Copious Notes

Walter Tunis as Falstaff, Jesse Hungerford as Edward (Ned) Poins and Trent Fucci as Prince Hal rehearse SummerFest's production of William Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part 1," being presented July 8-12 at the Arboretum on Alumni Drive. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Trent Fucci was doing what was normal for guys in his family.

His grandfather, Dominic Anthony Fucci, was an All-American in football and baseball at the University of Kentucky in the late 1940s, and he briefly played for the Detroit Lions in the National Football League.

His father, Sam Fucci, was a baseball and track standout at Tates Creek High School and played baseball for Auburn University. His uncle, Dominic Anthony Fucci Jr., was the 1975 Kentucky Mr. Basketball who also played baseball for Auburn and was drafted by the Chicago White Sox, making it to the teams’ Triple A affiliate.

Trent’s cousin, Ryan Fucci, is currently a baseball standout at Tates Creek.

As Trent was getting started in sports, playing T-Ball, his mom, Holly Fucci, noticed that whenever he wasn’t on the field, he was over at the stands, “entertaining the audience,” Fucci recalls, catching himself referring to sports fans as, “the audience.”

Fucci says, “My mom said, ‘We need to get you into a theater program.’”

And he did do some theater, in school at Tates Creek. But he also stayed with sports, all the way through his Freshman year at Transylvania University, where he played baseball.

“Finally, it became apparent that I needed to focus on theater,” Fucci says.

And his stage career since is another example why as much as we watch college sports programs to look for future sports stars, it’s also worth watching the stages for future marquee actors.

Fucci has gone on to graduate school at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, where he will spend his last year, the 2010-11 academic year, as an intern at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater.

And it was Orlando and the prestigious Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival that helped point Fucci toward his biggest role in his hometown.

Looking for a monologue to perform in the Festival, a couple of University of Central Florida professors pointed Fucci to Prince Hal from William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. Fucci’s performance of the monologue that ends Act I earned him the classical acting award in the competition.

This week, Fucci will expand his performance of that role from a signature monologue to the entire show in SummerFest’s production of Henry IV, Part I.

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Here’s our slide show of the University of Kentucky Theatre’s production of The African Company presents Richard III. Mouse over the bottom to get controls. Click on the little comment cloud to the left to activate captions. 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 for a larger version of the whole show.

Emannuel Thurman sits on the stage of the Briggs Theatre in the University of Kentucky Fine Arts Building and starts to perform the great speech from Act I, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he says. “Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house ….”

But then he veers into a monologue recalling some of the glorious and not so glorious moments of his actual character, James Hewlett, a black Shakespearean actor in early 19th-century America.

Hewlett’s monologue in Carlyle Brown’s The African Company Presents Richard III recalls how it was difficult to be taken seriously as an African-American actor back then. But the play, being presented this week by UK Theatre, also illuminates a time when black actors were taken very seriously — seriously enough to be seen as a threat by the white establishment in New York theater.

For the play’s director and cast, it was a little-known part of black history until they picked up Brown’s script, based on a true story.

“It’s 1821,” director Sidney Shaw says. “This is way before the Civil War, way before the Emancipation Proclamation. So these Negroes during this play are free, and we don’t know a lot about free Negroes prior to the Civil War. You assume they were all in slavery, and of course, these people are not. They’re doing theater.”

They’re also asserting African-American culture very early in U.S. history, making white theaters nervous. One of the central conflicts of the play is the efforts of Stephen Price, a New York impresario, to shut down the African Company’s production of Richard III because it presents a strong challenge to his own production, even among white theatergoers.

“There’s this culture war going on about what is this country going to be?” Shaw says. “Stephen Price thinks it’s his prerogative, and Billy Brown (owner of the African Company) thinks, ‘We’ve got a point of view about this. Why can’t we present it?’

“So there’s this clash of cultures, clash of ideas and clash over who has the right to do Shakespeare.”

This might be theater, but the student actors in the show say they are learning a lot of history from Brown’s script.

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Actors Walter Tunis and Adam Luckey chat with director Joe Ferrell during a rehearsal of "Antony and Cleopatra" for last year's SummerFest. Ferrell will direct "Henry IV, part 1," this summer. Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Kentucky Classical Theatre Conservatory’s Summerfest, held annually at the Arboretum across from Commonwealth Stadium, has unveiled its lineup of three plays, none of which have been presented in the Arboretum in the past decade. They are:

• Henry IV, Part 1, July 8-12: Joe Ferrell directs William Shakespeare’s story of King Henry trying to maintain the throne and a relationship with his hard-drinking son and heir.
• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, July 15-19: An adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s story by Jeffrey Hatcher, whose work has been seen locally at Lexington Children’s Theatre and Actors Guild of Lexington. Patty Heying will direct.
• Once On This Island, July 22-26: Margo Buchanan directs the Caribbean musical by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, whose hits have included Ragtime, Seussical, Island and music for 20th Century Fox’s animated Anastasia.

Performances will be at 8:45 p.m. Weds.-Sun., at the Arboretum on Alumni Drive. Tickets will go on sale in June for $10 adults and $5 children 12 and under. Season tickets to all three shows will be $25 adults and $12 children.

Auditions will be at 4 p.m. April 4 and 5 at the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre’s Schmidt Vocal Arts Center, 412 Rose St. For more information visit the SummerFest website.

In a 2004 photo, Tiffiney Kavanaugh, Adam Luckey, Michelle Czepyha and Rubin Thomas rehearse for Actors Guild's production of My Way, led by Peggy Taphorn. Taphorn is now director of Temple Theatre in Sanford, N.C., where Luckey is playing Hamlet.

Two Actors Guild of Lexington productions from past seasons are getting some road work.

AGL artistic director Richard St. Peter and actor Adam Luckey have been in Sanford, N.C., recently to bring St. Peter’s high-tech production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the stage of the Temple Theatre. The production, with Luckey reprising his performance in the title role, opened Jan. 7 and runs through Jan. 25. The Temple’s producing director is Peggy Taphorn, who directed Actors Guild’s productions of My Way in 2004 and Quilters in 2005.

Allie Darden in 2007. Herald-Leader photo by Mark Cornelison.

To the north, Brian Hampton’s Checking In, which received its world premier production at Actors Guild in the Spring of 2005, will be read Monday night at the Blackbird Studio Theatre in New York. Heading to Gotham for the reading is Lexington actor Allie Darden, who will be reprising her role as Brooke and Hampton, as Ben. The play is about a group of old high school friends from Virginia who reunite for a weekend at an Atlantic City hotel. One of the friends has been harboring a secret that threatens the group’s friendship. Filling out the reading’s cast will be several Broadway and television actors.