Bluebeard's Castle

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Sponsors

Donors

Opera Roanoke would like to thank our Donors for their generous gifts.

Tributes

Opera Roanoke is honored to acknowledge gifts made in tribute or memory of special friends.

Performers

Kyle Albertson

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Bass-Baritone

Jennifer Johnson Cano

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Mezzo-Soprano

Setting

Songs & Scenes

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Production Staff

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Venue Staff

School Administration Staff

General Director

Brooke Tolley

Artistic Director

Steven White

Community Engagement Associate

Ansley Melton

Musicians

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Board of Trustees

Daniel C. Summerlin III

Robert Nordt Sr.

Paula Prince

Immediate Past President

William "Bill" Krause

Board Members

Sally Adams Barbara von Claparede-Crola Rupert "Rupe" Cutler Isabel Ditzel Frank Giannini James "Jim" Kern Krista Vannoy

Student Advisory Board

Credits

Lighting equipment from PRG Lighting, sound equipment from Sound Associates, rehearsed at The Public Theater’s Rehearsal Studios. Developed as part of Irons in the Fire at Fault Line Theatre in New York City.

Special Thanks

*Appearing through an Agreement between this theatre and Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.

“Actors’ Equity Association (“Equity”), founded in 1913, is the U.S. labor union that represents more than 51,000 actors and stage managers, Equity fosters the art of live theatre as an essential component of society and advances the careers of its members by negotiating wages, improving working conditions and providing a wide range of benefits, including health and pension plans. Actors’ Equity is a member of the AFL-CIO and is affiliated with FIA, an International organization of performing arts unions. www.actorsequity.org

United Scenic Artists ● Local USA 829 of the I.A.T.S.E represents the Designers & Scenic Artists for the American Theatre

ATPAM, the Association of Theatrical Press Agents & Managers (IATSE Local 18032), represents the Press Agents, Company Managers, and Theatre Managers employed on this production.

21-22 Season Welcome Letter

Dear Friends of Opera Roanoke,

Welcome to Opera Roanoke’s 46th Season of live performances in the Roanoke Valley. If this past year has taught us anything, it is how vital this art form and its patrons are to our community. We have missed you terribly, but we are ready to welcome you back to the theatre with a line-up of programs that highlight the best of all this art form has to offer – from traditional to contemporary – performances that will expand your mind and fulfill your soul.

At the core of everything we do at Opera Roanoke, is the belief in the power of the human voice to entertain, teach, and connect. With each of our three mainstage offerings this season, there is an opportunity to witness our mission in action. We invite you to explore a world where the ordinary becomes extraordinary through the power of music and singing.

We are excited to share our 2021-22 season with you and we look forward to seeing you {back} at the Opera!

‍

Sincerely,

Brooke Tolley
General Director
Steven White
Artistic Director
Daniel C. Summerlin, III
President, Board of Trustees

Program Notes

Bluebeard’s Castle

American premiere of Eberhard Kloke’s version for chamber orchestra

Béla Bartók (1881–1945) was a Hungarian composer and an important pioneer in the field of ethnomusicology. During the first decades of his life, he was better known for his work in collecting and analyzing folk music than for his own compositions. He fled fascism to settle in New York City in 1940. At the time of his death from leukemia, his stature as a composer was beginning to grow internationally.

Bartók’s only opera is an intense psychological journey, a powerful drama of inner emotion, and a tour de force for its two singers and orchestra. Loosely based on Charles Perrault’s late–17th-century fairy tale, it tells the grotesque story of a rich and powerful man, suspected of having murdered several wives, who brings a new bride to his castle. In Bartók’s version, the bride, Judith, prods Bluebeard to open seven doors, each of which reveals an aspect of Bluebeard’s life, material possessions, and, by extension, his soul. With the opening of the final door, Judith is engulfed in his dark subconscious.

By the time the opera was written, the Perrault tale had become a metaphor for contemporary psychological questions: How well can two people know each other? How much should they attempt to find out? While such an approach, almost completely without conventional “action,” could easily have resulted in an overly didactic treatment, Bartók’s music makes the opera a thrilling journey. The score resides on, yet not quite beyond, the jagged edges of tonality. Like the subconscious and the dream world it depicts, it sounds familiar enough so as not to be experienced as abstract, yet foreign and disturbing enough to create a feeling of unease. It is a unique achievement in opera and a great challenge to the performers and production team.

Musicologists delight in analyzing the score of Bluebeard’s Castle, but the opera is remarkable for its ability to make a direct and powerful impression on anyone. The music is closely linked to the rhythms of the text, and yet gives it an acoustic power that transcends the strictly syntactic meaning. It speaks to the emotions as well as to the intellect.

