Copious Notes

Studio Players gets the holiday theater season going with a different take on Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” The theater presents a minimalist production of Tom Mula’s “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol,” which supposes Scrooge’s redemption was Marley’s ticket out of an eternity in chains. Photos by Rich Copley | staff.

Read more about “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol.”

Heather Parrish as Patsy Cline and Billy W.H. Mason as her guitarist in "Always . . . Patsy Cline." They are also in the band June July, which resumes gigs after "Cline" closes Aug. 2. Photo by Mark Cornelison | Herald-Leader staff.

Wednesday performances are unheard of at Studio Players, but that is what Always . . . Patsy Cline has pushed the Bell Court troupe to do.

After opening night, the theater which regularly presents performances Friday through Sunday, added Thursday shows July 23 and 30. That still left Studio with a 15-page waiting list, so it added shows Wednesdays, July 22 and 29. Studio board member Bob Singleton said those will probably be the last added performances and the wait list is currently closed because it is still so long. The show adds to what has been a very successful 2009 for Studio, which has had sell-outs and added performances for its previous three shows this year starting with The Last of Mrs. Lincoln in February.

Folks who don’t get in to see Patsy might want to check out June July, the band fronted by Heather Parrish who plays Cline and has several members in the Patsy Cline band. The group’s next show is 9 p.m. Aug. 21 at Natasha’s Bistro and Bar, 112 Esplanade, and Parrish says they will be doing some Patsy Cline tunes in their upcoming sets. Admission is $6, and if you miss that one, June July bassist Ethan Hayen says the band is getting swamped with booking requests, so you’ll probably see them around.

SummerFest presents Patti Heying’s production of Jeffrey Hatcher’s adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde July 15-19, 2009, in the Arboretum on Alumni Drive. In this version, Jekyll is played by one actor (Bob Singleton) and Hyde is played by four different actors who interact with Jekyll. Photos by Rich Copley | staff.

Roger Leasor plays Marcus Hubbard in On the Verge's production of Lillian Hellman's "Another Part of the Forest" at the Hunt-Morgan House. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Click the play button to hear our interview with Roger Leasor:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Also, see our slide show from Another Part of the Forest.

Roger Leasor feels as if he’s come full circle with On the Verge’s ­production of ­Another Part of the ­Forest, and not just because he’s playing the father of a ­character he played last fall.

“When I started performing, it really was as a storyteller in high school, reading to the kids at the public library,” says Leasor, 58.

In subsequent years, he became an actor and a singer at the University of Kentucky, focusing on those crafts.

“But now it comes back full circle,” Leasor says. “What I really want to do is tell the story, and I have all these tools to do it with. I just don’t have the youthful energy to do it or the free time.”

Leasor is chatting in one of the offices of his day job, at the Harrodsburg Road Liquor Barn. As president of the expanding party and spirits business, Leasor has found he spends much of his time overseeing operations in Lexington and Louisville.

He jokes that after ­Another Part of the Forest, he will enter his 19th and last retirement from the stage. But despite his schedule, some roles are too good to pass up.

“These are opportunities that just don’t come along, Leasor says. “I’ve just been so lucky all my life to be given these amazing roles. It takes that anymore to justify the time, and it takes someone like Ave that wants you to work with them.”

Director Ave Lawyer is the most recent person to lure Leasor out of his umpteenth retirement with the opportunity to play the patriarch of the Hubbard family, playwright Lillian Hellman’s treacherous Southern clan, a group that demonstrates how much emotional terrorism can be inflicted while decked out in formal wear.

In the fall, Leasor played Ben Hubbard in Hellman’s The Little Foxes. Now, in Hellman’s prequel to Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, Leasor is playing Marcus Hubbard, Ben’s father.

In "The Little Foxes," last fall, Leasor played Ben Hubbard, Marcus' son. Bob Singleton, right, plays Ben in this show.

“With Ben Hubbard, I was consumed by the fact that he was always conniving, always planning,” Leasor says. “I got the feeling that before he took each breath he was trying to decide which side of the mouth it should come out on. … Well, this is his daddy. Who do you think he got it from?”

Indeed, Marcus is as treacherous as Ben, minus the subtlety.

Leasor says they are both roles that probably startle some who have followed his stage career, particularly recently.

His last few turns have been noble, warm characters - Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, the stage manager in Our Town - roles that seem like typecasting when you talk to Leasor.

Maybe his harshest role of recent vintage is Matthew Harrison Brady in Inherit the Wind, a character whom you had to admit had good intentions, even if you disagreed with his point of view.

There is nothing good or selfless about Marcus ­Hubbard or his son.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s our slide show of On the Verge’s production of Another Part of the Forest. Mouse over the bottom of the slide show to get controls. Click on the little comment cloud to the left to activate captions (if you want captions on this show, it’s probably best to go to the large version of the show). If you click on a photo, it will take you to a larger version of it at Picasa, and you can click the link at the bottom left of the slide show window for a larger version of the whole show.

On the Verge opens its second site-specific production this weekend: Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest at the Hunt-Morgan House on Gratz Park. The play is the prequel to Hellman’s The Little Foxes, which was On the Verge’s debut last fall, across the park at the Bodley-Bullock House. Like that original show, the audience is extremely limited for each performance of this play, which will be acted out in various rooms of the house.

Read more about the show, directed by Ave Lawyer, later this week as we catch up with Roger Leasor, who plays Marcus Hubbard, the father of Ben Hubbard, the character he played in Foxes.

