Copious Notes

Laura Campbell, 18; Bryce Hood, 17; and Emily Curtis, 16, perform the title song from "Rent" during a workshop at the University of Kentucky's Schmidt Vocal Arts Center, Jan. 3, 2009. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

The workshop participants are singing “Will I lose my dignity?” the chorus from “Rent” in which members of an HIV support group wonder what lies ahead for them.

“What does making contact mean?” director Tracey Bonner asks the participants in the workshop, who have given up a holiday weekend to be in this pre-audition tune-up for SummerFest’s production of “Rent.”

To some, contact means eyes meet. Others say it is just a matter of feeling someone’s presence. Others feel left out.

Tracey Bonner talks to workshop particpants.

Bonner guides the participants into another rendition of the chorus, trying to push them to move beyond singing and acting and find connection.

To Bonner, that’s what “Rent” is about: “being those open, vulnerable human beings, willing to show all these scars.”

In directing “Rent,” her first Lexington production since Paragon Music Theatre’s inaugural production of “State Fair” in 2004, Bonner knows she is taking on a show fraught with emotion. Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning musical tells the story of a group of artists living in New York’s Lower East Side at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic. Her production will be the first one presented by a Central Kentucky theater group.

“I want to create our ‘Rent’ for our community and how it speaks to our community,” Bonner says over a latte at Common Grounds Coffee Shop, the morning after the workshops.

Not that she instantly took the job.

Brandon Smith leads a movement class during the musical theater workshop. Tracey Bonner says more choreography may be a signature of her "Rent."

Bonner, a Paul Laurence Dunbar High School graduate, actually witnessed “Rent” mania first hand living in New York, close the to Nederlander Theatre in the early days of the show’s almost 13-year run. She didn’t become a “Renthead,” but directed many friends to the theater when they came to town and sometimes accompanied them.

When SummerFest artistic director Joe Ferrell called Bonner in California, where she teaches at three colleges including the University of California at Irvine, she asked to think about it and went to a Long Beach production to refresh her memory.

Two other things gave her pause: The prospect of coming home to direct, “because people view you as you were as a kid,” and the question of whether the talent was here to pull off a production.

The workshop, she said, really helped answer her questions about whether the talent was here to credibly present the show, which is not a typical musical.

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Patricia Clark, director of the Kentuckly Classical Theatre Conservatory, talks to students in a musical theater workshop Jan. 3, 2010 in the Schmidt Vocal Arts Center on the University of Kentucky Campus. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Instructors and directors would come up to her and talk about students that had gone through the Kentucky Classical Theatre Conservatory and its former incarnation as the Lexington Shakespeare Institute, which Clark has overseen. They would comment on how well versed the students were on things like Ann Bogart’s Viewpoints method and skills like stage combat.

“They’d say, ‘Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it right,’” Clark said.

But, for the most part, the conservatory was doing it only in the summertime, in conjunction with Summerfest, the three-week outdoor theater festival in the Arboretum on Alumni Drive.

That’s been changing the past few months, though. The conservatory and the organizations’ stage productions aim to become a year-round enterprise.

“We have wonderful talent here that needs as many opportunities to develop as possible,” Clark said. “To do that, we need something solid and consistent we can build on.”

KCTC and SummerFest president Joe Cannon Artz said, “The goal is to be a full-time, year-round producing organization by 2011. This will include a full calendar year of performing arts training opportunities for high school, college students and adults, plus SummerFest and two other indoor productions, one prior to SummerFest and one after.”

Artz said that the organization has been working with a consultant from the Kentucky Arts Council for a year to plan for the next steps, and the full plan will be revealed after this year’s SummerFest, July 7 to 25.

That planning will include a new name for the overall organization, including the educational outlets, though SummerFest will remain the name of the July festival.

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