The opera opens with a spoken prologue, in which the audience is invited to question whether what they’re about to see is really happening or takes place in their imagination. Bartók builds each of the scenes, represented by each of the seven doors of Bluebeard’s castle, around its own pitch center: beginning in F-sharp, moving to a bright C (expressed in a glorious outpouring of melody) in the fifth scene, and returning to the subdued F-sharp at the end. The whole drama is contained within this sequence: loneliness with a glimpse of the lost opportunity for love and light.

Much of the title character’s vocal line is declamatory and indeed without much color or range. Its power lies in its dramatic delivery. Conversely, Judith’s music covers a wider range. The underlying intention is clear: She is attempting to break away from his stifling presence. The music of Bluebeard’s Castle makes a universal tale of human relationships from a symbolist psychological study.

Bartók began the project, his sole opera, in 1911, working from a libretto by Béla Balázs. Adapting a particular violent story from Perrault’s collection—now often omitted from modern editions—Balázs, a leading intellectual in Budapest circles, had created a new, psychological rendering of the tale. He removed the happy conclusion, in which Judith is saved from the castle by her brothers and, employing Hungarian folk idiom, turned his focus to the strange relationship between Judith and her husband. “My ballad is the ballad of the inner life,” the poet explained. “Bluebeard’s castle is not a real castle of stone. The castle is his soul. It is lonely, dark and secretive: the castle of closed doors.”

In his score, Bartók likewise presented an inner life, not only pumping musical blood into the veins of the two characters but also presenting a précis of his maturation as a composer. His musical education had begun through his parents’ performances at home, as well as by his own exploration of works by Brahms and Schumann. But in travelling from what is now the borderland between Hungary and Romania to the former’s newly established capital of Budapest, Bartók discovered much richer musical landscapes. Attending the city’s Academy, he not only encountered the music of Richard Strauss but also that of Debussy, thanks to his meeting with the man who was to be his colleague and companion, Zoltán Kodály, in 1905. Such diverse musical seams fused in the works that Bartók began both to create and to notate. He had announced in 1904 that he would “collect the finest Hungarian folk- songs and elevate them, adding the best possible piano accompaniments, to the level of art song.” His encounter with Kodály made that ambition a reality. Working in collaboration, they were prolific in their collecting activities and the music they discovered came to infuse their work.

But what is so remarkable about Bartók’s output is not its ability to reflect diverse influences but to sublimate the strands into one, as is clear in Bluebeard’s Castle. Progress with the score was slow. With it, Bartók had hoped to win the Ferenc Erkel Prize in 1911, but he failed both in this and in a 1912 competition run by music publishers Rózsavölgyi, with one judge deeming the work impossible to stage and another thinking it far too dark. Bartók was devastated, but when, after World War I, the opera was finally mounted in Budapest, he experienced at least a partial refutation of those judgements.

As musical drama, Bartók’s only opera offers a decidedly bleak resolution to the oppositions at its core: Judith vs. Bluebeard, light vs. dark, sanity vs. madness, tonality vs. atonality. These tensions are immediately apparent as the ambiguous spoken prologue trails into silence and the score begins, low down in the orchestra’s register. Its music revolves around a penumbrous F-sharp chord, spelled out in folksy, pentatonic terms. Quickly, the woodwinds cut across this dark but sonorous sound, centering instead on a triad of C major. The clash between these elements spells out the interval of a tritone, the middle point in the chromatic scale or, rather, the polar opposite of the very first note we heard.

Such a dichotomy is seemingly resolved at the blinding opening of the fifth of the seven doors in Bluebeard’s castle. Accompanied by full orchestra (including an organ), Judith screams in amazement at the vastness of the kingdom she can see beyond, the music resounding with the luminescence of C major. But as with every door that she unlocks, there follows a shudder, a strange, angular scale, couched in the same sound-world as the clashing semitone that represents the blood covering everything in sight.

Once more, Bluebeard coolly thanks Judith for bringing daylight into the castle, but when, inevitably, she unlocks the last door of his soul, following her forebears into that final room, the music returns to Bluebeard’s dark, modal sound-world. All light is extinguished, and we are taken back to the primordial “Once upon a time” that is, thanks to Bartók’s psychologically acute music, the clarion call of eternity.

— Gavin Plumley

Gavin Plumley, commissioning editor of English-language program notes for the Salzburg Festival, specializes in the music and culture of Central Europe. He appears frequently on the BBC and has written for publications around the world.

