Art and Theater and Life
A good weekend to be in either in St. Augustine, Fla., or Richmond, Va.


St. Augustine is the nation's oldest continually occupied, European-settled city (founded by the Spanish in 1565 (!)); and also near Florida's beckoning summer beaches. Thus, it is right and appropriate that my partner-in-art-for-life, Amie Oliver, and our friend, Ruth Bolduan, should have an exhibition titled "Drawing From History" opening there and that their work features the figure and often historical or classical settings. And you have almost the entire season to get down there to the Dow Museum and see the show.

Unlike Amie's and Ruth's work, the Firehouse Cabaret is in its last days. For members of the billion-eyed audience who think in terms of a 2 million number possible audience and a rotating cycle of bus tours, it's Richmond, and a smaller market, and we're a strained shoe-string non-profit. That all said:

Last Two Weekends! "The Firehouse Theatre Cabaret"

Better than Botox!*

Does The Firehouse Cabaret , directed by and starring Scott Wichmann, have magical properties? Can you actually leave this show looking years younger? Can you afford not to find out?!

Read the stellar reviews below and make up your own mind! (Then buy some tickets!)

"The sort of program Richmond can use more of." - Mary Burruss, Style Weekly, in her review, "Snacking on Actors".

and

"Firehouse Theatre Project Courts Controversy With Latest Production" - S.E. Parker's interview with staff and cast in RVA Magazine.

Quick! You've only got until next Saturday, (the 17th) to see for yourself what the hubbub is about - and be seriously entertained in the process.


*not verified by scientific means.

Actin' up: (top to bottom)Jude Fageas, Alia Bisharat, Lisa Kotula & Scott Wichmann Image by Jay Paul Photography

Special Events: See Firehouse Theatre Fire Ball auction winners Caroline Gottwald (Thursday, May 15) and Debbie Walton (Friday, May 15) onstage in The Cabaret!

Short on cash? No problem! Sunday, May 11 is "Pay What You Will" matinee day! Doors open at 3:30 for a 4 p.m. matinee. First come, first served!

Tickets & Showtimes:
General: $25, Seniors: $22.
Students $10 with valid ID. Click here to buy tickets online, or call the 24-hour ticket line at 1-800-595-4TIX (595-4849) Showtimes: 8:00 p.m. Thursdays - Saturdays. Sunday matinee at 4:00 p.m. Doors open a half-hour before showtime.

Readers Theatre is Back!

Readers Theatre, Tuesday, May 13th, 7:30 p.m. - Free. Kerrigan Sullivan directs John Tyler Community College students performing this scaled-back, staged reading of Baby with the Bathwater by playwright Christopher Durang.

Mother is a frustrated novelist; Father's an unemployed alcoholic; and Nanny's a warped Mary Poppins who gives Baby rattles of asbestos and Red Dye #2. Durang's wicked wit sheds light on our foibles and follies as no one else in theatre can.

Do You Know Where Your "UGG" Is?

Hey, we know times are tight, and you'd support us if you could. Fret no more, dear Firehouse friend - Ukrop's Golden Gift program is in full swing, and for the price of a postage stamp, you can support your favorite theatre.

Your UGG certificate is lolly-gagging around the foyer, or lurking in the home office, waiting to be useful, so help it find a home! Drop it in the mail by May 31 to:
Firehouse Theatre Project/UGG
1609 W. Broad Street
Richmond, VA 23220

Lazy friends? Rescue their UGG certificates from the recyle bin, and send them on, too! Thanks for your support!

About The Firehouse Theatre Project

The Firehouse Theatre Project, a non-profit theatre company, was founded in 1993 to present important contemporary American theatre pieces with an emphasis on plays not previously produced in the metropolitan Richmond area. The company, which is under the direction of Carol Piersol, Founding Artistic Director, is housed in the former Richmond Fire Station #10 at 1609 West Broad Street. For more information about the Firehouse Theatre Project's 2007/08 season, please call 804.355.2001 or visit the website.

