Copious Notes

Audiences packed the Meadow View Barn at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill for last years Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

• Check out our audio slide show from As It Is In Heaven.

Shaker Village of ­Pleasant Hill doesn’t necessarily need music.

The lush, green grounds of the community are a sustained pianissimo passage, frequently augmented by the songs of birds, whistling of the wind and rhythm of rippling water.

Leave your iPod behind.

But that does not mean that music cannot enhance the Pleasant Hill experience.

As Rachel in "As It Is in Heaven," Erica Solitaire Chappell sings in Pleasant Hill’s Meadow View Barn.

The Shakers, after all, are known for their songs - Simple Gifts, anyone? The University of Kentucky Theatre has been bringing some of those tunes to the stage of the Meadow View Barn the past two weekends with its ­production of Arlene Hutton’s As It Is In Heaven.

That production, which has its final performances today through Sunday afternoon, begins and ends with the women of the play ­strolling through the field adjacent to the barn raising songs to the tops of the trees.

The music does not stop there, though.

Next weekend brings the third annual Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, and if you are trying to come up with a more perfect ­marriage of music and venue in ­Kentucky, you have some work to do.

We tend to think of ­classical music as something to seal in a perfectly quiet concert hall, supposing that one obscured note would obliterate an entire work. Of course, perfect silence is rarely achievable in a hall full of people, with walls that aren’t impervious to honking horns and sirens.

Yes, Meadow View Barn is susceptible to the sounds of its environment, but a violin mixes so much better with a bird or a breeze than a candy wrapper or screeching tires.

At last year's Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, the lineup included the Orion String Quartet, featuring sibling violinists Todd and Daniel Phillips.

In the natural setting, at last year’s festival, the music seemed to open, with the instruments so close to their source materials.

And these are musicians to make the most of the environs.

All three years of the ­festival, the Norton Center for the Arts at Danville’s ­Centre College has engaged the Chamber Music ­Society of Lincoln Center to ­oversee its artistic direction. ­Pianist Wu Han has been the constant, and this year she brings ­violinist Erin Keefe, cellist Fred Sherry and ­clarinetist David Shifrin. If you pay attention to classical music, each is an ­internationally known practitioner of his or her instrument.

For the second year, the festival has engaged a second group, this time the Escher String Quartet, to play in its own right and mix with the Lincoln Center musicians in the festival’s four concerts.

Those combinations, like Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E Flat Major for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello, scheduled for next Sunday night, are the real treats of the event.

The morning sessions, in the village’s ­Meetinghouse, focus on Ludwig van Beethoven on Saturday and J.S. Bach on Sunday. The evenings include music of Beethoven, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy.

Debussy and nature? — makes sense.
As does trying to take the arts out to environments such as Pleasant Hill.

So often we try to hype the natural beauty of the ­Bluegrass, but then when it comes to presenting the beauty of the arts, we retreat to the city like everywhere else.

The Heaven performances, chamber music festival and other outdoor events show an arts community trying to get more in tune with our ­surroundings.

HARRODSBURG — For the second consecutive spring the University of Kentucky Theatre is presenting Arlene Hutton’s As It Is In Heaven at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill. The play is set in the village in 1838, at a time known as the “Era of Manifestations,” when many Shakers were experiencing visions and receiving spiritual gifts. The play by Hutton, whose family hails from Corbin, examines jealousies that arise when members of the Pleasant Hill group start experiencing these visions and gifts.

This is director Rhoda-Gale Pollack’s third time directing Hutton’s play, which is being presented in a tobacco barn that was renovated for the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass. The UK production runs May 15-24, 2009.

Dr. Finache (Ryan A. Harr, far left) and Victor (Alex Maddox, middle left) discuss a mysterious letter actually sent by Lucienne (Jesse Rebecca Pavlovic) and Raymonde (Katie Keene) as bait to catch Victor cheating on Raymonde, his wife in the University of Kentucky Theatre production of Georges Feydeau's "A Flea in Her Ear." Photos by Rich Copley.

The University of ­Kentucky Theatre’s ­season comes to a close this week with, appropriately, an ­innovative show that has the students working to push the bounds of stage work.

Paparazzi: Saviors of the World is appropriate because the UK theater students and professors quietly put together a season that was educational, enlightening and entertaining, which is what a university theater program should do.

Don’t take this as a review of Paparazzi, because I have not seen a second of it. But I am intrigued.

The show was developed in a class with lighting design professor John Holloway, and will make full use of lighting, video, shadows and other techniques to tell a tale of a band of paparazzo, teen-age stars and space aliens.

Jeremy Gillett in"The African Company presents Richard III."

It will be ­fascinating to see what the kids have come up with after a season of ­relaying others’ words. The theater’s choices of others’ words have been pretty cool, too.

It was a year that started with the collaborative spirit of A Flea in Her Ear, the Georges Feydeau farce that inspired Hotel Casablanca, last season’s UK ­Opera Theatre world ­premiere. The students in the production clearly had a blast ­chewing into the script about ­infidelity and mistaken identities.

Then things got serious with John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable. Yes, the timing was interesting with the movie on the horizon as the play was presented in December. But what was really interesting was student actors taking on the Lexington debut of one of the most celebrated scripts in recent memory.

The coincidence was less fortunate with The Grapes of Wrath, but you had to ­appreciate the timeliness of the production and the ambition, giving student ­actors the chance to work with some of Holloway’s huge, exquisite set pieces.

Maybe my favorite move was Carlyle Brown’s The African Company ­Presents Richard III earlier this month.

The story of a ­company of free black actors in early 19th-century New York staging Shakespeare productions that rivaled the white company’s ­productions was marvelous theater history. And it was a great showcase for some talented actors we hope will give Lexington at least a few more performances before possibly pursuing stage careers in ­bigger markets.

The season will close with Paparazzi, which you have to admire for its ambition, and then a reprise of last spring’s production of Arlene ­Hutton’s As It Is in Heaven, at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill from May 15 to 24.

What does the theater do for an encore?

Next season includes a production of Paula Vogel’s Baltimore Waltz directed by a UK graduate who went on to get his master’s while studying with Vogel at Trinity Rep; what department chair Nancy Jones describes as a different “take” on Henrik ­Ibsen’s The Dollhouse; the third presentation from the James W. Rodgers Playwriting Competition, and a production of The Pajama Game that will pair the UK theater kids with area musical theater wiz Ryan Shirar.

No, it’s not puttin’ on the hits, and at the college level, it shouldn’t be. But quietly, UK is putting on some of the best seasons in town.