Meet the Cast

Kyle Albertson

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Bass-Baritone

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Mr. Albertson made his European début at Opera Köln in Germany as Frank Murrant in Street Scene and will return to Europe in 2022 to perform the title role in Der fliegende Holländer and Wotan in Loriot’s Der Ring an einem Abend for Opera Graz. In addition, he will return to the Metropolitan as Angelotti in Tosca.

He first joined The Metropolitan Opera roster for Don Giovanni and returned for five consecutive seasons in their productions of Le nozze di Figaro, Die Zauberflöte, Dialogues des carmélites, The Merry Widow, and Manon. 2020 and 2021 Metropolitan Opera engagements were to include covering the roles of the Dutchman in Der fliegende Holländer, Claggart in Billy Budd, and Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde. He recently stepped back onto the stage as Scarpia in Tosca for the Phoenicia Festival and performed Wotan in Das Rheingold for Opera Santa Barbara and Virginia Opera.

Jennifer Johnson Cano

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Mezzo-Soprano

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A naturally gifted singer noted for her commanding stage presence and profound artistry, Jennifer Johnson Cano has garnered critical acclaim for committed performances of both new and standard repertoire. For her performance as Offred in Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale she was lauded as “towering…restless, powerful, profound, she is as formidable as this astonishingly demanding role deserves” (New York Times). With more than 100 performances on the stage at The Metropolitan Opera, her most recent roles have included Nicklausse, Emilia, Hansel and Meg Page.

Highlights this season include the premiere of Kevin Puts’s The Hours with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Beethoven 9 with the Chicago and San Francisco Symphonies, and the New York premiere of Marc Neikrug’s A Song By Mahler at CMS Lincoln Center. She performs Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites (Mother Marie) with Houston Grand Opera; the world premiere of Gregory Spear’s Castor and Patience (Celeste) with Cincinnati Opera; and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (Judith) with Roanoke Opera.

Meet the Team

Steven White

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Conductor, Stage Director & Scenic Designer

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Praised by Opera News as a conductor who “squeezes every drop of excitement and pathos from the score,” Steven White is one of North America’s premiere operatic and symphonic conductors. He made his acclaimed Metropolitan Opera debut in 2010, conducting performances of La traviata starring Angela Gheorghiu. Since then he has conducted a number of Metropolitan Opera performances of La traviata, with such stars as Natalie Dessay, Hei-Kyung Hong, Plácido Domingo, Thomas Hampson, Dmitri Hvorostovksy and Matthew Polenzani. In the past several seasons he has returned to the Met to participate in critically fêted productions of Don Carlo, Billy Budd, The Rake’s Progress and Elektra.

With a vibrant repertoire of over sixty-five titles, Maestro White’s extensive operatic engagements have included performances with New York City Opera, L’Opera de Montréal, Vancouver Opera, Opera Colorado, Pittsburgh Opera, Michigan Opera Theater, Baltimore Opera, New Orleans Opera, and many others. In recent seasons he has conducted Rigoletto with San Diego Opera, Otello and La traviata with Austin Opera, La traviata with Utah Opera, and a world premiere staged production of a brand-new Bärenreiter edition of Gounod’s Faust with Opera Omaha.

In the 2021-2022 season, he returns to the Metropolitan Opera for their production of Tosca, which he also conducts for Utah Opera. He continues his close collaboration with Opera Omaha, conducting Eugene Onegin, joins Peabody Opera Theatre as guest conductor for Dominick Argento’s Postcard from Morocco, and returns to Opera Roanoke for Bluebeard’s Castle in the fall and Verdi’s Requiem in the spring.

Tláloc López-Watermann

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Lighting Designer & Assistant Stage Director

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Tláloc López-Watermann is the founder of Light Conversations, LLC, a lighting and video design company based in New York City. Tlaloc regularly collaborates with stage directors Crystal Manich, Copeland Woodruff, Dean Anthony, JJ Hudson, and James Marvel. He has also designed for directors Ned Canty, Timothy Nelson, Tomer Zvulun, Andrew Eggert, Beth Greenberg, Corinne Hayes, and Sarah Meyers.

Tlaloc is fluent in Spanish and German and spent a season working at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Tlaloc has also worked regularly for The Seattle Opera, North Carolina Opera, Opera Louisiane, Toledo Opera, Utah Festival Opera, Todi Music Festival, Opera Roanoke, Opera Naples, and Shreveport Opera. In 2013, Tlaloc was chosen as the festival lighting designer for Lorin Maazel’s prestigious Castleton Festival in Virginia and has been lighting designer in residence for the Janiec Opera Company in Brevard, North Carolina.

