***

And meantime, Craig Pinder’s rehearsals for The Tempest are moving on, and rehearsals have shifted from one cast member’s house to another, bigger one.
Patti-Anne Ali arrives on Saturday, and after that the real work begins. Right now — the play’s getting read again, and everybody’s reading it.

More here!

Listen up!

Dana Ferguson and David Burrows read Ariel and Antonio

Roger Gibson (Adrian) smiles for the camera

Director Craig Pinder gives, well, direction

Veteran actor Mik Bancroft returns to the stage for The Tempest

Ensemble work

Gene Cage (Ferdinand) listens to the director

All the female parts have been cast, but we’re still looking for some men for The Tempest. We’ll be auditioning at the Hub, Bay and Colebrooke, between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday August 8th, 2009.

Audition pieces may be downloaded here.

Image from Zecora Ura's 2006 adaptation of The Tempest

This year, Ringplay is working on a similar adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Widely understood to be Shakespeare’s swan song, the original play tells the story of Prospero, the scholar-magician who loses his dukedom to his more ambitious brother, and who, after being exiled from his home, winds up on an island whose chief inhabitants are a legion of spirits, and Caliban, one creature who takes some kind of human form. Prospero settles on the island with his daughter Miranda, and he raises her, and tries to tame the wild being he meets there. The Tempest of the title refers to the magical hurricane Prospero conjures up to shipwreck his brother and the king who had assisted the overthrow, and the play unfolds under Prospero’s power.

In Shakespeare’s original, Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, his brother Antonio is the usurper, and Alonso is the medieval King of Naples, Antonio’s ally and backer. In the Ringplay adaptation, the kingdoms are twenty-first century hotel conglomerates; Alonso is a woman, and the stakes are the control of Prosperity Cay, an island in The Bahamas where the two great companies, Naples-America and Hotel Milan, hope perhaps to build their next great joint resort. The sea they are crossing is the Bahamian branch of the Atlantic, the spirits are local deities, and Ariel the head spirit takes on forms that include a chickcharney.

The Tempest is a play that’s full of illusion and spectacle. Nothing in the play is as it appears to be. Caliban is written as an uncultured brute, but he has the most beautiful language in the entire play; Ariel, on the other hand, is reduced to singing some of the silliest songs ever penned for the stage. Prospero forces his enemies to feel loss and remorse, and in the end forgives them; he creates the best circumstances he can for his daughter to fall in love, and then forbids her to exercise her feelings; and in the end he sets all the spirits free, renounces his art, and turns away from his island to take up the reins of industry once again.

The Tempest goes into rehearsal on August 10th, and will be performed for school audiences and for the general public during Shakespeare in Paradise between 5th and 12th October 2009. Make plans now to see it — the thing about plays is that once they close, there’s no guarantee they’ll be mounted again!

Running the auditions was our guest director Craig Pinder, a Bahamian actor whose career on London’s West End includes featured performances in Les Misérables and Mamma Mia! as well as numerous productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Craig’s co-directing the production of The Tempest along with Trini director Patti-Anne Ali, and in conjunction with Nicolette Bethel and Philip A. Burrows of Ringplay Productions and Shakespeare in Paradise. He’s also playing the part of Prospero in the production.

The auditions were held at The Hub, East Bay Street, and got a turnout of some 18 people, some of whom were trained actors, others who were raw talents, and we had some really happy surprises. The problem isn’t whether we have enough talent for The Tempest now — it’s how we can use the talent we have.

Check back for photographs of the auditions, taken by David Burrows!

The first auditions for The Tempest by William Shakespeare, adapted and dramaturged for a Bahamian setting by Nicolette Bethel, Travis Cartwright-Carroll, Reva Sharma, and Toni Francis, will be held tomorrow, Saturday, August 1st.

The Tempest is the signature piece of this year’s Shakespeare in Paradise theatre festival (October 5th – 12th, 2009).

Auditions will be held on Saturday, August 1st beginning at 11:00 am at The Hub, Bay Street and Colebrook Lane.

The parts that are available can be found here.

Information about the directors of this production can be found here.

You are asked to come with a prepared piece of no more than two minutes in length. You will also be asked to read either a monologue or a part of a scene from the play.

You can download those pieces here.

Future auditions will take place for Music of The Bahamas and we will post that information as soon as it becomes available.

If you have any questions you can email us at admin@shakespeareinparadise.org ]]> http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2009/07/31/the-tempest-goes-into-production/feed/ 0 http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2009/07/07/shakespeare-in-paradise-update/ http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/2009/07/07/shakespeare-in-paradise-update/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:56:06 +0000 Ringplay http://nicobethel.net/ringplay/?p=434 Three things maybe you should know about Shakespeare in Paradise.

