Please Attend the Holiday Cabaret!

Posted by Bruce Miller
Whether you are one of Greater Richmond's theatre artists, theatre attendees, or a blog reader sympathetic to theatre in general, I hope you will join us this holiday season in our vital efforts to raise money for the Richmond Theatre Artists Fund. The RTAF is an endowment fund managed by the Community Foundation and the Richmond Alliance of Professional Theatres.

Our annual Home for the Holidays benefit cabaret begins this coming Sunday evening, Dec 14 at 7 pm; with subsequent performances at 7 pm on Tuesday Dec 16; 11 pm on Saturday Dec 20; 7 pm on Sunday Dec 21; and 7 pm on Monday Dec 22.

Nineteen of Central Virginia's best musical theatre performers--including Larry Cook, Corey Davis, Georgia Farmer, Jan Guarino, Robin Harris-Jones, Michael Hawke, Kelly Kennedy, Lauren Leinhaas Cook, Katrinah Lewis, Jason Marks, Billy Christopher Maupin, Robyn O'Neill, Derek Phipps, Maggie Roop, Janine Serresseque, Angela Shipley, Debra Wagoner, Chloe Williams, and Tony Williams on piano--are volunteering their time and talent to raise money for the Richmond Theatre Artists Fund.

This important charity provides emergency financial assistance to members of our own community when, through no fault of their own, they face impossible financial challenges and need our help.

I believe in the Richmond Theatre Artists Fund with all my heart. I have known its recipients--the challenges they faced before receiving help and the great joy they experienced when they realized that someone actually cared enough to assist them during their time of crisis.

I hope each and every one of you will make a point to attend one of the cabaret performances this season. I hope you will twist the arms of all your friends, relatives and neighbors. We really need to sell tickets if this once-a-year fundraiser is to be a success.

I've attended every previous performance of the cabarets, and I can assure you that they are lots of fun.

Regular tickets are $25 each. Barksdale and Theatre IV subscriber tickets are $20 each. All of you who are active members of the Richmond theatre community can reserve tickets for whatever size contribution you can afford, no questions asked.

The box office will list these pay-what-you-will tickets as comps, and you can donate whatever works with your budget. 100% of your contribution will go to increase the principal of the Fund. The Fund currently stands at approximately $21,000, and yields approximately $1,000 in emergency relief each year. Over time, we'd like to increase the Fund's principal about tenfold. The important thing is to support your friends and colleagues by attending and making whatever contribution is within your means.

It's also important to make reservations, so that we know how many people to expect.

Please help us spread the word. I honestly can't understand why every performance isn't sold out. All performances are held in the Barksdale Willow Lawn lobby, and all seating is cabaret style at tables. The bar is open throughout the event.

I count on seeing you and all of your friends there.

Thanks. Happy Holidays!

--Bruce Miller

Harris-Jones Scores at First NYC Audition

Posted by Bruce Miller

I received a Happy Thanksgiving email from Robin Harris-Jones, late of Richmond now of NYC, reporting some great news. After practically just arriving in the Big Apple, Robin has been cast in a leading role at her first audition. No huge surprise there. Here in River City, Robin was definitely a young woman whose star was on the rise.

The photo shows Robin as an Ozian, in case you're wondering.

“Good news on my end,” Robin writes. “I got a theatre job! Off my first audition! I'll be headed down to Ft. Myers, FL in a couple weeks to play Cathy in The Last Five Years for Synergy Productions of SW Florida. Unless something goes terribly awry, I'm supposed to leave NY around Dec 3 with a run, I believe, Dec 17 thru Jan 27 at the Foulds Theatre.

The artistic director, Andrew Kurtz, is a busy bee - artistic director of 2 orchestras in Florida, an opera company in Philly, and a little music theatre company to boot!I can't wait to get back to work … and have a role I've wanted to play for a long time on my resume!!!!”

That's Maestro Kurtz's photo to the right--obviously a man who knows an amazing voice when he hears one.

Robin sends her best wishes to one and all for a happy holiday season.

--Bruce Miller

First Friday's at the Empire!