In 2016, Tlaloc made company debuts with Amarillo Opera (Le Nozze di Figaro); Opera Grand Rapids (Gluck's Orphee); and Pittsburgh Opera (Ricardo Primo). In 2017, Tlaloc made debuts with Lawrence University (Hydrogen Jukebox), Opera Columbus, and Opera on the James. In addition to his work in opera, Tlaloc has worked with the Ontological Hysterical Company in New York City, In Strange Company in Albuquerque, A Host of People in Detroit, and The Arena Stage in Washington, DC, where he was the Allen Lee Hughes Lighting Fellow. He holds a BFA in Performance Production from Cornish College of the Arts, and an MFA in Design from NYU / Tisch.

Joey Neighbors

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Set Builder & Technical Director

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Joey has been in the theatre all his life. He has worked on countless productions all over the Southeast and Northeast United States. He has his BFA from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. He has been the resident builder for Opera Roanoke for the past six seasons. He has worked with Opera Roanoke on countless productions on and off since 1986. Along with his work with Opera Roanoke he also works with Roanoke Ballet Theatre, Southwest Virginia Ballet, Roanoke Children’s Theatre, Off the Rails Theatre in Roanoke, Opera on the James in Lynchburg, and Annapolis Opera in AnnapolisMD. He has owned his own business for 18 years, Neighbors Handyman & Custom Carpentry and Star City Sets, doing small remodeling/repair jobs, tile work, and custom built-in’s and Sets for Opera and Theatre Companies. His joy in life is his family.

John Lipe

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Stage Manager

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John Lipe, Stage Manager, is a native of Carbondale, Illinois. He has worked for opera companies across the country, such as the Opera Company of Philadelphia, New Orleans Opera, Opera Columbus, Boston Early Music Festival, Opera Memphis, Opera Roanoke, Opera Southwest, Tampa Opera, Fargo-Moorhead Opera, Toledo Opera, Opera Nevada, and Utah Festival Opera.

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2021 National Touring Cast

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A Theatrical Solo Show Roundup — Reviews

Joey Sims

November 6, 2025

Discover your identity. Find your person. Or, if all else fails, get a dog.

Off-Broadway is positively littered with solo shows right now—such are the industry’s financial straits. For each of these lonely performers, salvation arrives in a very different form. The answer might be a loving pet, or a devoted partner, or profound self-acceptance….or just some really good sex. If, indeed, any answers arrive at all. No surprise that the strongest works of this bunch decline, ultimately, to provide any easy catharsis.

For Ari’el Stachel, author and performer of Other (at Greenwich House Theater through December 6), the core struggle is identity. A deserved 2018 Tony Award winner for The Band’s Visit, the performer works through an exhaustive array of challenges in just 90 minutes, all framed around Statchel’s own struggle of selfhood: his confused adolescence as an Arab Jew, discrimination against Arab-Americans after 9/11, panic attacks on Broadway and, finally, the ongoing fallout of the Gaza war.

To give it all shape, Stachel tends to break his own life into distinct sections, packaging the personal and political with a tidiness that doesn’t always ring true. A less diffuse structure might have allowed some room for Stachel to, where needed, dig a little deeper. His performance work is also overly broad, particularly when it comes to the friends and peers that float through Stachel’s life. All but the performer’s family feel like types, not fully formed humans—gay best friend, annoying NYU student, nagging Jewish elder, etc. In experiencing Other, I was reminded of the incredible precision that solo work demands, and how easy it can be to slide into caricature.

Still, Statchel’s openness around grappling with anxiety is refreshing. He is also remarkably honest about his own failings, particularly the years spent keeping his Yemenite Israeli father at arm’s length. Comfort with his own identity is what allows Stachel to extend a full, unburdened love to others. At least for this anxiety sufferer, that rings true.

Extending full, unburdened love to others is also the focus of Brandon Kyle Goodman’s Heaux Church—albeit in a slightly different sense. This joyous piece, at Ars Nova through November 21, is a celebration of unadulterated sexual pleasure. Goodman warmly leads us through a judgement-free sex talk, pushing past any nervousness or shame the topic brings up with skillful ease. Specific and even hands-on, Heaux Church is a happy relief from theater as feelgood sloganery. “Love thy neighbor” is a nice sentiment, sure—but Goodman will actually show you how. (Demonstrating on a Krispy Kreme donut, no less.)

