The play’s short run ended in October, but BTTUNY will be performing more programs this season. Valley Song by Athol Fugard will be at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, NY, about an hour from Albany, on November 15-17 and 22-24.

They will perform Once On This Island on CapRep’s main stage from February 6 to 16, 2025. I saw this show at Proctors in 2020, just before the pandemic.

The final BTTUNY performance of the 2024-25 season will be Eclipsed by Danai Gurira from May 29 to June 8 in TheRep’s Iselin Studio. Based on the quality of Berta, Berta, I imagine these will be fine performances.

Some Like It Hot; Seared

a hot-headed chef

On Thursday, September 19, my wife and I went to Proctors Theatre to see the national touring company production of Some Like It Hot. A couple of seasons ago, it was a smash on Broadway.

It was very useful that we saw the 1959 movie at a cinema in 2023, which starred Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe.

The interesting thing about the musical is that they took the bones of the fairly absurd storyline from the film and made a not-quite-as-absurd tale. It’s about two musicians in 1933 Chicago. Saxophonist Joe (Matt Loehr) and his best friend and bass player Jerry (Tavis Kordell) need a gig. But they are forced to “flee the Windy City after witnessing a mob hit.”

Meanwhile, in another speakeasy, performer Sweet Sue (Tarra Conner Jones) is arrested in a raid. After exiting jail, she forms an all-girl band and heads to California. Sugar (Leandra Ellis-Gaston) is the fine vocalist in the girl band. With gangsters hot on their heels, Joe becomes Josephine, Jerry becomes Geraldine – no, Daphne! – and they join the band on its cross-country train “for the life-chasing, life-changing trip of a lifetime.”

The show was great and occasionally exhausting. I expect that the chase scene near the movie’s end was edited together. The musical has a similar scene, but it’s astonishing in real-time.

All the performers are tremendous, including Edward Juvier as Osgood Fielding III, the multimillionaire who falls in love with Jerry/Daphne. His character is much more fleshed out than his cinematic predecessor.

The dog knows

From the Nippertown review:

“The Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin book with music by Marc Shaiman and lyrics by Scott Wittman and Shaiman is a thrill for all the senses. Scott Pask’s scene design and Natasha Katz’s lighting package create a beautiful world for the cast to inhabit. Gregg Barnes has put together a magnificent array of costumes… Broadway director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw does a wonderful job filling both roles… [He] works every ounce he can from the 25-member cast.”

Since it was a Thursday matinee, we watched a talkback session. Devon Goffman, who played the mobster Spats, and two dancers responded to questions.

The tour dates for Some Like It Hot run through at least August 2025. You should see it if it comes to your town.

The restaurant life

My wife saw the play Seared at Capital Rep in Albany on Saturday, October 5, the penultimate day of the run. The Rep’s page notes:

“Brilliant, hot-headed chef Harry Caesar Samayoa] scores a mention in a food magazine with his signature dish, and his business partner Mike [Kyle Cameron] finally sees profits within reach. The only problem? Harry refuses to recreate his masterpiece for the masses. Mix in a shrewd restaurant consultant [Rin Allen as Emily] and a waiter with dreams of his own, and it all goes to hell in this hilarious and insightful new play that asks us to consider where art ends and commerce begins.”

That’s pretty accurate. What you DON’T tend to get is this:

ALLERGY NOTICE: Seafood is cooked on stage during “Seared.” NO SHELLFISH. The following foods are also used in “Seared”—
asparagus, bacon, broccoli and broccolini, butter, cabbage, fennel, garlic, gnocchi, lemon, lettuce, mushrooms, oil, onions, pasta, pesto, salmon, some spices (cumin, paprika, mustard seeds, cinnamon, salt), spinach and white fish.

There was actual cooking onstage, and it smelled delicious! Seriously.

As for the play itself, Theresa Rebeck’s mostly comedy was off-Broadway five years ago. I liked the play more than the Berkshire Eagle and WAMC reviewers did. I’ve seen Harry’s ego in artists and other creatives. But it may have been overly long and a tad too shrill.

Still, the Times Union’s dining critic, Susie Powell Davidson, said the food side was correct. : “‘Seared’ taps into sizzles and scent, visuals in precise knife cuts and blaring music to convey escalating tension. This in contrast to the calm collegiality of coffee and doughnuts shared during prep and the cost-of-living issues discussed, from the high price of a Brooklyn doughnut ($3.50 for one) to the post-pandemic topic of equitably split tips.”

The linchpin of the production is the character of Rodney, the waiter (Jovan Davis, who was great in Sweat in March 2024).

Play: Three Mothers

playwright Ajene D. Washington

On a very busy Saturday, my wife and I saw the new play Three Mothers at Capital Rep in Albany, NY. If you’re of a certain age, as I am, you may remember the names James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman and even recall their pictures in the newspapers.

It’s a piece of American history that is baked into my brain as much as the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, AL in 1963 or any number of atrocities of the era.

