“Midsummer” arrives at Notre Dame

The Midsummer AFTLS cast

“Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain!”

We’ve arrived in the land of the free! (In a stretch limo no less; thanks Deb!) [Office note: the limo was the cheapest option to transport our five actors from Chicago to South Bend.] And at the risk of completely adhering to the British stereotype, I am going to talk about the weather. It has been amazing! I hadn’t packed for the beautiful Indian summer here. I have alpaca and cashmere for the winter but very little in the way of shorts and sunscreen, and it’s making me nervous about Texas in a couple of weeks…

Our first week in the US has been fairly slow-moving. We’ve had to do a lot of admin, from filling-in and rehearsing whilst battling the bewildering effects of jet lag. However, it has been a joy to finally meet the wonderful people at the end of all the emails who have also helped us through this week. Deb Gasper is an astonishing lady, organizing everything and conducting herself with the patience of a saint while we set ourselves up for the tour ahead. We have had the pleasure of meeting Becky and Heidi in finance and Peter, Scott, Aaron from Shakespeare at Notre Dame who have all been delightful.

The craft beer list at South Bend's Evil Czech Brewery

The craft beer list at South Bend’s Evil Czech Brewery

Deb, Aaron and Scott very kindly took us out for Taco Tuesday at Evil Czech Brewery where we got to experience the famous American craft beer movement first hand. (Scott’s spicy Porter had a real kick to it!) Joining us with an Irish welcome was Grant Mudge, producing artistic director of Notre Dame’s Shakespeare Festival.

In our rehearsal room this week we have been joined by Anna Kurtz-Kuk who has been a joy! So positive, useful, and insightful. I wish we could have had her with us in London too. She is about to direct a production of The Understudy and it promises to be a fantastic production if her contribution to our Midsummer is anything to go by.

Notre Dame's Golden Dome as seen from our rehearsal space, ND's historic Washington Hall.

The burning sun on the dome at Notre Dame. This picture does not do it justice. I couldn’t look at the dome it was so bright.

Rehearsals were held in Notre Dame’s historic Washington Hall, just steps away from ND’s Golden Dome. We did our second preview on Friday afternoon, a week after the first in London and got some great feedback from the audience. We’ll hopefully get some time this week to work the notes. After notes it was straight on the road to go to Valparaiso, gearing up for our Westville residency.

Saturday was our much needed day off and the day of the England vs Wales Rugby match in the Rugby Union World Cup which is going on back home.

The Indiana Dunes on the shore of Lake Michigan

View of Lake Michigan from the Indiana Dunes

Sam and Chris were keen to catch the match but failed to find anywhere in downtown Valparaiso showing it so ended up heading towards Lake Michigan where Claire, Patrick, and I had already gone to have a dip. My gosh, it was beautiful! And not as cold as the Hampstead ponds in London.

(Blog post by AFTLS actor Ffion Jolly)

Bro-etry in Poetry (by Andrew S. Hughes)

From left, Xavier Blevel, Anthony Murphy, Quint Mediate and Damian Leverett perform a ballet scene Thursday, July 9, 2015, during rehearsal outside the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center for the upcoming Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival's Young Company production of "Love's Labor's Lost." SBT Photo/GREG SWIERCZ

From left, Xavier Bleuel, Anthony Murphy, Quint Mediate and Damian Leverett perform a ballet scene Thursday, July 9, 2015, during rehearsal outside the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center for the upcoming Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s Young Company production of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” SBT Photo/GREG SWIERCZ

Love's Labor's Lost Rehearsal Photo 4

Xavier Bleuel sings as musicians play behind him in this scene from the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s Young Company production of “Love’s Labor’s Lost” that opens Sunday in Valparaiso and travels to area outdoor venues through Aug. 24. SBT Photo/GREG SWIERCZ