1. It’s happening in Nassau, Bahamas, 5-12 October, 2009.
2. The founders met through the month of June, collecting volunteers of various kinds and hearing from all sorts of well-wishers, and have come out with some solid goals and tasks to take us through to October. We need all the help we can get, and we also need people who want to get onstage as well as people who want to work behind the scenes. You can join the Facebook group,  visit the official site for Shakespeare in Paradise, and in a short while subscribe to the Shakespeare in Paradise blog and Twitter pages!
3. The organizers are currently working on fundraising and soliciting sponsors for the festival. If you’re still wondering how you can help, big it up! And plan to be there — the more tickets that sell the more confidence is build and the more exposure sponsors get.

Here’s the current line-up for the Festival week, with Bahamian productions included:

THE TEMPEST by William Shakespeare, dramaturged by Nicolette Bethel, Toni Francis, Travis Cartwright-Carroll, and Reva Sharma

Producer: Ringplay Productions
Directors: Patti-Anne Ali (Trinidad and Tobago), Craig Pinder (Bahamas/UK)

ZORA by Laurence Holder, a one-woman play about the life of African-American folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston

Featured performer: Kim Brockington (USA)

ONE WHITE ONE BLACK by Frank McField, the Caymanian two-man play that took CARIFESTA X Guyana by storm in 2008

Director: Henry Muttoo (Cayman/Guyana)

SHOWS by KEN CORSBIE, the Guyanese-American storyteller and performer whose return to Guyana for CARIFESTA X was hailed as the high point of the festival

Featured performer: Ken Corsbie (USA/Guyana)

LOVE IN TWO ACTS, two one-act plays by Alfred Sutro and Anton Chekhov, adapted for The Bahamas by Matthew Kelly

Producer: Track Road Theatre Foundation
Director: Matthew Kelly

MUSIC OF THE BAHAMAS, the Bahamian docu-musical based on E. Clement Bethel’s master’s thesis, adapted for the stage by Philip A. Burrows and Nicolette Bethel

Producer: Ringplay Productions
Director: Philip A. Burrows

Track Road Theatre (which goes by the initials TRT these days) is back on its game with this evening of two one-act plays by European writers from the first quarter of the twentieth century. It’s one of the few times TRT has ventured outside The Bahamas for its material, and certainly the first I can remember when it’s produced something from outside the Diaspora. The two plays are short and small, and both were adapted for a Bahamian audience by Matthew Kelly, who also directed the evening.

The first, The Open Door, is an intimate story of impossible love originally written by UK playwright Alfred Sutro and published in 1922. Kelly has kept the dramatic core, but has adapted the characters and some details to fit the local audience, and it works. It’s performed by Kelly and Selina Archer. Archer is competent as Glennis Heastie, but it is Kelly who shines in his role. I’ve seen him on stage in numerous parts, but in this character and in this style of acting he has found his home, and he is clearly at his best when he’s occupying intimate, subtle parts.

The second, The Bear, is another love story of sorts, this one by Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright and short story writer. It’s typical Chekhov, with Russian passion all over the place, and tension up the wazoo, and it stood in sharp and successful contrast to the smaller, tighter, subtler Sutro work. In this one, the definite star is Dion Johnson, whom audiences might recognize from Da Spot and who recently performed in Guyana at CARIFESTA X 2008. He takes over as the rough, uncultured title character. His work is complemented by Leslie Ellis-Tynes, who does a fair job of holding up her end of the bargain in what is her first major role.

The performance takes place in the Hub, and is performed in the seven-eighths round, and the intimacy of the space and the closeness of the action lend an energy to the performance that isn’t common in Bahamian works. The usual style of over-the-top acting which has its place on a big, remote stage, is unnecessary in this setting, and it’s this which allows Kelly in his quieter moments to shine.

If there is any flaw in this production, it’s in the fact that almost all of the performances take place on a single note. The intimacy of the space calls for the expression of subtle, inner tension, something which not all of the performers have mastered, and it also allows for a range of moods and moments that was not capitalized on. What would also have added to the experience would have been a more intimate connection with the audience. One of the great advantages of theatre in the round is that the so-called “fourth wall” of the stage is swept away. There is no barrier of distance, stage, or light between the audience and the action, and that closeness could have been played with far more fully. The other, slightly less obvious, challenge is that the transitions between the different registers in the language — between the Bahamianized elements and the original early twentieth-century passages — are sometimes rough.

But that aside, this evening is a bargain at $15 a head. Live performance doesn’t come this cheap or this good very often — and if you get your tickets in advance, your $12 will go a long, long way.

Love in Two Acts plays until Sunday March 1 at the Hub, Bay Street and Colebrook Lane. Don’t miss it!