EMAV Review: 'The African Company' at NCT was funny, furious and uniquely American ★★★★

Maurice-Aimé Green as 'James Hewlett'

Images by Josh Hawkins, UNLV Creative Services

★★★★☆ - Delicious

Did you know that there was an African Theatre Company in 1821 America?

During Nevada Conservatory Theatre’s (NCT) delicious 4-Star production of "THE AFRICAN COMPANY PRESENTS RICHARD III”, we learn that 6 years before New York abolished slavery and 40 years before the beginning of the Civil War, this theatre company existed. William Henry Brown, a free black American, organized a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

What do the words of a dead White poet mean to a group of Black actors? Everything, actually. After all, these are artists forced to spend their days disguised as maids and waiters. Hiding their gifts along with their feelings, until the sun sets and the time comes to discover themselves in Shakespeare's poetry. His writing demanding that everyone find their own way through his words, haters be damned. A backstage story like no other -- funny, furious and uniquely American.

Breanna McCallum as 'Sarah'

Shakespeare is the chosen cultural battleground in this inventive retelling of a little known, yet pivotal event in the history of America’s first black theatre company. Knowing they are always under prejudicial pressures from white society, and facing their own internal shakeups, the African Company battles for time, space, audiences and togetherness. The Company presents classic plays at a theatre in downtown Manhattan for both black and white audiences. But they are challenged when they dare to put on Shakespeare’s Richard III at the same time as the powerful and popular Park Theatre. Carlyle Brown’s humorous and touching play, based on real-life events, dares to ask the question: does Shakespeare belong to everyone?

Brandon Dawson as 'The Constable Man' and Cameron Stuart Bass as ' William H. Brown'

Their competition, Stephen Price, an uptown, Broadway-type impresario, is producing Richard III at the same time that the African Company's production and has promised a famous English actor overflowing audiences if he plays Richard in Price's theatre. Fearing the competition of the African Company's production, which is garnering large white audiences, Price manipulates the law and closes down the theatre. The Company rebounds and finds a space right next door to Price's theatre. At the rise of curtain of the next performance, Price causes the arrest of some of the actors in a trumped-up riot charge. The play ends with the Company, surviving, its integrity intact, and about to launch an equally progressive new chapter in the American theatre: They'll soon be producing the first black play written by black Americans of their day.

Maurice-Aimé Green as 'James Hewlett' and Riyadh as 'Papa Shakespeare'

The very capable cast included Cameron Stuart Bass as William H. Brown; Maurice-Aimé Green as James Hewlett; Brandon Dawson as The Constable-Man; Nate Marble as Stephen Price; Breanna McCallum as Sarah; Riyadh as Papa Shakespeare; and Lauren Washington as Ann Johnson.

Lauren Washington as 'Ann Johnson'

Director Melissa Maxwell did an admirable job keeping the action moving and getting the ensemble comfortable and confident in their transitions between the play-within-a-play. The designers created an intimate and authentic proscenium stage, with an exposed backstage above the curtain line and an ample apron in front of the proscenium arch.

The production and design team includes scenic designer Trevor Dotson, lighting designer Andrew Killion, co-sound designers Megan Thompson and Lina Lim, costume designer Hailey Eakle, technical director Ryan Pope, dramaturg Dr. Lezlie Cross, and production stage manager M. Sohaa Smith.

Carlyle Brown is a writer/performer and artistic director of Carlyle Brown & Company, based in Minneapolis. He is a Core Writer of the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, and an alumnus of New Dramatists in New York. He has served on the board of directors of The Playwrights' Center and Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for the nonprofit professional theatre and is a member of the board of the Jerome Foundation. He is the 2006 recipient of The Black Theatre Network's Winona Lee Fletcher Award for outstanding achievement and artistic excellence, a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2010 recipient of the Otto Rene' Castillo Award for Political Theatre, and 2010 United States Artists Friends Fellowship.

The next production at NCT is Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding, directed by Allegra Libonati and running March 8th through March 17th.

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EMAV Review: Nevada Ballet sparks mid-winter inspiration with new work, a diverse program, and the L

Images captured by Virginia Trudeau Photography

The cast of Nicolo Fonte’s Crane/ing.