From left, Xavier Blevel, Anthony Murphy, Quint Mediate and Damian Leverett perform a ballet scene Thursday, July 9, 2015, during rehearsal outside the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center for the upcoming Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival's Young Company production of "Love's Labour's Lost." SBT Photo/GREG SWIERCZ

From left, Xavier Blevel, Anthony Murphy, Quint Mediate and Damian Leverett perform a ballet scene Thursday, July 9, 2015, during rehearsal outside the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center for the upcoming Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s Young Company production of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” SBT Photo/GREG SWIERCZ

It shouldn’t count as a spoiler to reveal Love’s Labor’s Lost doesn’t end with one or more marriages. The play’s title means, after all, love’s labor is lost. And in that respect, the play, this year’s Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival Young Company production, is unique among William Shakespeare’s comedies.

“In all of his other plays about wooing, it ends with the men getting the women,” director West Hyler says. “It’s a war of wooing in which the men are conquerors.”
Here, the men still see themselves as warriors, but Hyler thinks the play’s nontraditional ending fits perfectly with its main characters. “These lovers are immature,” he says. “You cannot love until you have grown up. What happens at the end of the play is they grow up.”

Hyler, who joined NDSF last year to direct the Young Company’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, has staged nine productions of Jersey Boys on five continents, directed circuses and has a background in classical theater, an interest that drew him to work with NDSF and the Young Company. The troupe consists of about 20 students from around the country who audition to take classes, produce their own play that they perform in area parks, and be cast and crew members for NDSF’s main stage production, which is The Winter’s Tale this year.

Fittingly for a Young Company production, scholarly pursuits set the plot in motion in Love’s Labor’s Lost, which scholars believe Shakespeare wrote in 1595 or ’96; they know it was performed in 1597. The play takes place at the court of Ferdinand of Navarre, where the king and three of his noblemen — Berowne, Longaville and Dumaine — have taken an oath to forswear women and other pleasures to devote themselves to three years of study in an effort to make the court a renowned academy. The Princess of France, however, arrives with three noblewomen — Rosaline, Maria and Katherine — and the men all fall in love with the ladies.

Abigail Schnell and Xavier Bleuel rehearse a scene for the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s Young Company production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” that opens Sunday in Valparaiso and plays at area outdoor venues through Aug. 24. SBT Photo/GREG SWIERCZ

Abigail Schnell and Xavier Bleuel rehearse a scene for the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s Young Company production of “Love’s Labor’s Lost” that opens Sunday in Valparaiso and plays at area outdoor venues through Aug. 24. SBT Photo/GREG SWIERCZ

To Hyler, the play has a “collegiate feel,” so he’s updated it to the 1890s and set it at a fictional Midwestern university, the University of Navarre, with the women coming from a sister school in Quebec.

“I think of it as the Smith girls go to Harvard,” he says. “I thought it was a great choice (for the Young Company), because it takes place in this fraternal bond of the boys and this sisterhood of the women. I recognized it was more or less a college romance… Loves grow very quickly, the love reaches a fever pitch quickly, and it fades quickly.”
The men’s oath, however, restricts them from courting the women in an overt manner.
“It’s a boy thing to do,” Hyler says, “to keep an oath despite all intelligence to the contrary.”
At the July 8 Beyond the Stage: Explore Love’s Labor’s Lost program, the four actors who play the king and his noblemen performed Act IV, Sc. 3, which the cast and crew have nicknamed “Bro-etry in Poetry” because it depicts each of the male suitors reciting a sonnet he’s written about the object of his attraction, with each of them thinking he’s alone and undetected by the others. The scene has a brilliant energy and hilarious joy to it while demonstrating how precisely Shakespeare’s words and the student’s performances make each of the men distinct characters. “On this one, it moves very, very fast, almost like a runaway train,” Hyler says about the play as a whole, but he could just as easily be referring that scene in particular. “The language is incredibly rich in this. It’s full of witty repartee, almost like a Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde.”