Website: http://www.firehousetheatre.org

The Firehouse Theatre Project Stacie Birchett Public Relations and Marketing email: stacie@firehousetheatre.org phone: 804-355-2001

And this wonderful piece from a concerned journalist, via RVA Magazine in which it is revealed all the actors keep their clothes on. Fort this show, anyway.:

Firehouse Theatre Project: Cabaret - S.E. Parker

Firehouse Theatre Project Courts Controversy With Latest Production Actors Remain Fully Clothed in ‘Cabaret’ The fingernails of Founding Artistic Director Carol Piersol have seen better days. She's nervous, and despite her calm exterior, her hands betray her. "This is the most normal show we've done in years at the Firehouse," she says, over a cup of chamomile tea and a scone in a popular Fan District coffee house. The tea calms her nerves, she says, and the scone is a guilty pleasure. "I knew we might offend some patrons by doing this kind of show, but it was a risk I was willing to take. I think our audience can handle it." She's talking about The Firehouse Theatre Cabaret, an entertaining assemblage of ten-minute plays and songs, accompanied by jazz music that opened April 24th and runs through May 17th. Unlike the generally expected Firehouse plate of edgy, thought-provoking drama however, "The Cabaret" dishes up a night of pure, unadulterated pleasure. "There's absolutely nothing to think about afterwards," Piersol says, "and that might disappoint some long-time season-ticket holders. But I've seen

The Firehouse Gets Style Appreciation
On trying to make art and theater in Richmond, Virginia

The Ensemble: Lisa Kotula, Jude Fageas, Scott Wichmann, Alia Basharat

Style Weekly's reviewer Mary Burruss gave the Firehouse a positive mention in this week's issue, on stands now, as they say.

Mary also interviewed TheatreIV/Barksdale's Bruce Miller about the recent kerfluffle about the Barksdale's production of The Little Dog Laughed and even TheatreIV's Peter Pan. How strange it is, to me, seeing a kind of role reversal. The Firehouse has had people naked on its stage, and produced plenty of plays with strong language.

Now, the Firehouse has on its boards a musical revue with short plays, directed by and featuring Scott Wichmann, that may have a total of four PG-13 words involved, no nudity, and one slinky spangly outfit with a pleated skirt. And Alia Basharat is a red head, with a powerful voice. She also wears the pleated skirt. There's also a clown nose and wig--Lisa Kotula dons those--and some frightening clown make up--Alia puts that on. A scary Ferris Wheel ride is simulated, with Scott and Lisa. And some rap is also presented by Jude that may jar some people, though the words have an ultimate positive message. And, among my favorites, a musical number in which the ensemble wears hats.

I recall how, way back in 1976, when what was then known as Virginia Museum Theatre presented Romulus Linney's Childe Byron and the word "damn" and caused a ruckus. Similarly, in Peter Pan the word "ass" is used, in reference to, well, a donkey. Horrors!

Which is why there wasn't a professional presentation of, for example, Glengarry Glen Ross until the Firehouse gave it in 2002 (!) That show did quite well, as did I Am My Own Wife, which also featured Scott Wichmann, and he performed most of it in a black dress. And between them both was Hedwig and The Angry Inch. And I could go on.

When Edward Albee visited the Firehouse a few years ago, he said in his remarks that it is the duty of a little theater like ours to not produce art that people think they want to see, but give them art they should see. So, the newspaper fulminated a few days later that Albee was an elitist who just wanted to insult people. Sigh.

I would argue, however, about what is more elitist than expecting all facets of art to resemble nothing more than watered-down entertainments that require no more thought or consideration that turning on the television and curling up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn? Sometimes, of course, this is what we want; to enjoy something, and sometimes what we seek is comfortable, reassuring or at least, familiar. And that's fine, but should we live in a city where that kind of theater (or art) was the only thing offered, it'd be like living where there's only one television station to watch, or one movie theater that only showed musicals.