But if you’re somewhat younger, you may not recall that on June 21, 1964, the three young men, were tortured and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Mississippi. They had the audacity to help Black Americans to register and vote. Chaney was Black and local, from Meridian, MS, the others Jewish from the New York City metro area.

Three Mothers is inspired by a 1964 photo of their bereft mothers leaving the final funeral together. The play imagines the conversation afterward, “in Carolyn Goodman’s home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when the three women forged an unbreakable bond and commitment to the Civil Rights Movement.”

Before the 90-minute production of Three Mothers with no intermission, Producing Artistic Director Maggie Mancinelli-Cahill noted that she, playwright Ajene D. Washington, and director Petronia Paley continued to tweak the piece as late as opening night, the day before we saw it.

The cast, Judith Lightfoot Clark, Trisha Jeffrey, and Cheryl Stern, was excellent. Even though the production is heart-wrenching, it was also occasionally, and surprisingly funny, as the three women portrayed negotiate how to move forward.

Freedom Summer

I spoke briefly to local thespian and former news anchor Benita Zahn. She mentioned how she had moderated a pre-play talk with author Julie Kabat about “her new book ‘Love Letter from Pig,’ based on her brother’s personal journals, which describe 1964’s Freedom Summer and the Freedom Schools.” Unfortunately, my wife and I missed that.

But I’m seriously considering attending the pre-show conversation with “Kabat, Andreesa Coleman, and Dorothy Singletary about their experience within the 1964 Freedom Schools in Mississippi” on Sunday, May 12 at 12:30 p.m.

Incidentally, I looked at the government page for Meridian, MS, and discovered that most of the current city council is Black. The mayor of Philadelphia, MS is black. That would have been unimaginable six decades ago.

He Was My Brother – Simon and Garfunkel. Andrew Goodman was a classmate of Paul and a friend of the duo.

The 25th annual sweat seasons

Sweat at Cap Rep and more

My wife and I saw a play, a musical, and a concert in eight days.

March 9: The drama Sweat at Capital Rep in Albany. ” This stunning Pulitzer Prize-winning play exposes the devastating impact of the loss of work in America’s Rust Belt circa 2000. Based on interviews with residents of Reading, Pennsylvania, Lynn Nottage brings her breathtaking storytelling to characters and situations that have become far too recognizable in the heart of de-industrialized America. “

From Nottage’s page: “Her play moved to Broadway [in 2017] after a sold-out run at The Public Theater… Inspired by her research on Sweat, Nottage developed This is Reading, a performance installation based on two years of interviews at the Franklin Street, Reading Railroad Station in Reading, PA, in July 2017.”

The Times Union’s Steve Barnes loved it. “The nine-member cast, under the accomplished direction of Margaret E. Hall, connects so intimately with their characters and the audience that we’re ground down alongside them, albeit with the remove of fiction, as financial turmoil ruins life, family bonds, and decades-long friendships in Rust Belt America while the Bush-Gore 2000 election unfolds.”

Sweat is about labor and the threat of exported jobs, ethnic bias, and the good old days. It’s playing through March 31 and is well worth your while.

Can you spell…

March 10: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was performed at Albany High School. The musical has been around for almost two decades, yet I had never seen it in any iteration.

As the Wikipedia page notes, “An unusual aspect of the show is that four real audience members are invited on stage to compete in the spelling bee alongside the six young characters.”

It was hilarious but also touching, especially as the number of spellers was winnowed down and the kids acknowledged the stress of the bee. There were only three performances, and we caught the final performance.

The Albany school district page noted that “some of the show’s content may not be suitable for young children.” Probably true.

We had to go because one of our church attendees was a speller, and also Jesus. Albany High often has high-quality productions, and this continued the trend.

Here’s the Broadway cast album of the musical.

Bermel

March 16: That day, my wife and I picked up our daughter from college for spring break, then promptly abandoned her so that we could attend the Albany Symphony Orchestra under the direction of conductor David Alan Miller. It took place at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.

We got the tickets from a woman at church and her husband who had another engagement. The first surprise: they have box seats! They’re kind of neat. Among other things, I can see that the music for the strings stage right of the conductor was mostly traditional, but two of them used electronic devices.

The first piece was Murmurations by Derek Bermel. The composer explained that a murmuration is a noun plural for a flock of starlings, which sometimes fly in unison and at other times move independent of the group. And the music does the same. Here’s the Gathering at Gretna Gardens and Gliding Over Algiers and Swarming Rome, recorded six years ago.

Esmail

The second piece is The History of Red by Reena Esmail. She says: “The first time I heard Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, it changed my life. I was fourteen years old, and as I sat under the stars at the beautiful Ford Theater on a summer night in in Los Angeles with my parents, I completely identified with the voice of the child who narrates the text of the piece – so aware of the huge, complex world that I was seeing, even through young eyes. Just trying to parse it all. I can pinpoint that one performance as a pivotal moment in my decision to be a musician. I just wanted be someone who could create that kind of beauty.