__wf_reserved_inherit — Brandon Kyle Goodman | Photo: Ben Arons

Sharply directed by Lisa Owaki Bierman, Heaux Church is not technically a solo piece—it should be noted that Goodman receives essential support from DJ Ari Grooves and Greg Corbino, who operates some very talkative puppets resembling a butthole, penis and vulva. It works only because Goodman is so totally at ease with themselves, a comfort that extends into the audience. That self-love is, we will come to learn, hard-won after a long journey (much like Stachel’s). But Goodman eases through the toughest part of that story, sandwiching the pain between joy on either side.

By contrast, Zoë Kim’s Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?) ambushes its audience with a shocking, unsettling account of parental abuse and family trauma. Perhaps “ambushes” is an unfair word. But the structure of this Ma-Yi Theater Company production (at The Public Theater through November 16) feels a tad cruel to the viewer. As shaped by Kim and director Chris Yejin, the piece’s early sections do not really prepare us for what’s to come. So harsh is the tonal shift that it’s difficult for Kim to rein it back when her journey does, thankfully, take a turn for the better.

It’s a bit obscene, I know, to complain that a person’s story—their life, the experiences they lived—is more than you can take. But tales of trauma can easily wind up numbing.

When Kim does ultimately pull us out of that abyss, she does it with a dog. His name is Spaceman. He is, as the stage directions aptly state, “the cutest dog in the world.” Now, of course, a cute dog is always a winner. But more importantly, the arrival of Spaceman (along with Kim’s eventual partner, her person) eases Eat into a space where love and pain can co-exist. Still, with some distance from Kim’s show, I can more easily admire her refusal to counterbalance the pain at her story’s center.

__wf_reserved_inherit — Blue Cowboy | Photo: Maria Baranova

An adorable dog also proves central to David Cale’s Blue Cowboy, a far gentler piece now at The Bushwick Starr through November 15. Cale’s extraordinary monologue traces his brief love affair with a mysterious ranch hand while visiting Ketchum, Idaho to research a film script. Cale is an expert storyteller, and veteran director Les Waters guides this deeply moving piece with a typically light touch. Aiding the storytelling is an elegant set by Colleen Murray, and subtly evocative lighting design by Mextly Couzin.

As with Goodman’s piece, Cale’s text has a refreshing sexual frankness. Like Stachel, he is admirably honest about his own emotional failings, and moments of immaturity. And like Kim, Cale refuses to allow too easy of an emotional catharsis.

The dog does arrive a bit earlier, though. And that’s nice. It’s always nice to have a dog.

QUEENS: Character Actress Riches in Martyna Majok’s Complicated Immigrant Tale — Review

Juan A. Ramirez

November 6, 2025

Queens, Martyna Majok’s revision of her 2018 play of the same name, opened tonight in a mesmerizing new production with an embarrassment of character-actress riches: Brooke Bloom, Anna Chlumsky, Sharlene Cruz, Marin Ireland, Julia Lester, Nadine Malouf, Andrea Syglowski and Nicole Villamil.

Majok’s expansive work lives up to their talents, and allows each of them to shine, capturing two moments (2001 and 2017) at an overcrowded basement apartment in the titular New York borough. The women making do with their exploitative-but-what-can-you-do situation are all from Ukraine, Honduras, Afghanistan and Poland, either striving towards financial independence or temporarily in the country to send money (or wayward relatives) back home. The particulars of their situations are both immaterial to critical analysis and completely the point; a compendium of the world’s ails that drive people to migrate, and which drive the disenfranchised to build strong communities – well, almost always.

The boldness of Majok’s proposition here is to challenge the ways the powerless can sell each other out. America, as it sometimes likes to remind itself, is a nation of immigrants, but they haven’t only been good to, or for, each other. Queens is blistering in exploding that campaign trail truism. This is no reactionist screed, though; Majok’s righteous politics are evident both in the play’s ethos and in the care she invests into all of these women and their backstories. But – and maybe I’m projecting – the ardor of its searing insight stems from an exhaustion with immigrant double-consciousness, further aggravated when your people, ostensibly seeking progress, court regressive actions. That the onus of moral rot in the play is relegated to some of its Polish characters (Majok’s native country) feels like a pointed missive: it’s no longer just Americans’ bootstraps, but immigrants’ ladders, that are being pulled up behind them.