Sure, we've had a few people walk out of shows in our 15 years. But mostly, they know what they're getting because the Firehouse is the Firehouse. And there is a certain amount of self-responsibility here; read the season brochure, for example, or a review. Some people in Richmond--and I really remember this from attending TheatreVirginia productions--would come to the show just so they could walk out in a cloud of indignation. That the Barksdale produced The Little Dog Laughed is to the theater's credit. But they're a big house, with overhead we don't have, and reactions like this in Richmond, Virginia, makes producing theater--or art--a challenge. Sometimes it feels like cultural mission work. But, we keep doing it because, well. Somebody has to.

The contrary view isn't new. In 1909, Richmond novelist James Branch Cabell's The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking was published by Doubleday. He'd intended to write a droll comedy of manners, as though Oscar Wilde was transferred to Williamsburg and Richmond, which in the book are rechristened Fairhaven and Lichfield.

At one point, the protagonist, Robert Townsend -- a snob, though on occasion amusing-- and his mentor, the novelist John Charteris, are attending a production of Romeo and Juliet at Fairhaven's Willoughby Hall. Afterward they encounter Mrs. Adrian Rabbet, wife of Fairhaven's rector. "A most enjoyable performance," Charteris says, not thinking anybody would say different. Not so, with Mrs. Rabbet.

"Such a sad play," she chirped, "and, do you know, I am afraid it is rather demoralizing in its effects on young people. No, of course, I didn't think of bringing the children, Mr. Charteris --Shakespeare's language is not always sufficiently obscure, you know, to make that safe. And besides, as I often say to Mr. Rabbet, it is sad to think of our greatest dramatist having been a drinking man. It quite depressed me all through the play of him hobnobbing with Dr. Johnson at the Tabard Inn, and making such irregular marriages, and stealing sheep--or was it sheep, now?"
I said that, as I remembered, it was a fox, which he hid under his coat, until the beast bit him.
"Well, at any rate, it was something extremely deplorable and characteristic of a genius, and I quite feel for his wife." Mrs. Rabbet sighed, and endeavored, I think, to recollect whether it was Ingomar or Spartacus that Shakespeare wrote. "However," she concluded, "they play Ten Nights in a Barroom on Thursday, and I shall certainly bring the children then, for I am always glad for them to see a really moral and instructive drama. And that reminds me! I absolutely must tell you what Tom said about actors the other day --"
And she did....Mrs. Rabbet said toward the end that it was a most enjoyable chat, although to me it appeared to partake rather of the nature of a monologue. It consumed perhaps a half hour; and when we two at last relinguished Mrs. Rabbet to her husband's charge, it was with the feeling not altogether unakin to relief."

Some Blathering Following A Quiet
Does one ever recover from the Democratic primary malady?



• I'm reading Richmonder James Branch Cabell's early novel, The Cords of Vanity--A Comedy of Shirking of 1909 (re-edited and republished 1920), to gain some understanding of the rarefied mindset of his social class to provide persepctive for this book I'm endeavoring to write. [The image above is via the Virginia Commonwealth University Special Collections site].

This, along with Ellen Glasgow's more realistic and far less self-conscious Romance of a Plain Man, are providing invaluable and insightful glimpses into this time and place.

Glasgow mentions the suffrage question, includes cruelty to animals, but even in her book African-Americas are tangential, uneducated people, lacking individual character. Cabell's Townsend character refers to his mammy. These two writers occupied the same city, though not a similar realm of existence as businessman and firebrand editor of the Richmond Planet, John Mitchell Jr. He was running weekly tallies of the lynchings of blacks, and the purported reasons for the crime. And none of them were sending checks to support the muckraker socialist Adon A. Yoder and his Idea.

Now, Cabell never needed to work, that is, in the time-clock punching way--he was descended of two storied Virginia families and his daddy married well. But he was the artist in the family, and as such, experienced the loneliness of loving a city that held him in suspicion and further expected him to accomplish something significant, and then after he built 52 books, forgot him.

