Burry Fredrik was a Broadway producer, regional theater director and all-around theater lover who lived in Fairfield County. She died five years ago at the age of 86. The Burry Fredrik Foundation has set up a new fellowship that honors her commitment to standards and sustainability in the regional theater realm.
It’s a clever concept: Each year, the Burry Fredrik Design Fellowship is awarded to a deserving design student who is about to graduate from the Yale School of Drama. Along with a $15,000 cash prize, the fellowship comes with work opportunities. First, the designer is asked to serve as a “design responder” for eight shows at the National Playwrights Conference.
The O’Neill explains that a “design responder” is “a blend of jobs — some more theoretical (planning for future productions) and some more practical (organizing props or scenery suggestions for the staged readings).” Then, if the Goodspeed, Hartford Stage, Long Wharf Theatre or Westport Playhouse want to hire the honoree within two years of winning the award, the Fredrik Foundation will “make a grant to that theater in an amount equal to the fee paid to the designer.”
The very first Burry Fredrik Design Fellowship has just been awarded, to Claire DeLiso. She dreamed up the scaffolding-and-platforms style for the world premiere of “Imogen Says Nothing” at Yale Rep, and also designed some clever environments for the Yale Cabaret (the claustrophobic modernized Greek tragedy “Boris Yeltsin”) and the Yale Summer Cabaret (the gloomy “Midsummer” and office-bound “Life and Death of Doctor Faustus”).
Here’s to more artful awards like this, that bring different theater institutions together with young artists for everybody’s benefit.
Napoli To New Haven To New York
“Napoli, Brooklyn,” which had its world premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre in February, is playing in New York City through Sept. 3 under the auspices of the Roundabout Theatre Company. This isn’t a transfer: The show was announced last year as a co-production between the two theaters. The Meghan Kennedy family drama still is directed by Gordon Edelstein and still has a set design by Eugene Lee, lighting by Ben Stanton, sound by Fitz Patton and costumes by Jane Greenwood. Only three of the New Haven cast members continue on in New York: Jordyn DiNatale as troubled teen Francesca Muscolino, Alyssa Bresnahan as her long-suffering mom and Shirine Babb as the factory worker Celia Jones.
New are Michael Rispoli as Francesca’s abusive father, Lilli Kay and Elise Kibler as her sisters Tina and Vita, Erik Lochtefeld as Irish neighbor Albert Duffy and Juliet Brett as Albert’s daughter Connie. Details at roundabouttheatre.org.
Smells Like Scene Study Spirit
Wendy C. Goldberg, who runs the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, is working on a grunge musical set depicting Seattle in the 1990s. It’s about a musical rivalry and a mysterious death, and is set to feature songs by Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Smashing Pumpkins (ahem, not a Seattle band) and Soundgarden. Goldberg conceived and will direct the project. The book will be by Matt Schatz, who was at the National Playwrights Conference in 2016 with his “The Burdens.” The show’s being developed by the Seattle Repertory Theatre; hopefully they’ll create something the grunge locals can relate to.
Reports that this is the first musical to feature songs by Nirvana deserve an asterisk. None of us who saw “Nirvanov” at the Yale Cabaret in 1994 — the year Kurt Cobain died — are likely to ever forget it. “Nirvanov” combined the life and works of Cobain with the basic plot and characters of Anton Chekhov’s drama “Ivanov.” The show (which at Yale starred Mark H. Dold, seen this year in “Cloud 9” at Hartford Stage) was later done in New York, Florida, California and, yes, Seattle. Originally presented using actual Nirvana songs, “Nirvanov” later had to swap them for originals composed by its creator/director David Karl Lee and others.
Look To The Rainbow
How far along the yellow brick road has “Chasing Rainbows: The Road to Oz” traveled? The musical, which was at the Goodspeed Opera House last season after just one previous production at the Flat Rock Playhouse in Arkansas, had three “private industry lab performances” last week in New York. Ruby Rakos is still portraying Judy Garland in the show, which follows the star’s path from vaudeville up to her iconic role as Dorothy.
Others from the Goodspeed cast, including Karen Mason, Sally Wilfert, Michael Wartella and Michael McCormick, will also take part in the labs. The choreographer will be Denis Jones, who was not with the show when it was at Goodspeed but has done other things there, including “Holiday Inn” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”
Cirque Bleu
Blue Man Group is now part of the Cirque du Soleil empire. The Canadian circus conglomerate announced earlier this month that it had purchased Blue Man Group Productions, which has shows running in six cities plus an international tour. Blue Man Group was co-founded by Wesleyan grad Chris Wink and one of the troupe’s first shows was a club gig opening for Cyndi Lauper at Toad’s Place in New Haven. In a prescient coincidence, both Cirque du Soleil and Blue Man Group played Hartford during the same week in June 2016.
Westport Community Theatre Strikes A Balance
Westport Community Theatre’s 2017-18 season offers classics, a couple of contemporary works that are hard to find anywhere, and yet another show by Ken Ludwig, who will be inescapable next year. It opened Sept. 15 through Oct. 1 with Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” directed by John Atkin, followed Nov. 24 through Dec. 10 by “The Diary of Anne Frank” directed by Richard Mancini.
Those two acknowledged classics yield to the much newer “Annapurna” (a relationship comedy by Sharr White, directed by Alexander Kulcsar) and “Yankee Tavern” (a conspiracy-theory suspense thriller by Steven Dietz, directed by Ruth Anne Baumgartner). The season ends June 8-24 with Ken Ludwig’s “Shakespeare in Hollywood,” meaning that you can catch at least five different Ludwig plays in Connecticut next season. Details at westportcommunitytheatre.com.