Director West Hyler, center, speaks to actor Quint Mediate during a rehearsal outside for this year’s Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s Young Company production of “Love’s Labor’s Lost." SBT Photo/GREG SWIERCZ

Director West Hyler, center, speaks to actor Quint Mediate during a rehearsal outside for this year’s Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival’s Young Company production of “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” SBT Photo/GREG SWIERCZ

Between scenes, Hyler has selected several works by 19th-century French composer Jacques Offenbach for the students to perform on violin, viola, trumpet, guitar and other instruments. “It allows the world to be set,” he says, and for the audience “to slow down at times to think about what you’ve seen and sort of have a palate cleanser before the next course in this feast of language.” The music serves as a transition, but “also to advance the plot,” Hyler says. “It’s diegetic; in other words, it’s being played as if it’s inside this world.”

But the play’s world also has reality as part of it. At the end, the princess learns her father has died, and she and her court prepare to return to France. The women tell the men they’ll have to wait one year to prove their love for them is true before they will marry Ferdinand and his friends. “It brings the reality of adulthood and responsibility and mortality into the world,” Hyler says about the unusual ending. “When a parent dies, you inherit the mantle of responsibility,” he says. “While your parents are alive, you sort of have a ticket to be irresponsible… They don’t win the labor they have put forward in the pursuit of love, but they have shed some of their immaturity.”

— by Andrew S. Hughes for the South Bend Tribune (July 16, 2015)

Go Backstage with Shakespeare

The Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival (NDSF) announced an expanded 2015 “Beyond the Stage” series this week. Featuring backstage access and conversations with Festival artists, NDSF’s “Beyond the Stage” events offer guests a behind-the-scenes look at the 2015 titles before they see the performances.

Beyond the Stage: Explore Love's Labor's LostThe series kicks off with Explore Love’s Labor’s Lost. Join director West Hyler (Broadway, Cirque du Soleil) and members of the NDSF Young Company for a glimpse at their touring Young Company show, Love’s Labor’s Lost. Following a conversation with Hyler, enjoy highlights from the production performed by members of the Young Company. The evening concludes with an audience Q&A.

  • Wednesday, July 8 at 7:30pm | Philbin Studio Theatre, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center | Tickets: $10 | CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

An Evening with Reed Martin & Austin TichenorNext, enjoy An Evening with Reed Martin & Austin Tichenor. Two of theatre’s greatest comedians, Martin and Tichenor are the writer-director team behind this summer’s brand-new comedy, William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged). Their irreverent abridgments have been performed on five continents, at the White House, The Kennedy Center, and as part of China’s Wuzhen International Theater Festival. With their new comedy, the “bad boys of abridgment” return to Shakespeare for the first time in over 27 years. Don’t miss your chance to meet Martin and Tichenor before you see their play.

  • Wednesday, July 29 at 7:29pm | Philbin Studio Theatre, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center | Tickets: $10 | CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

Beyond the Stage: Explore The Winter's Tale

Finally, Explore The Winter’s Tale with director Drew Fracher. Guests will tour behind-the-scenes, see how the magic is made, and meet the teams making it happen. This hour-long event begins with Fracher, in conversation with 2015 NDSF actor Wendy Robie. Fracher has worked throughout the Midwest’s most prominent regional theaters and on Broadway. Robie is perhaps best known as Nadine (with her eye patch) in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Guests will then see the set, visit the costume shop, and learn about the creative process directly from The Winter’s Tale designers and production staff.

  • Wednesday, August 8 | Tours at 6pm, 6:30pm, and 7pm | DeBartolo Performing Arts Center | Tickets: $10 (limited to 25 for each tour) | CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

Purchase tickets for “Beyond the Stage” events and learn all about the 2015 NDSF productions at shakespeare.nd.edu. For interviews and/or media requests, contact Audience Development Manager Aaron Nichols at aanichols@nd.edu or (574) 631-3777.