Cords is, as his biographer Edgar MacDonald described, an almost painfully autobiographical novel. The protagonist Robert Etheridge Townsend is James Branch Cabell's alter ego. Richmond becomes Lichfield.

He strove to be an epigrammatic word smith, oh so witty and droll. For this reason, among others, he is a personal hero, though I shall never match Cabell's preciosity--I'm not by half as well-read or educated--I, instead, seek relevancy.

Townsend of Lichfield was sort of dating, with intention of marriage, a young woman of means named Rosalind Jemmett whom he kind of forgot about while writing his first and unfortunate novel. They patch up and take up. He spends the summer holidaying with Rosalind and her family's well-off friends. Here, he waxes proto-Fitzgeraldian.

"They were a queer lot. They all looked so unspeakably new; their clothes were spick and span, and as expensive as possible, but that was not it; even in their bathing suits these middle-aged people--the were mostly middle-aged--seemed to have been very recently finished, like animated waxworks of animated people just come from the factory. And they spent money in a continuous careless way that frightened me.
But I was on my very best, most dignified behavior; and when Aunt Lora presented me as "one of the Lichfield Townsends, you know," these brewers and breweresses appeared to be properly impressed. One of them--actually--"supposed that I had a coat-of-arms"; which in Lichfield would be equivalent of supposing that a gentleman possesses a pair of trousers."

Then at one point he finds wealthy widow named Elena Barry-Smith -- (sounding like Cabell's wife, Priscilla Bradley Shepherd, though Elena has no children, and goes off to marry someone else due to Townsend's arty dawdling and protestations--and the chronology is too soon) -- who is acting as though she's not interested, and he woos her, making great and ardent claims, even that he'd become a prominent citizen and seek office. This comment leaped out considering the current season:

"I will even go into civic politics, if you insist upon it, and have round-cornered cards in all the drug-stores so that everybody who buys a cigar will know I am subject to the Democratic primary. I wonder, by the way, if people ever survive that malady? It sounds to me a deal more dangerous than epilepsy, say, yet lots of persons seem to have it -- "

Firehouse Cabaret Reviewed

The writer still says you should go; despite quibbles here and there.

'Firehouse' Offers Change of Pace

By SUSAN HAUBENSTOCK

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

The modestly entertaining "Firehouse Theatre Cabaret" brings back the concept of a revue.

Like some shows done in New York in the 1950s and'60s, it's a mixture of sketches -- in this case, actual 10-minute plays -- and songs with a slightly skewed perspective.

This year's cabaret is in the hands of Scott Wichmann, who not only acts and sings in the show but also directed it.

There are few pleasures in Richmond equal to seeing Wichmann perform; he's like a cyclotron, full of energy and magnetism. His singing is especially skilled in this cabaret; he does wonders with Gershwin's "Sweet and Low Down" and Ray Charles' "Hallelujah."

There's a pleasantly loose jazz trio backing up the singer-actors, with a basic black set by Tad Burrell and well-executed lighting by Mike Mauren.

Wichmann has good supporting players to work with. Jude Fageas opens the evening with "But I Was Cool," an Oscar Brown Jr. song, and he uses his lanky frame and versatile voice to embody a geeky grace.

Alia Bisharat sings a soulful version of the Mack Gordon-Harry Warren "At Last," and Lisa Kotula ably joins Wichmann in the absurdly amusing "Date with a Stranger" by playwright Cherie Vogelstein.

But the other playlets are lackluster. Ellen Melaver's "Isabelle" is flat; Jamie Brandli's "Clowning Around" is silly; Jeffrey Sweet's "The Award" is just mildly amusing; and Mary Miller's "Ferris Wheel" echoes "Date with a Stranger" a little too much.

And while the playwrights are honored with full program bios, you have to wonder why there are no credits at all for the songwriters, including Rodgers and Hart, or for songs borrowed from the scores of "Brooklyn" and "Avenue Q."