★★★★½ - Delicious

Nevada Ballet Theatre’s (NBT’s) mid-winter program at The Smith Center featured four Las Vegas premieres including a World Premiere, "Crane/ing" by renowned Choreographer Nicolo Fonte. Commissioned exclusively for Nevada Ballet, this never-before-seen ballet featured music by Giovanni Sollima and Donnacha Dennehy. This eclectic program offered by Artistic Director Roy Kaiser included the Las Vegas Philharmonic conducted by Music Director Donato Cabrera. Krista Baker in Crane/ing and Alissa Dale in Firebird

The February 16th evening opened with RAYMONDA VARIATIONS, which premiered in 1961 at the New York City Ballet, with choreography by George Balanchine and music by Alexander Glazounov. Throughout his life, Balanchine was attracted to Glazounov’s music for Raymonda. He wrote: “to try to talk about these dances in any useful way outside the music is not possible. The music itself, its grand and generous manner, its joy and playfulness, was for me more than enough to carry the plot of the dances.”

George Balanchine’s Raymonda Variations. Choreography by George Balanchine c The George Balanchine Trust.

Balanchine focused on various ways to use a dancer's rising on toe, the releve. The five soloists danced brightly and had a workout in this respect, mutually elegant and poised. The cascade of classical solos and pas de deux was filled with sweet waltzes and daring virtuosity.

Next was a pas de deux from LIGHT RAIN by Gerald Arpino. The NBT performance of this work was part of the Joffrey/Aprino Festival, celebrating the lives of Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino by having organizations nationally and internationally perform their works. LIGHT RAIN (pas de deux) included music by Douglas Adamz & Russ Gauthier.

Light Rain has been the Joffrey Ballet’s signature piece since its premiere in 1981. Created for the Joffrey’s Silver Anniversary, and presented again as the closing ballet of the Company’s Golden Anniversary, Light Rain remains the company’s most beloved and requested work.

Jaime DeRocker and Steven Goforth in Gerald Arpino’s Light Rain (Pas de Deux).

Gerald Arpino was the co-founder and resident choreographer of the Joffrey Ballet, directing the company for twenty years after Robert Joffrey’s death. He created this ballet to showcase the new young dancers of the company. “It is my gift to these talented youngsters…I am inspired by their modes and rituals, their passions.” Light Rain, with its accent on youth, its American artists, and its original music, continues The Joffrey traditions begun in 1956.

The costumes were unitards and, from far away, it was sometimes hard to tell the different genders apart, but, unlike in classical ballet, it didn’t really matter. All the dancers were awe-inspiring at handling Arpino’s mix of modern-dance and ballet.

NBT was honored to present CRANE/ING, a World Premiere ballet by renowned choreographer Nicolo Fonte -- Music by Giovanni Sollima, Aquilarco #6 (Spinning Top Prelude) and Donnacha Dennehy / CRANE version II.

Monolithic gestures and poignant subtlety were two extremes in the score that are bound up with Fonte’s own passion for both boldness and intimacy in movement. Even after discovering that the original commissioning of the score was for a dance for machinery, he still found it fiercely “bird-like” and poetically delicate.

The cast of Nicolo Fonte’s Crane/ing.

“Crane/ing takes as its main premise that perhaps viewing things from a “bird’s eye” view, we are, metaphorically speaking, able to soar up above to an “oasis in the sky” and from that perspective see the extraordinary beauty below – the extraordinary beauty that exists deep in the collective sacred spaces of our hearts and souls.” (Nicolo Fonte)

Robert Mulvey in Firebird.

The final ballet on the bill was FIREBIRD, Igor Stravinsky's breakthrough work of 1910, with choreography by Yuri Possokhov -- one of the most iconic and spectacular of the classical ballets of that era.

The story is based on a Russian folk tale where Prince Ivan, assisted by the Firebird, destroys the evil magician Kashchei the immortal, marries his princess and brings happiness to the kingdom. Alissa Dale danced the Firebird with strength and delicacy. Her pas de deux with Ivan, Sergio Alvarez, embodied the romantic lyrical brilliance of the choreography. Robert Mulvey, as Kaschie, and Jaime Derocker, as the Princess, also performed with great passion and intensity. This piece definitely stands the test of time.

Firebird's Christina Ghiardi and Sergio Alvarez.

Throughout the evening, all of the dancers performed with great beauty and control, delivering first rate performances which captured every breath of the music, and managed the choreography with comfort and confidence, making this another memorable performance. As always, NBT dancers were elegant and rousing in equal measure.