__wf_reserved_inherit — The company of Queens | Photo: Valerie Terranova

The production has a slight metaphysical bent, mainly during scene transitions or to tie the women together beyond their literal shared space, that feels slightly put-on, but the rest of Trip Cullman’s staging for Manhattan Theatre Club is dually attentive to his many characters’ interiorities as well as to an audience which spends nearly three hours in a single, not particularly attractive, set. (That’s no diss on Marsha Ginsberg’s scenic design which, aided by Ben Stanton’s haunting lighting, closes out the first of the play’s two acts on a striking note.)

Amid an ensemble of sterling work, Chlumsky’s brief first appearance stands out for its sheer fire. She speaks a language most in the audience won’t understand, but her meaning is clear. Ditto the reaction she engenders from Ireland, who achieves something like a silent scream: unthinkable, impenetrable, universal.

Queens is in performance through November 30, 2025 at New York City Center Stage I on West 55th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

We Could See BOOP! THE MUSICAL Across America! National Tour Lauching Fall 2026

Kobi Kassal

November 5, 2025

Looks like North America is about to get a little versatility. Today, it was announced that BOOP! The Musical will launch a 50-week tour in Rochester, NY at the West Herr Auditorium Theatre in Fall 2026.

Additional tour cities, dates, and casting for the North American Tour will be announced soon. The tour of BOOP! is produced by NETworks Presentations and booking is by The Booking Group.

Tony-winning director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell brings the Queen of the Screen to the theater in BOOP!, with celebrated multiple Grammy-winning composer David Foster, Tony-nominated lyricist Susan Birkenhead and Tony-winning book writer Bob Martin. 

For almost a century, Betty Boop, created by animation pioneer Max Fleischer, has won hearts and inspired fans around the world with her trademark looks, voice, and style. Now, in BOOP!, Betty's dream of an ordinary day off from the super-celebrity in her black-and-white world leads to an extraordinary adventure of color, music, and finding love in New York City — one that reminds her and the world, “You are capable of amazing things.”

The design and creative team for BOOP! includes Tony Award-winner David Rockwell scenic design; Three-time Tony Award-winner Gregg Barnes, costume design; Philip S. Rosenberg, lighting design; Tony Award-winnerGareth Owen, sound design; Tony Award-winner Finn Ross, projection design; Emmy Award-winner Sabana Majeed, hair and wig design; Michael Clifton, makeup design; OBIE Award-winner Skylar Fox, illusions design; The Huber Marionettes, marionette design; Tony Award-winner Daryl Waters, music supervision and arrangements; Three-time Tony Award-winner Doug Besterman, Orchestrations; Rick Fox, music director; and Tony Award^®-nominee Zane Mark, dance music arrangements. Casting is by The TRC Company, DB Bonds is Associate Director and Rachelle Rak is Associate Choreographer.

Theatrely News

EXCLUSIVE: Watch A Clip From THEATER CAMP Starring Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, and Molly Gordon

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READ: An Excerpt From Sean Hayes Debut YA Novel TIME OUT

Theatrely News

"Reframing the COVID-19 Pandemic Through a Stage Manager’s Eyes"

EXCLUSIVE: Watch A Clip From THEATER CAMP Starring Ben Platt, Noah Galvin, and Molly Gordon

By: Maia Penzer

14 July 2023

Finally, summer has arrived, which can only mean one thing: it's time for camp! Theater Camp, that is. Theatrely has a sneak peak at the new film which hits select theaters today.

The new original comedy starring Tony Award winner Ben Platt and Molly Gordon we guarantee will have you laughing non-stop. The AdirondACTS, a run-down theater camp in upstate New York, is attended by theater-loving children who must work hard to keep their beloved theater camp afloat after the founder, Joan, falls into a coma.

The film stars Ben Platt and Molly Gordon as Amos Klobuchar and Rebecca-Diane, respectively, as well as Noah Galvin as Glenn Wintrop, Jimmy Tatro as Troy Rubinsky, Patti Harrison as Caroline Krauss, Nathan Lee Graham as Clive DeWitt, Ayo Edebiri as Janet Walch, Owen Thiele as Gigi Charbonier, Caroline Aaron as Rita Cohen, Amy Sedaris as Joan Rubinsky, and Alan Kim as Alan Park.

Theater Camp was directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman and written by Noah Galvin, Molly Gordon, Nick Lieberman & Ben Platt. Music is by James McAlister and Mark Sonnenblick. On January 21, 2023, Theater Camp had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

You can purchase tickets to the new film from our friends at Hollywood.com here.

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READ: An Excerpt From Sean Hayes Debut YA Novel TIME OUT

By: Kobi Kassal

29 May 2023

Actor Sean Hayes is what we in the biz call booked and blessed. On top of his Tony-nominated performance as Oscar Levant in Good Night, Oscar, Hayes has partnered with Todd Milliner and Carlyn Greenwald for the release of their new YA novel Time Out.

