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DOUG ROYSDON IS 2015'S BRIGHTEST AND MOST INSPIRING THEATRICAL FORCE
What we theater lovers genuinely need more of are Doug Roysdon and his effective, often manic, efforts to create venues, opportunities, and calendar dates for the NON-institutional performing artists.
His 'IceHouse Tonight' series, entering its third year, offers the most accessible and affordable calendar and playing space opportunities ever seen in the Lehigh Valley.
Mr. Roysdon is best known and deservedly respected for his marvelous Mock Turtle Marionettes and their many flanges and limbs that extend into regional and coastal stage performance spaces.
But his ambitious attempts to rally the untraditional performing arts community--- the one that mostly abjures the Broadway and university models--- into something resembling a viable entity may become his most enduring contribution to the region.
Please support this great effort. Visit http://icehousetonight.com/
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THE VALLEY'S SEEMINGLY IRREPLACEABLE LOSS
I never met anyone who loved watching theater more than Myra Outwater.
Myra, our friend, critic, and advocate, died in August.
Her Allentown Morning Call reviews consistently buoyed the lesser known and more adventuresome theater companies in the region for over twenty years, even as they humbled the more traditional and financially resilient.
Her critical observations and encouraging spirit were more precious than any financial grant or private endowment could be.
Many of us were aware how irreplaceable Ms Outwater would be, even as she bounded cheerily into our lobbies and scribbled on her notepad throughout our shows. Although there have been many fine and perceptive theater reviewers in our region's print publications, most notably Dan Sigley, John Flautz, and David Howell, Myra's bubbling enthusiasm for unpretentious and straightforward stage production shone above the rest in every column and review she wrote.
I never met anyone else nearly as supportive of and inspiring to our work at Crowded Kitchen Players.
She and her husband Eric became mainstays at our shows. She wrote, in her 2004 year end review, " I also got my first look at the work of The Crowded Kitchen Players. Their effervescent rendtition of 'A Thurber Carnival' was so much fun that I returned to see their equally well done Christmas production, 'Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Christmas Goose'. This is a group that manages miracles in small spaces, and does it with flair, farce and fun."
You can only imagine how stirring and encouraging these words sounded to a troupe struggling to find its audience.
You can also only imagine how still the air of critical review seems now in the wake of her passing.
She had a flair for the dramatic in her own life. After curtain at one of our plays, Myra told me about a painting, a canvas by a nationally acclaimed artist, that she had some years earlier lent to a local theater to help decorate its lobby, and she was outraged that the theater now refused to return it to her.
Eric had greatly admired the work, and now that he was confined to a personal care facility, Myra wanted to hang the painting on his bedroom wall.
When she invited me to her home one afternoon to donate Eric's formal dress clothes to our costume collection, and while giving me a tour of Eric's facsimile of an RMS Titanic stateroom (created from an actual stateroom from its sistership, RMS Olympic) on the lower lever of their house, she asked me if I would conspire with her to find where the painting was being stored, and to retrieve it for her.
Not long after, upon a cold and snowy evening, we managed to drape a shower curtain over the drywall-size, framed painting and spirit it down a back stairs, out of the theater, slide it onto the back of my truck, and deliver it to Eric's nursing home.
The painting hung, triumphantly restored to its rightful owner, upon his bedroom wall until his final days.
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THE OVERLOOKED GEM OF REGIONAL PRODUCTIONS
As for the productions themselves in 2015, the Lehigh Valley was awash in turgid musicals performed much less for the elevation of their audiences than for the overflowing coffers of their producers.
The only one of integrity, sincerity, and grit that I came across off-campus this year was a wondrous staging of 'Working' in cozy Dutch Country Playhouse in Telford, beautifully paced and choreographed by young, highly skilled, and remarkably un-jaded theater artists.
The feel of attending theater in that space is much like that of a church-social. But that feel was almost immediately dispelled by the graphic, matter-of-fact, and completely unselfconscious production of this unassuming show.
Check this place out: www.dcptheatre.com
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HOWEVER, IF YOU'RE GOING FOR BIG, BUT NONETHELESS WORTHWHILE...
The institutional theaters, aka college drama and dance departments, along with their dour donors, are really the only places we should be finding Broadway retreads and the overexposed classics these days.
They've got the best spaces for that sort of thing; they've got the endowment necessary to afford the technical excesses needed to the create the illusions audiences want to grasp hold of; and they've got the indentured--- and ingenuous--- and often very skilled--- labor force these spectacles require.
And, as usual, the finest of these was Muhlenberg and its Summer Music Theatre, whose 'Hello Dolly' lived up to the elevated standards this annual series has established.
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SERIES ON RACIAL DISCRIMINATION LAUNCHED AND ON ITS WAY
'Voices of Conscience: Toward Racial Understanding' is a year-long, Lehigh Valley-wide arts series designed to encourage and promote socially-conscious art on issues surrounding race. The series features music, photography, poetry, theatre and other events on this topic, plus related community performances and discussions. As today's America struggles with questions of identity and growing inequality, we need a sensitive and socially-conscious public, now more than ever.
The series was originally conceived by Crowded Kitchen Players and Allentown Public Theatre to encourage more conversation about, and greater sensitivity to, these issues. It has since expanded to include a wide cross-section of organizations across the Lehigh Valley committed to furthering thoughtful engagement of meaningful topics through art. Also participating are: Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley, Basement Poetry, Bethlehem Public Library, Godfrey Daniels, Lehigh University, Lehigh Valley Friends Meeting, Mock Turtle Marionette Theatre, Moravian College, Muhlenberg College Multicultural Center, Northampton Community College, Selkie Theatre, and Sing for America.
For more information, please visit www.lehighvoc.com