July 1, 2005

"For people who bring a devotional level of skill to tasks that are ancillary to the original creative work but absolutely essential for its success - assistants, backdrop painters, toy makers, book designers - [we reserve] a special, grateful admiration."

Tony Kushner
“The Art of Maurice Sendak”
- submitted to In The Wings by Claiborne Dawes

The Concord Players’ 85th season received 21 nominations and seven honorable mentions for the EMACT Distinguished Achievement and Special Honors Awards. At the June 30th ceremony, Sunday in the Park with George was awarded Best Supporting Actress in a musical, for Maryann Swift’s performance as Yvonne; Doug Cooper won Best Set Dressing in a musical; and Best Properties in a musical went to Marion Pohl and Charlotte Kelly and Best Lighting Design in a Musical went to Darren Evans & Eric Jacobsen

Mark Baumhardt is directing Waldo Fielding in “The Angel of Brooklyn” as part of The Hovey Players 9th Annual Summer Arts Festival, July 15, 16, 22 and 23. For further information visit http://www.hoveyplayers.com/shows/shorts05.html.

Nancy Berger will be the guest soloist with the Concord Pops Band during their Summer Series Concerts at the Fruitlands Museum, in Harvard, MA on Thursday, July 21 at 7:30 P.M. She will also be performing in two benefit cabarets for the New England Light Opera Company. Wednesday, July 6, will be toast to the tunes of Broadway, and on Wednesday, July 20, the theme will be Gilbert and Sullivan. The performances are held at the Congregational Church of Topsfield. For more information, visit the New England Light Opera web-site at http://www.newenglandlightopera.org.

The Town Cow Theater Company, in collaboration with The Concord Ensemble, reprised their October 2004 performances of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” and William Walton’s “Facade” at the North Andover High School Auditorium on June 14. The cast was comprised of Concord Players Myron Feld, Jay Newlon, Gisele Ganz, and Thomas Caron.

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“What is a true theatre? It is a body of craftsmen - actors, directors, designers, technicians, administrative staff - united on a permanent basis to develop its own technique, to embody a common attitude to life that an audience more or less shares. Such theatres may be socially, politically, or religiously motivated, but each of them must develop an identity, a style, a “face,” a meaning of its own. Above all, true theatre sets itself a goal and plans its work as a lifelong community.
So long as theatre production is envisaged as a piecemeal endeavor - a series of disparate “good shows” - the fruitless cry for theatre as a profitable business will persist and talk about the theatre’s decadence or desuetude will continue, ad nauseum.
Giant luxury constructions do not serve art. An architectural face-lift and the most modern equipment offer no solution to the essential problems which the theatre confronts.
We are the problem, we and our ignorance of the theatre’s very nature. For the theatre is not a business; it never has been basically that. It is an art of direct communication grounded on shared social and moral values. It is not, first of all, a condiment, a genteel pastime, an escape from reality, but like all art it is a resource in civilization’s human treasury. It is, moreover, perhaps one of the most telling expressions of a people’s innermost character, because it is an art composed of many elements, of which the matrix is the public itself. Everyone in the theatre is a vital communicant; each is responsible to the other. Every departure from that general idea, no matter how tricked out by technical novelty, by advantageous physical means, even by endowments of huge sums of money and property, must of necessity diminish its most valuable function, its true reason for being.”

Harold Clurman
“The Fervent Years”

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The deadline for In The Wings is the third Tuesday of every month.

Thomas Caron, editor