Posted by Catherine Dudley
I just wanted to let you guys all know… if you’re not coming downtown on the first Friday of every month- you’re missing out! At every event the streets are swarming with people, and the energy is amazing. The restaurants are packed, the art galleries are filled to capacity, the music is spilling out into the streets from numerous storefronts and we, here at the Empire Theatre, are proud to show off our beautiful and historic building. Some months our lobby presents live music from awesome bands around the Richmond area, and some months we have a video montage of several of our past productions playing on a large screen in the lobby. Every month there is a gallery display of some kind- photography, artwork, sculpture, costume display, etc…, but there is always a ton to be seen. The bar is ready to serve, and the theatre space itself is ready to be admired. So come on down and join us every First Friday night, and see what you’ve been missing! The theatre beckons…

(This Friday also come check out a cabaret featuring Keydron Dunn, Russell Rowland, Billy Christopher Maupin, Andrea Ross, Audrey Snyder, Robin Harris-Jones, Janine Serresseque, Corey Davis and Chloe Williams.)

-Catherine Dudley

A "Bridge" to Cherish

Early in the performance of Austin’s Bridge, now enjoying a wonderful World Premiere with Firehouse Theatre Project, the character of Austin Quinn sings that his actions are about to finally set him free. Watching the musical play that follows, I kept thinking that author Bill C. Davis was also experiencing a sort of freedom.

Much of the action of Austin’s Bridge is set in a residential community for mentally and developmentally disabled adults in Upstate New York. For four summers, I lived and worked at a similar residential facility, Camp Baker in Chesterfield County, and for one full year thereafter I was employed at the Development Training Center in Richmond.

I remember as if it were yesterday how strange the residents of those facilities seemed to me at first. I felt like 95% of their physical, psychological and emotional traits were different from mine. By the end of that first summer, I realized that the opposite was true. In 95% of the ways in which we thought and felt and acted, we were exactly the same.

Except they had one major strength that I lacked. Freedom. I was living my life behind a wall of self-consciousness, social mores, artifice and subtext. I regret that I still do. The residents seemed to me to be completely free of these obstacles. They said exactly what they felt, they asked for exactly what they wanted and needed, their emotional lives were rich and layered and unencumbered by a desperate need to appear to be “normal.”

Lacking this freedom, I began to feel like I was the one who was disabled.

Very early in his career, Bill Davis (pictured to the left) wrote a super-hit—Mass Appeal, which has been internationally successful both on stage and screen. Mass Appeal is a beautiful play. We produced it years ago at Theatre IV with an African American cast.

I’m sure that writing a super-hit can provide traps just as easily as it can provide freedom. I’m so glad that, at least at this stage in his career, Bill Davis seems to have chosen to be free.

Austin’s Bridge is not like most contemporary plays. It wears its heart on its sleeve. It is honest and gentle and sweet in a way that reminded me of The Fantasticks, except it is of course completely different. Like the residents it portrays, it makes no attempts at artifice or subtext. It’s all about freedom and feeling and shucking off the need to hide. To be honest, it took me a while to get used to its simplicity and sweetness. But ultimately, I found myself caught up in its spell, in a very similar way to the manner in which I remember becoming enthralled by the unencumbered emotions of the Camp Baker residents.

Depending on what kind of person you are, Austin’s Bridge may seem beautiful or sappy, baldly honest or sentimentally manipulative. I’m sure that Bill Davis knows this, and he has written freely the play that shows the inner-workings of his heart. He openly shares emotions with us, writing honestly with the courage of his convictions.

Chalk me up among those who found his work to be beautiful and honest. When one central couple explains, in two or three words, the absolute necessity of marriage, my heart leapt into my throat.

And let me express my admiration for the wonderful cast, who entered into their roles with body, mind and soul. Not to mention the fact that they sing their hearts out. You guys knocked me out.

By all means, go see Austin’s Bridge. However you respond, you will surely be impressed by the fact that this World Premiere is happening right here in River City. And just like Bill Davis, his startlingly gifted composer Brett Boles, and the multi-talented cast, the Firehouse itself is going for it with everything its got.

I’m jealous of theatrical intentions and exercises and institutions that are so pure, and simple, and free. I wish this run, and whatever runs may follow, all the success in the world.

--Bruce Miller