As You Like It – Actors’ Blog #8

As You Like It Blog – Valparaiso University

Jen guards our exponentially expanding collection of luggage.

Jen guards our exponentially expanding collection of luggage.

Here we are in week 8 of our 11 week tour…still just about managing to squeeze our belongings into suitcases that fit the airline luggage allowance!

This week we were back in Indiana at Valparaiso University. When we left the mid-west, back in Feb, it had been a covered in snow and extremely cold…so it was a pleasant surprise on Monday, to find that the snow had largely melted and that Spring was starting to make its presence felt. Friday was so Spring-like that I even took the opportunity to take a running tour of the campus with Theatre student Chrissie. This would have been impossible a month ago without getting stuck in a snow drift. Now the only limitations were my speed and fitness levels.

This is the third time that “Valpo” has been host to AFTLS, and it was great to see this experience reflected in the diversity of the classes we attended. I spent Tuesday visiting a session in the Law department. Final year students had all written a personal paper on a particular legal angle in one of Shakespeare’s plays and the breadth of their research was fascinating. I lead various exercises encouraging them to explore the role of the audience in Merchant of Venice and especially enjoyed having them experience connection to an audience while standing in the middle of the room on a large wooden boardroom table…I recommend it to executives snoozing through meetings everywhere.

One of the great things about the American college system is the opportunity for studying such a range of subjects, and nowhere is this more the case than Valpo. I met so many students with dual majors across disciplines. Even those students following a single major in theatre will study design, acting, costume making, lighting design, stage management and so on. Many of the students acting or working in shows on campus are not majoring in theatre but are nonetheless making it an integral part of their college experience. We were very well looked after by a Kari-Anne and her team of students studying for a Masters in Arts Administration, many of whom had travelled from China to study the course in Valpo. I also spoke to a number of other students who were taking opportunities to study abroad during the course of their programmes, several of whom are off to Cambridge this Autumn. 

The Faculty responsible for teaching the broad range of classes on offer are of course multi-talented. I would love to have been able to attend the Tap class, taught by Ann (who also teaches costume design) and we spend Sunday admiring faculty member Alan Ernstein’s beautiful hand-made furniture (and amazing Black Bean Soup!).

Being back in our home state meant this week offered a lovely opportunity to catch up with familiar faces from earlier in the tour.  We had visits from colleagues at Notre Dame and also from Saint Joseph’s College in Rensselaer and Saturday night brought members from all three institutions together as we toasted the closing night of the show in Stacks…from the outside a seemingly humble office block but inside a terrific bar and restaurant full of books with an encyclopaedic drinks menu to match.

Next week we are staying put in Valpo (giving our suitcases another week to mysteriously expand!) as we will be working at Westville Correctional Facility a few miles down the road.

Westville Correctional Facility (Westville, Indiana)

Westville Correctional Facility (Westville, Indiana)

Othello Tour Update

ALamo More Jack Jacks Birthday Wellesley-2

Wellesley

Wellesley

Well we had a fantastic week in San Antonio, I had some great classes, including one on Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls – after some speedy research, it ended up being great fun, the whole class were up on their feet playing various, debating birds! I have to say their squawking was more coherent than some Parliaments I can think of!!
We also had a cast birthday – Jack celebrated his 24th, 32nd or maybe it was his 50th I’m not quite sure, so many numbers were thrown around! We planned and executed a surprise party which was a surprise,  he didn’t realise anything was going on until he knocked on Richard’s door for ‘the academic meeting’ and had to wait ages to be let in, as we all ran round trying to light candles, put on party hats and generally whisper a little bit too loudly for the game not to be up! We partied hard that night but did manage to have our academic meeting too!
We also managed to sell out on Saturday night for the 1st time in 5 years, a little amble along the river walk and a trip to the Alamo on Sunday finishing the week with some sight seeing – who could ask for more!
Up early on Monday morning for flights to Boston and then here we are in Wellesley – the most beautiful campus I have ever seen.