Heralded by many as Heartstopper meets Friday Night Lights, Time Out follows hometown basketball hero Barclay Elliot who decides to use a pep rally to come out to his school. When the response is not what he had hoped and the hostility continually growing, he turns to his best friend Amy who brings him to her voting rights group at school. There he finds Christopher and… you will just have to grab a copy and find out what happens next. Luckily for you, Time Out hits shelves on May 30 and to hold you over until then we have a special except from the book just for Theatrely:

The good thing about not being on the team the past two weeks has been that I’ve had time to start picking up shifts again at Beau’s diner and save up a little for college now that my scholarship dreams are over.

The bad part is it’s the perfect place to see how my actions at the pep rally have rotted the townspeople’s brains too.

During Amy’s very intense musical theater phase in middle school, her parents took her to New York City. And of course she came back home buzzing about Broadway and how beautiful the piss smell was and everything artsy people say about New York. But she also vividly described some diner she waited three hours to get into where the waitstaff would all perform songs for the customers as a way to practice for auditions. The regulars would have favorite staff members and stan them the way Amy stans all her emo musicians.

Working at Beau’s used to feel kind of like that, like I was part of a performance team I didn’t know I signed up for. The job started off pretty basic over the summer—I wanted to save up for basketball supplies, and Amy worked there and said it was boring ever since her e-girl coworker friend graduated. But I couldn’t get through a single lunch rush table without someone calling me over and wanting the inside scoop on the Wildcats and how we were preparing for the home opener, wanting me to sign an article in the paper or take a photo. Every friendly face just made the resolve grow inside me. People love and support the Wildcats; they would do the same for me.

Yeah, right.

Now just like school, customers have been glaring at me, making comments about letting everyone down, about being selfish, about my actions being “unfortunate,” and the tips have been essentially nonexistent. The Wildcats have been obliterated in half their games since I quit, carrying a 2–3 record when last year we were 5–0, and the comments make my feet feel like lead weights I have to drag through every shift.

Today is no different. It’s Thursday, the usual dinner rush at Beau’s, and I try to stay focused on the stress of balancing seven milkshakes on one platter. A group of regulars, some construction workers, keep loudly wondering why I won’t come back to the team while I refuse proper eye contact.

One of the guys looks up at me as I drop the bill off. “So, what’s the deal? Does being queer keep ya from physically being able to play?”

They all snicker as they pull out crumpled bills. I stuff my hands into my pockets, holding my tongue.

When they leave, I hold my breath as I take their bill.

Sure enough, no tip.

“What the fuck?” I mutter under my breath.

“Language,” Amy says as she glides past me, imitating the way Richard says it to her every shift, and adds, “even though they are dicks.” At least Amy’s been ranting about it every free chance she gets. It was one thing when the student body was being shitty about me leaving the team, but the town being like this is even more infuriating. She doesn’t understand how these fully grown adults can really care that much about high school basketball and thinks they need a new fucking hobby. I finally agree with her.

[She’s wearing red lipstick to go with her raccoon-adjacent eyeliner as she rushes off to prepare milkshakes for a pack of middle schoolers. I catch her mid–death glare as all three of the kids rotate in their chairs, making the old things squeal. My anger fades a bit as I can’t help but chuckle; Amy’s pissed-off reaction to Richard telling her to smile more was said raccoon makeup, and her tolerance for buffoonery has been at a negative five to start and declining fast.

I rest my arms on the counter and try not to look as exhausted as I feel.

“Excuse me!” an old lady screeches, making me jump.

Amy covers up a laugh as I head to the old lady and her husband’s table. They’ve got finished plates, full waters. Not sure what the problem is. Or I do, which is worse.

“Yes?” I say trying to suppress my annoyance.

“Could you be bothered to serve us?”

Only five more hours on shift. I have a break in three minutes. I’ll be with Devin at Georgia Tech tomorrow. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I say, so careful to keep my words even, but I can feel my hands balling into fists. “What would you—?”

And suddenly Amy swoops in, dropping two mugs of coffee down. “Sorry about that, you two,” she says, her voice extra high. “The machine was conking out on us, but it’s fine now.”

Once the coffee is down, she hooks onto a chunk of my shirt, steering us back to the bar.

“Thanks,” I mutter, embarrassed to have forgotten something so basic. Again.

“Just keep it together, man,” she says. “Maybe you’d be better off with that creepy night shift where all the truckers and serial killers come in.”