It takes a world class ballet organization, orchestra -- and their respective artistic leaders -- to bring such new creative work to Las Vegas artists and audiences. May this stellar artistic collaboration between NBT and the Las Vegas Philharmonic spawn many successors.

Correction: Due to injury, Christina Ghiardi (pictured) was replaced by Alissa Dale in 'Firebird.' An earlier version misidentified the artist in performance. Please accept our apology for this error.

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EMAV Review: 'Love's Labour's Lost' brings the Bard's banter to life at NCT

★★★☆☆ - Satisfying

The Nevada Conservatory Theatre (NCT) presents a satisfying 3-Star production of Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" at the Judy Bayley Theatre (Nov. 30 - Dec. 9).

One of Shakespeare's earliest comedies, “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (written around 1594-95) details a pact made by the King of Navarre and three of his courtiers who swear off women in order to focus their energies on intellectual pursuits. The oath is quickly forgotten, however, following the appearance of the Princess of France and her entourage.

The play has all the hallmarks of a Shakespeare comedy: Letters are misdirected, disguises are donned and secret soliloquies are overheard by others. There’s a show within the show, and a few fools to keep the humor high. And through it all is that wonderful wit: wordplay in which “Shakespeare seems to seek the limits of his verbal resources, and discovers that there are none,” to quote the scholar Harold Bloom.

“Love’s Labour’s Lost” is unique in the Shakespeare canon because so much of its action relies on formal groupings of characters. In the main plot the courtly groups of men and women function very much as gender-defined units in a battle of the sexes that ultimately exposes the immaturity and pretentiousness of the young men.

Several of the male characters in the comic subplot are drawn from ancient comic traditions. The word “fool” is a technical term in Shakespeare’s plays. The fool in Elizabethan drama is someone employed to entertain a king or a duke or any other rich person who needs someone to entertain him. The convention in Elizabethan drama is that the fool is the most insightful and intelligent man in the play -- not to be confused with a clown who, in Shakespeare’s time was a simple rural man – a yokel.

These more exaggerated comic characters – which can be traced back to classic Roman comedy and the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition – are well characterized in this production: the braggart soldier (or miles gloriosus), Don Adriano de Armado (Equity Actor Jonathan Smoots) is a fantastical Spaniard who is at the center of the play's comic subplot, the courtship of Jaquenetta. Costard (Guest Artist Brandon Burk), the earthy slave (one of Shakespeare’s clowns), is an unsophisticated country bumpkin with an underlying shrewdness, who vies with Don Armado for Jaquenetta; Holofernes (UNLV senior Noah Keeling) is the stereotypical pedantic schoolmaster, conceited and quick to dismiss those he perceives as intellectually inferior, the commedia dell’arte figure of the Doctor.

Every company member handled the text “trippingly on the tongue”. Additional ensemble members include: Keach Siriani-Madden as King Ferdinand of Navarre; Delius Doherty as Berowne; Aimé Green as Longaville; Jacob Noble as Dumaine; Sarah Rice as The Princess of France; Amanda Guardado as Rosaline; Sydney Story as Maria; Gabrielle Silveroli as Katherine; Myles Lee as Boyet; Jacob Sidhom as Moth; Nicole Holbrook as Jaquenetta; Dawson Mullen as Dull; Ryan Baker as Sir Nathanial; and Johann Heske as Monsieur Marcade.

The Bard’s canon is tough work, certainly, but that is precisely why it continues to be essential knowledge and training for actors today. Luckily, Shakespeare continues to be the mostly widely taught playwright for actors and students around the world. Director and Guest Artist, Sandy Ernst, brings her considerable directing and teaching experience to bear in keeping the action moving across scenic designer Trevor Dotson’s royal outdoor courtyard of Navarre in the Pyrenees. Costume designer Katie Dennis admirably dressed the players in 1918 period attire. Lighting designer Andy Killion, along with sound designers Rosalie Chaleunsouck and Kaliah Silva, seamlessly supported time, place, and atmosphere throughout.

The Shakespeare Society’s artistic director, Michael Sexton, has said that “Becoming familiar and acquainted with Shakespeare’s work is good for any human being. It’s good for the soul. If one gets the opportunity to perform Shakespeare at a high level, it’s a privilege and an enormous joy. It’s one of the things that only we in the theater can do.”

Photos by: Katie Dennis Design

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