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Sweet Home
StageWorks’
new theater is 57 steps directly southeast from Hudson’s Amtrak
station. With a picturesque view of the tracks, the Hudson
River, and the Catskill Mountains prominently in the distance,
the new theater is three blocks from what StageWorks artistic
director Laura Margolis calls “hopping Warren Street,” Hudson’s
version of Lark Street filled with newly opened antique shops,
boutiques, and restaurants. To be christened the Max and Lillian
Katzman Theater when it opens this July, StageWorks’ space
is three stories of a worn and dingy warehouse with 40,000
square feet of space for offices, stages, costume storage,
scene construction, and actor housing (six bedrooms, two baths,
kitchen, and recreation area on the floor above the stage),
complete with off-street parking for the 100-seat theater
planned for phase one of the project. “It’s a culmination
of a dream,” Margolis said while adjusting a white plastic
bucket under a steady drip from the ceiling.
Originally a flypaper factory 100 years ago, the industrial
warehouse was donated by Richard Katzman, president and CEO
of Kaz, Inc., a health-care supplier whose plant is adjacent
to StageWorks’ new space. An industrial faded gray now, the
former warehouse is at the bottom of the hill, the doors opening
out to the steep backyards of row houses high up the hill.
Warped stone retaining walls and busted chain-link fences
complete the gritty street setting that is perfect for a theater
company that has made a name by staging new works in gritty
ways at its antiseptic former rented space 16 miles away in
Kinderhook.
“This
is our permanent home,” Margolis said, showing off the space
while six members of the artistic staff put a basecoat of
white paint on what will be the walls of the company offices.
The two identical floors in the warehouse proper, dotted by
blue-gray steel pillars 20 feet apart, with 12-foot-high ceilings,
leave lots of space. “We will be a destination. The sign out
front will say ‘StageWorks.’ We can store things here. We
don’t have to take lights and sets and costumes down and schlep
them to spaces from one end of Columbia County to the other.
We can make our own schedule and expand the season. It’s our
home.”
With an ambitious three-phase, five-year plan to ultimately
have a two-story, 250-seat theater, phase one begins this
year. “Come hell or high water, we open this July with some
form of Play by Play. We’ve sent out personal invitations
to playwrights we’ve produced in the past like Israel Horovitz
[Lebensraum, 2003]and Cornelius Eady [Brutal Imagination,
2002] to create one-acts for our grand opening.”
“We’ll
define our own home,” Margolis added, looking out of what
will be, this July, the lobby off of Cross Street. Just off
the lobby will be, within five years, a balcony garden with
one of the best views in any area theater. “We will be the
destination, a theater for developing new works, presenting
local groups, teaching theater to high-school kids. . . .
It’s a dream come true.”
—James
Yeara
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NYCB's
Damian Woetzel.
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Summer
Ballet School in Jeopardy
The New York City Ballet is the central thread in a delicate
and wide-ranging mesh that connects people and organizations
throughout the region, New York state and beyond. As the community
reacts to SPAC’s decision to evict the ballet from its summer
home of nearly 40 years, Saratoga Springs residents are beginning
to realize that, if the central thread is pulled, the entire
fabric unravels.
One
first-order effect of the possible loss of the NYCB residency
is drastic change for the New York State Summer School of
the Arts, School of Ballet. The School of Ballet, begun in
1976, is a four-week program for 68 of the state’s most talented
ballet students. They are housed at Skidmore College and train
in the Swyer studios behind the National Museum of Dance on
the SPAC grounds. They learn technique, variations, character
dancing and partnering, all under the artistic direction of
Damian Woetzel, principal dancer of NYCB. Woetzel is assisted
by faculty from the School of American Ballet, NYCB’s official
school in Manhattan.
Mary
Daley of the New York State Department of Education coordinates
the summer institutes, which also include Saratoga-based programs
in modern dance, orchestral studies, and jazz studies. Daley
said that Woetzel conducted auditions in late February for
the 2004 summer session.
