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away from home: the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls. |
Traveling
Players
This
summer, the Adirondack Theatre Festival is producing four
plays in five different places—not one of them a conventional
theater. The ATF’s home, the Woolworth Theatre in Glens Falls,
is undergoing necessary renovations for a scheduled opening
next season. “This is a make-it-or-break-it season for us,”
says producing director David Turner, explaining that “we
chose the plays first, and the venue for the particular production
came a close second.”
Save for three performances of the solo piece It Goes Without
Saying at the Tannery Pond Community Center 45 minutes
away in North Creek, the other four venues are within 15 minutes
of the Woolworth Theatre. The most spectacular of the settings
is the Lake George Recreation Center on route 9N, “atop what
old-time Lake Georgers would know as the town dump,” Turner
says, turning up a steep, crumbling blacktop road to probably
the most gorgeous set of any production this season. While
no trace of the dump remains, it seems that at one time even
the garbage of Lake George had a great view. “They’re going
to be blown away by this setting,” he continues. “Martha Bantu
and I discovered it ice skating three years ago.”
The world premiere of The Lake’s End, a play set in
Italy during the rise of fascism in the 1930s (which Bantu
discovered during a residency at Dartmouth University last
summer), will appropriately overlook the southern end of Lake
George. The mountains provide the setting with a grandeur
impossible for a set designer to re-create. “We’ll spray for
bugs,” Turner says of the birch-and-pines-bordered spot. “There’s
a nice breeze that kicks in around 8 o’clock the last three
times I’ve driven up here; scaffolding will be built here
[on what are currently basketball courts] for seats, and two
tons of these patio stones will be laid.” Though ATF won’t
promote it as such, the venue begs for people to bring picnic
baskets and enjoy the view hours before The Lake’s End
opens.
The other three venues are within five minutes of each other
in Glens Falls. There is the Hyde Collection Auditorium, which
was the venue for ATF’s Art in 2001. The Parish House
of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah will host the East
Coast premiere of the musical Bingo—“with a working
electronic bingo board” Turner proudly demonstrates, complete
with numbered ping-pong balls worthy of Yolanda Vega’s presence.
The grittiest of the venues is the former warehouse of Adirondack
Scenic, Inc., a three-story faded brick building around the
corner from ATF’s offices. ATF’s current scene shop is at
one end of the warehouse, and the snarl of circular saws in
the background competes with Tim Burton’s The Nightmare
Before Christmas (bizarrely playing in one of the offices)
as Turner completes a tour of this bare-bones space. The warehouse
will be the setting for Yasmina Reza’s (Art’s playwright)
The Unexpected Man. The performance area, with its
two-story-high windows and freight elevator, screams “industrial”
the same way The Lake’s End’s setting whispers “pastoral.”
“The
Woolworth building has to be renovated,” Turner says. “We
may regret it ultimately [using five different venues], but
this is what we’ve been doing the past eight years, making
the most out of nothing.”
—James
Yeara
Rolled
Over Beethoven
Regular
listeners tuning in to WMHT-FM (89.1 and 88.7) last Thursday
(June 12) discovered that most of voices they were used to
hearing were gone. The Capital Region’s only full-time classical
public radio station fired almost all of its on-air announcers
and began taking much of its programming from satellite service
Classical 24, a joint venture of Minnesota Public Radio and
Public Radio International.
Gone were announcers Larry Nuckolls, Eric Willette, Mary Fairchild
and longtime host Lawrence Boylan. These four announcers,
combined, hosted 58 hours of classical music programming per
week. In addition to this, three hosted locally produced,
weekly one-hour shows, underlining the depth of knowledge
and expertise WMHT will no longer have. Boylan’s The American
Sound was a cross-genre survey of “America’s rich musical
heritage.” Brave New Music was Nuckolls’ look at contemporary
classical music. (Nuckolls is also a composer, and his works
have been performed locally.) Operatic tenor Willette—who,
according to the not-yet-removed station biography, has performed
with the New York City and San Francisco Opera companies—hosted
A Singer’s Note-book, which explored a wide variety
of vocal music.
When reached for comment, Fairchild summed up her sense of
loss: “It used to be a first-class radio station.”
Marcy Stryker, director of communications for WMHT television
and radio, notes that some local programming remains. The
station will be live weekday mornings from 6 to 10 AM, with
either radio vice-president Christopher Wienk or operations
supervisor Bill Winans serving as announcer; a new, one-hour
weekday program to be called Bach’s Lunch will debut
soon with an as-yet-undetermined host; and the current program
No Ticket Required, which consists of taped broadcasts
of recent local concerts, will remain.
The reason for the wholesale layoff, according to Stryker,
is money. As previously reported in Metroland (“Last
Light,” May 29), WMHT is undergoing extreme financial stress.
Stryker says that the radio station operated at a deficit
of $503,000 in 2002, and is projected to run a deficit of
$400,000 this year. (Stryker says that the TV and radio stations
are operating at a combined deficit of $300,000 so far this
year.) The goal, she says, is to reach the break-even point
in 2004.
Critics contend that the station is top-heavy with administrators,
however, and point out that a hiring freeze instituted last
year seems no longer to be in effect—WMHT television had a
job opening for Art Director posted on its Web site as recently
as last week.
When asked if the drastically reduced local character of WMHT-FM
might cause regular listeners to tune out and the number of
memberships to decline, Stryker admits “that is a concern.”
She says firmly, however, that WMHT is not giving up on classical
music: “We’re committed to the format.”
Others are not so sure. If the new format does fail, WMHT
conceivably could drop classical music, or, more likely, sell
its valuable spot on the dial. For now, however, you can still
enjoy classical music on WMHT; it’s just that most of it originates
in Minnesota, not at the station’s home in Rotterdam.
—Shawn
Stone
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