Honestly, at least the serial killers wouldn’t care about my jump shot.

It’s a few minutes before my break, but clearly I need it. “I’ll be in the back room.”

Right before I can head that way though, someone straight-up bursts into the diner and rushes over to me at the bar. It’s a middle-aged dad type, sunburned skin, beer belly, and stained T-shirt.

“Pickup order?” I ask.

“You should be ashamed,” he sneers at me. He has a really strong Southern accent, but it’s not Georgian. “Think you’re so high and mighty, that nothing’ll ever affect you? My kid’ll never go to college because of you and your lifestyle. Fuck you, Barclay Ell—”

And before this man can finish cursing my name, Pat of all people runs in, wide-eyed in humiliation. “Jesus, Dad, please don’t—”

I pin my gaze on him, remembering how he cowered on the bench as Ostrowski went off, how he didn’t even try to approach me. “Don’t even bother,” I snap.

I shove a to-go bag into his dad’s arms, relieved it’s prepaid, and storm off to the break room.]

Amy finds me head in my arms a minute or two later. I look up, rubbing my eyes. “Please spare me the pity.”

She snorts and hands me a milkshake. Mint chocolate chip. “Wouldn’t dare.” She takes a seat and rolls her shoulders and neck, cracks sounding through the tiny room. “Do you want a distraction or a shoulder to cry on?”

For more information, and to purchase your copy of Time Out, click here.

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Reframing the COVID-19 Pandemic Through a Stage Manager’s Eyes

By: Kaitlyn Riggio

5 July 2022

When the COVID-19 pandemic was declared a national emergency in the United States in March 2020, Broadway veteran stage manager Richard Hester watched the nation’s anxiety unfold on social media.

“No one knew what the virus was going to do,” Hester said. Some people were “losing their minds in abject terror, and then there were some people who were completely denying the whole thing.”

For Hester, the reaction at times felt like something out of a movie. “It was like the Black Plague,” he said. “Some people thought it was going to be like that Monty Python sketch: ‘bring out your dead, bring out your dead.’”

While Hester was also unsure about how the virus would unfold, he felt that his “job as a stage manager is to naturally defuse drama.” Hester brought this approach off the stage and onto social media in the wake of the pandemic.

“I just sort of synthesized everything that was happening into what I thought was a manageable bite, so people could get it,” Hester said. This became a daily exercise for a year. Over two years after the beginning of the pandemic, Hester’s accounts are compiled in the book, Hold Please: Stage Managing A Pandemic. Released earlier this year, the book documents the events of the past two years, filtering national events and day-to-day occurrences through a stage manager’s eyes and storytelling.

When Hester started this project, he had no intention of writing a book. He was originally writing every day because there was nothing else to do. “I am somebody who needs a job or needs a structure,” Hester said.

Surprised to find that people began expecting his daily posts, he began publishing his daily writing to his followers through a Substack newsletter. As his following grew, Hester had to get used to writing for an audience. “I started second guessing myself a lot of the time,” Hester said. “It just sort of put a weird pressure on it.”

Hester said he got especially nervous before publishing posts in which he wrote about more personal topics. For example, some of his posts focused on his experiences growing up in South Africa while others centered on potentially divisive topics, such as the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Despite some of this discomfort, Hester’s more personal posts were often the ones that got the most response. The experience offered him a writing lesson. “I stopped worrying about the audience and just wrote what I wanted to write about,” Hester said. “All of that pressure that I think as artists we put on ourselves, I got used to it.”

One of Hester’s favorite anecdotes featured in the book centers on a woman who dances in Washington Square Park on a canvas, rain or shine. He said he was “mesmerized by her,” which inspired him to write about her. “It was literally snowing and she was barefoot on her canvas dancing, and that seems to me just a spectacularly beautiful metaphor for everything that we all try and do, and she was living that to the fullest.”

During the creation of Hold Please, Hester got the unique opportunity to reflect in-depth on the first year of the pandemic by looking back at his accounts. He realized that post people would not remember the details of the lockdown; people would “remember it as a gap in their lives, but they weren’t going to remember it beat by beat.”

“Reliving each of those moments made me realize just how full a year it was, even though none of us were doing anything outside,” he adds. “We were all on our couches.” Readers will use the book as a way to relive moments of the pandemic’s first year “without having to wallow in the misery of it,” he hopes.

“I talk about the misery of it, but that’s not the focus of what I wrote... it was about hope and moving forward,” Hester said. “In these times when everything is so difficult, we will figure out a way to get through and we will move forward.”

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