Nick Nickl, board chair of the Lexington Singers, at a rehearsal of the group Dec. 8, 2008. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.

It’s been a good season for Studio Players.

Martha Campbell as Mary Todd Lincoln in the Studio Players hit, "The Last of Mrs. Lincoln." Photo by Pablo Alcala | LexGo.

The first three shows at the Carriage House ­Theatre on Bell Court - Don’t Dress for Dinner, A Tuna ­Christmas and The Last of Mrs. Lincoln - were hits for the community ­theater troupe, selling out most performances. Bob Singleton, president of the company’s board of directors, says that if about 80 percent of the seats for a production are sold, the costs have been covered. And so far, Studio Players has not seen a decline in donations.

If only every arts group could tell that tale.

As the nation plunges deeper into a recession, good news in the arts has been hard to find. Just last week, word came of layoffs at the Philadelphia Orchestra and Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the latest in a steady stream of bad news for arts groups that also must deal with the economic downturn’s effect on ticket sales and fund-raising.

But community arts ­organizations generally don’t have the overhead costs of a staff or space to maintain, and sometimes are able to thrive in challenging times.

“This is a season ­everyone wants to write down in red letters in their diaries,” Lexington Singers board president, Nick Nickl, says.

Last fall’s the Singers’ 50th ­anniversary concert far ­exceeded box-office ­expectations, and the chorus had the ego boost of traveling to ­Washington to sing at the ­Kennedy Center for the ­Performing Arts in the production of Our Lincoln.

The only ­disappointment of the season, Nickl says, has been ­raising money for its annual Festival of Choirs.
“Usually people are eager to contribute to that,” Nickl says of the event, which brings the Singers together with choirs from ­traditionally black churches. “But we had to give it a little extra push this year.”

That said, “if you look at the list of organizations close to the edge, we’re not one of them,” Nickl says.
Neither is the Lexington ­Community ­Orchestra.

“We have been able to continue with a minimum of difficulty or ­challenge,” says violinist Pam ­Hammonds, ­president of the community orchestra board. Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Luckey will star in "This Wonderful Life," a one-man version of "This Wonderful Life." Photo by Mark Cornelison | LexGo.

Actors Guild of Lexington has announced a five-show schedule for the 2009-10 season. It’s a lineup that will import a couple of familiar directors and give one of Lexington’s leading actors the stage all to himself at Christmastime.

• Beguiled Again: The Songs of Rodgers and Hart, music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart; music arrangements by Craig D. Ames; conceived by J. Barry Lewis, Lynnette Barkley, and Craig D. Ames — Peggy Taphorn of Temple Theatre in Sanford, N.C., who directed Quilters and My Way for AGL, returns for a program of tunes by the Broadway duo including Blue Moon and My Funny Valentine. Sept. 10-27.
• The Vertical Hour by David Hare — Actors Guild artistic director Richard St. Peter directs this play about the meeting of two people with divergent views of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Broadway production was directed by Sam Mendes and starred Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy. Oct. 15-Nov. 1.
• This Wonderful Life, by Steve Murray, conceived by Mark Setlock — Adam Luckey will star in this one-man show in which he plays all the characters from the Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Bob Singleton directs. Dec. 3-20.
  
• The New Century by Paul Rudnick — Bo List returns from Memphis to direct this fast-paced comedy from the writer of I Hate Hamlet. The characters include a wealthy Jewish matron, a flamboyant public access TV host and a Midwestern scrapbooker/competitive cake decorator. Feb. 11-28.
• What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton — AGL associate artistic director Eric Ryan Seale directs this risque, door-slamming comedy about a psychiatrist who tries to seduce his secretary. Somehow, Winston Churchill gets involved.  March 25-April 11.

For the coming season, the shows will run for three weekends on a Thursday through Sunday schedule at the Downtown Arts Center. The past several years, the theatre had been going on four-week runs Friday through Sundays.

Studio Players announced the lineup for its 2009-10 season at Tuesday night’s members meeting in the lobby of the Carriage House Theatre on West Bell Court.

Sam Shepard

The highlight of the schedule is True West by celebrated playwright Sam Shepard, who lives in Midway. True West is a story of role reversal between two brothers, one a petty thief and the other an aspiring screenwriter. It is the first production of a Shepard play by one of Lexington’s leading theaters in several years. The play will be Studio’s March 2010 production, and a director has not been announced for the show.

All the other plays on the season have directors attached, though specific dates have not been nailed down yet. Here’s the rest of the lineup, as announced by Studio Players president-elect, David Bratcher:

• The Unexpected Guest by Agatha Christie — Gary McCormick will direct the play, which Bratcher says opens with a dead body in a wheel chair. Begins in September.
• Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol by Tom Mula — Dickens’ classic tale, told from the perspective of the guy in the heavy chains. Carly Preston directs. November.
• Wait Until Dark by Frederick Knott — This is the original stage version of the hit 1967 movie starring Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman who has to contend with three thugs searching her house for a missing drug shipment. The Broadway cast was pretty good too: Lee Remick and Robert Duvall. Bob Singleton directs. January.
• Run for Your Wife by Ray Cooney — Director Ross Carter described this as a “quintessential British farce,” about a Taxi driving bigamist whose cover is blown. May.

Studio still has two productions left in its current season — Six Degrees of Separation, which runs March 19-April 5, and Dearly Beloved, May 21-June 7 — plus a summer musical, Always, Patsy Cline, July 9-Aug. 2.