In
mid-February, Herb Chesbrough, president and executive director
of SPAC, proposed to replace NYCB in 2005 and 2006 with three
other, less-expensive dance companies that would perform for
one week each. Daley said this would threaten the continuity
and coherence of the summer ballet school. “The potential
loss of NYCB raises critical questions we would have to address:
What is our curriculum? Who would select the students? What
criteria would the selection be based on?”
She
said the school operates under the governor’s mandate and
is required to offer “the highest curriculum we could find.
We founded this school with City Ballet. We’ve never done
it differently. The artistic director has always been a principal
dancer. Without a company and a steady artistic director,
how do we follow our state mandate? Dancers understand that
companies have different techniques. Some techniques, you
can’t mix and match.”
Daley
said, “As soon as we get through auditions, we’ll be talking
to Damian and the company as a whole. We don’t know what we’ll
do, but we want to explore all our options.”
In
Schenectady, Darlene Myers, artistic director of Northeast
Ballet Company and its school, also is concerned about the
potential loss of the ballet. She said, “A lot of my kids
work in their productions in summer and are in the New York
State Summer School of the Arts program, and I hire a lot
of the NYCB dancers as guest faculty.”
The
breakup will be felt in winter, too. Northeast Ballet performs
one of the region’s major productions of The Nutcracker
every December at Proctor’s Theatre. For decades, guest artists
from NYCB have danced the principal roles of the Sugarplum
Fairy and her Cavalier.
Myers
said, “We have contracts out for December 2004 for Philip
Neal and Maria Kowroski. Proctor’s is concerned because a
lot of our Nutcracker audience is the following from
the NYCB. Without the NYCB at SPAC in summer, I feel our Nutcracker
is in jeopardy.”
Myers
said she has a batch of Save the Ballet’s ticket pledges at
her studios. “Sixty kids took them home and I expect that
59 pledges will come back,” she said.
—Mae
G. Banner
The
Show Goes On
Troy
High School’s young crooners and hoofers have something to
crow about: the hard work that went into staging this year’s
school musical, Guys and Dolls, which extended far
beyond the long hours at play practice.
Students and parents had to raise all of the funds necessary
to stage the musical after massive budget cuts left Troy High
School’s after-school activites either underfunded or unfunded
[“Trouble, Right Here in River City,” Newsfront, Sept. 18,
2003]. Parents organized the Troy Boosters to raise money
for their kids’ extracurriculars, and one by one, some activities
were restored.
The theater students helped raise money by staging a “Broadway
Revue” last October, which brought in about $3,000, enough
to match a generous anonymous matching pledge for another
$3,000. The remaining $6,000 needed to fund the musical came
from other fund-raising activities. In total the Boosters
have been able to raise about $50,000 since fall, and restored
several clubs and sports teams that had been cut.
“I
think we consider this a success even before the kids take
the stage,” said Boosters secretary Sue Steele. “It’s just
really exciting to see them on stage and see them again have
that opportunity to show off their talents.”
So this Friday and Saturday (March 26-27), the curtain goes
up in Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium at 7:30 PM. The ensemble
cast boasts 48 students, and 15 play in the orchestra; there
are about 200 students total involved with the production.
Proceeds from ads in the show’s program, as well as the $8
tickets, will go to the drama club for its future endeavors,
as Steele said it looks like the same budget crunch will be
repeated next year.
—Ashley
Hahn
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Photo by: Joe Putrock
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Celebrating
Freedom
The story of Elaine Bartlett’s two-decade-long
journey through the criminal justice system is
almost too strange and horrible to be believed.
But it’s true, and has been told in the new
book Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey
of Elaine Bartlett, by Jennifer Gonnerman.
On Monday, March 22, Gonnerman and Bartlett (pictured,
l-r) were featured at a reception at the Corning
Tower’s observation deck to celebrate the
book’s publication. Also at the event: Assemblyman
Jeffrion L. Aubry, Chair, Committee on Correction,
and, very briefly, actor Charles Grodin. What
happened to Bartlett is an almost textbook example
of why the Rockefeller drug laws have proved to
be an unmitigated disaster—which is probably
why she’s one of the few inmates to have
received a pardon from Gov. Geroge E. Pataki.
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