newsFEED Next Stage at Mills San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater has announced that it will begin partnering with Oakland’s Mills College on a new theatre curriculum starting in fall 2014. This will be a new major and minor offered by the college, which currently has only a dance department (which lays claim to being the oldest continuously operating dance department in the country). Mills hasn’t had a theatre program since 2004, when the school closed its dramatic arts department due to a budget deficit. The new program will be offered in the expanded and renamed dance and theatre studies department. Half the courses will be taught on campus at Mills, the rest in ACT’s studios in downtown San Francisco. Majors either enroll in ACT’s San Francisco Semester program, a four-day-a-week intensive program for a full semester, or register as a part-time student at ACT while completing their BAs at Mills. (Students in the program reportedly do not have to pay additional tuition to ACT on top of their Mills fees.) Students minoring in theatre studies will be able to design their minor with an emphasis on drama or physical theatre, drawing largely from the theatre component of the existing curriculum of the Mills dance department. It’s the Birthday Bard Assuming William Shakespeare wasn’t actually a vampire spy from the moon as some have theorized, this
April is his 450th birthday (or thereabouts—we know he was baptized on April 26). Marin Shakespeare Company is also celebrating an anniversary this year—its 25th season—and it’s celebrating with a summer full of popular favorites: Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet, and Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, in lieu of more obscure gems such as last year’s The Spanish Tragedy and the previous year’s King John that may tickle the critics but don’t exactly draw audiences in droves. Thanks to a generous gift from an anonymous donor, all tickets for the entire run of As You Like It are “pay as you like it,” with donations of any amount accepted at the door. Although As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s most oft-performed comedies, it’s been 13 years since Marin Shakes last staged it, and this is only the third time in the company’s history. It was the first play the theatre produced for its first season in 1990 (directed by Ann Brebner and starring Nancy Carlin), which makes it an especially apt selection to open the 25th season. Artistic director and company cofounder Robert Currier directs both comedies this year, and managing director/ cofounder Lesley Schisgall Currier takes on the starcrossed lovers. Where CA$H Is King Theatre Bay Area, in partnership with Dancers’ Group, has announced the latest recipients of its CA$H grants for theatre. Among
the grantees are Black Artists Contemporary Cultural Experience for Zakiyyah Alexander’s Sweet Maladies; Idiot String to build a mobile stage to tour parks with its show O Best Beloved; and foolsFury Theater for the premiere of Angela Santillo’s Faulted. Individual artists granted include Corey Fischer for a new solo musical theatre work; Sara Kraft for Fair Share//Share fare; Kevin Rolston for Deal with the Dragon; David Szlasa for Studio 1 Pop Up and Eli Wirtschafter, Marica Petrey and Hannah Michahelles for Post-Apocalyptic Storytime. The selecting panel for this round of grants comprised theatre artists Steve M. Boyle, Gabriel Grilli, Jeanette Harrison, Marcia Kimmell and Dr. Ayodele Nzinga. Wells Fargo Stages Santa Rosa’s Wells Fargo Center for the Arts has announced two new partnerships with local arts organizations. North Bay Stage Company joins Roustabout Theater as the center’s second resident theatre company, housed primarily in the East Auditorium. NBSC is a new venture helmed by producing artistic director John DeGaetano, coming from a long tenure as president of Raven Players in Healdsburg. Offering dance classes for youth and adults, Sonoma Latin Arts also joins the center’s resident partners, alongside organizations already in place such as Santa Rosa Original Certified Farmer’s Market and Village Charter School. “As a nonprofit organization,
it is our goal to make the center a gathering place for everyone in our community,” said Rick Nowlin, the center’s executive director. “We are delighted to be working with two organizations that share our core purpose of using the arts to bring people together.” Ground Floor Coming Up Berkeley Repertory Theatre is once again bringing a staggering array of renowned theatre artists together for its new works program the Ground Floor’s Summer Residency Lab. Now in its third year, the lab will be a hotbed of activity on 18 projects from more than 30 artists all going on at once at Berkeley Rep’s West Berkeley campus. Among the creators living, eating and creating new plays together over an intense four-week period are Annie Baker (Circle Mirror Transformation); Kara Lee Corthron (Etched in Skin on a Sunlit Night); Colman Domingo (Wild with Happy); Anna Deavere Smith (Fires in the Mirror); Joan Holden (Seeing Double); Aditi Brennan Kapil (Love Person), Manu Narayan (The Love Guru) and Radovan Jovićević of musical collaboration Darunam; John Leguizamo (Ghetto Klown); Dave Malloy (Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage); Gregory S. Moss (punkplay); Julie Marie Myatt (The Happy Ones); Dominic Orlando (Fissures lost & found) and Brian Carpenter (leader of the band Beat Circus); Jiehae Park (Hannah and the Dread Gazebo) and set designer Tristan Jeffers;
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