Yet this is enough of a change of pace from the usual theatrical fare to make it worth seeing. Get to the theater early, buy a drink and snag a table. You'll feel like you're in a nightclub, you'll have some laughs and you'll enjoy some tunes. Not a bad night out.

The Best Parts of the Merlefest

• The Avett Brothers, their full-bore, fierce Friday night mainstage set. So earnest, energetic and entertaining, these boys from Concord, N.C. A mixed blood child of newgrass, The Proclaimers, Kurt Cobain and The Beatles. Dancing erupted up front, but without enough space, thus the audience began hefting chairs in fire brigade fashion, passing them overhead and out of the way, and for a while the plastic seats danced in the air, as though performing a blue grass-flavored peformance-art piece.

• The Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group of young African-American musicians playing as a string band in the tradition of Upper Piedmont Carolina's banjo and fiddle music. Joyful, wistful, spiritual, surprising-- their version of Blu Cantrell's "Hit'Em Up Style" gets the crowd roaring.

• The Waybacks, with John Cowan, presenting classic Led Zeppelin tunes, on the Hillside Stage, with intermittent rain. Who knew Jimmy Page played all that on an acoustic instrument? Yup, those are fiddles, a banjo, drums and guitars. Two words: A-mazing.

• And just meandering around, listening and watching as all types and sizes plucked, picked, and fiddled just for the fun of being among others who also enjoy the music.

The Firehouse Theatre Cabaret: Opening Tonight!
Featuring and directed by Scott Wichmann
Through the sponsorship of Mr. and Mrs. W.E. Singleton



It’s BACK! The Firehouse Theatre Cabaret, opening Thursday, April 24th.

SEE the Firehouse interior transformed into an intimate cabaret-style setting!

BE ENTERTAINED by Director Scott Wichmann, Alia Bisharat, Jude Fageas, and Lisa Kotula playing various roles in these ten-minute, one-act plays:

Clowning Around by Jamie Brandli, in which two women compete for a job neither want, but both desperately need; Isabelle by Ellen Melaver, in which a man projects his old dreams onto his ex-girlfriend’s new life; The Award by Jeffrey Sweet, in which a scientist’s trophy becomes a catalyst for revenge; Ferris Wheel by Mary Miller, in which two lonely souls are trapped on a stuck ferris wheel at a county fair; and Date With a Stranger by Cherie Vogelstein, in which two impetuous people meet in a diner and act out the rest of their lives over breakfast.

GROOVE to the live music ensemble led by Ryan Corbitt playing jazz interludes.


(Photo, L-R: Scott Wichmann, Jude Fageas (rear), Lisa Kotula, Alia Bisharat. Photo by Jay Paul Photography)

April 24 - May 17, 2008.

Special Events:
Thursday, April 24th: Opening night! Post-show reception provided by Davis & Main.
Friday, April 25th: Post-show talk back with cast and crew.
Friday, May 2: Doors open at 7:00 for a special wine tasting provided by Strawberry Street Vineyard. Show starts at 8:00 p.m.
Thursday, May 15: See Firehouse Fire Ball auction winners Caroline Gottwald and Debbie Walton in their debut performances on the Firehouse stage!

Tickets: Individual - $25; Seniors - $22; Student - $10 with valid ID.
Showtimes: 8:00 p.m. Thursdays - Saturdays; Sunday matinees at 4:00 p.m. Doors open a half-hour before showtime.

Click here to buy tickets online, or call the Firehouse at 355-2001.

Off To The Merle, too...



Despite having too many things and not enough clock, we're making the annual journey to the Merelefest in N. Wilkesboro, N.C. This is massive four-day event of bluegrass, blues, alt-country--what Page Wilson has termed "purebred American mongrel music," which is as good a description as I know of. Anyway, I tank up on banjo sounds until I don't need to hear anymore the rest of the year. Well, OK, for a few weeks.