“The History of Red is borne from the same bones as Knoxville: it is also a large-scale work for soprano and chamber orchestra (intentionally written for the same instrumentation), where the singer grapples with the world around her. And yet it is different — Linda Hogan’s beautiful text is clearly the voice of an adult woman, aware not only of her own current world, but of the entire, complex history of her ancestors. Perhaps that is why her words instantly grabbed me — at this time in the world, when we are each grappling with our own complicated, intertwined histories, her journey felt so resonant to me.”

The soprano at ASO was Molly Netter. Here’s Kathryn Mueller singing from 2021. It may take another listen for me to really warm up to it.

Vivaldi

In the pre-concert talk, David Alan Miller made an interesting parallel. He and the orchestra work closely with so many living composers, working through the best way to actualize the intent of composer and musicians. But, he claims, it happens with dead musicians as well. It’s almost like seance.

It helped that they were able to access older bows and traditional strings. Four young violinists each played a season of Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons: Ravenna Lipchuk, Amelia Sie, Shelby Yamin, and Edson Scheid. The musical dialogue between solo violins and cellist were wonderful; at least one fiddler turned to face the cellist, like I’ve seen a couple rock guitarists do. It may an old chestnut, but it was a good one, and it’s better live.

Antonio Vivaldi: The Four Seasons. Voices of Music, Freivogel, Moore, Youssefian.

Ironweed’s 40th, Lux aeterna, RISSE fundraiser, FFAPL gala

Requiem and other texts

Here are four events coming in the next month that I want to plug. I avoid noting these here because most people reading my blog don’t live in New York State’s Capital District. Still, they’re all events I have a special attachment to. I’ve mentioned the last one before.

The NYS Writers Institute is celebrating Ironweed’s 40th anniversary with the first-ever marathon public reading of the novel written by Albany’s native son, William Kennedy, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and put the author’s hometown on the literary map.

The special event will begin at noon and continue through 8 p.m. on WEDNESDAY, November 1 (NOT Thursday, Nov.1, as the flier suggests.)

“It will be hosted at the Albany Distilling Co. Bar and Bottle Shop, maker of Ironweed whiskey, at 75 Livingston Ave. in the North Albany neighborhood where the author grew up and where some of the fictional scenes in the Depression-era narrative set in 1938 take place.”

To sign up for a time slot as a volunteer reader, visit: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C084AAFA72FA3FAC52-45194995-albany#/

The final chapters of Ironweed will be read on stage by the novel’s author and invited VIP guest readers, beginning at 7 p.m. at Capital Repertory Theatre, 251 N. Pearl St., adjacent to Albany Distilling Co. Reservations are required. Go to: https://capitalrep.org/event/ironweed/

The ticket prices are a donation of $10, $25 or $50. All proceeds will go to benefit the food pantry and free meal outreach at Sacred Heart Church, 33 Walter St. in Albany, which was Kennedy’s parish when he was growing up.

“The novel takes place across three days — All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls Day — in the jagged, heartbreaking journey of Francis Phelan, an alcoholic vagrant and former Albany professional baseball player.”

Neighborly

Refugee and Immigrant Support Services of Emmaus (RISSE) Annual Fall Fundraiser: Homecoming Open House

Sunday, November 12th, 2023, 2:00 – 4:00 pmRISSE, 715 Morris Street, AlbanyJoin RISSE as “we celebrate our newest neighbors and the newcomers who have made the Capital Region their home. The event will showcase performances and food from a variety of cultures from around the world.

“Learn more about RISSE, our partner agencies, and our collective work welcoming refugees, immigrants, and asylum seekers to the Capital Region.”

Click Here to Register Now!

This event is free and open to the public. However, donations are appreciated and encouraged.

Lux Aeterna is a 1997 five-movement piece by Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) perform. As First Pres’ music director, Michael Lister, noted: “It is a sensitive and moving setting of the Requiem and other texts and will be a time for us as a community to remember and honor those of who we have lost from our community over the several past years.”

First Presbyterian Church is located at 362 State Street, Albany, at the corner of Willett Street, across from Washington Park. There is parking on the street and in the park. The music will be in the sanctuary on Friday, November 3, at 6 p.m., while the art display in the adjacent room will start at 5:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.

Century

The Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library (FFAPL) look forward to seeing you on Saturday, October 21^st, as we celebrate 100 years of the Albany Public Library! The Centennial Celebration will be held at the newly-expanded Café Madison at 1108 Madison Ave. Albany, NY, from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. Cocktail attire is suggested. Tickets are available via the link above.

The evening will feature music, a silent auction, a mystery wine pull, stationed hors d’oeuvres, and an open bar. FFAPL has partnered with Harding Mazotti’s Rideshare Home Program to provide free rides home from the event! Scan a QR code at the event to get a free Uber voucher for pick up at Café Madison (Up to $200).

If you plan on driving to the event, street parking and nearby parking lots are available after-hours, including the Pine Hills Library.

If you are not able to attend the event but would like to support Albany Public Library, please check out the online auction showcasing unique products and experiences from local businesses.