October 26, 2018

Mr. Popper’s Penguins kicks off our Children’s Theatre Season this week, with the official opening tomorrow afternoon at two. The show opens now and runs all the way through Dec 30. Even with this extended run, weekday matinee tickets are already going gangbusters. Based on the popular children’s classic by Richard and Florence Atwater, Penguins tells the tale of a gentle British house painter with a fondness for Antarctic exploration, who finds himself and his family the proud domesticators of a family of penguins. The heartwarming show is directed by Josh Chenard, music directed by Jason Marks, and choreographed by Wes Seals. An entire menagerie of penguin puppets has been created by Kylie Clark, who designed and built the puppets for last season’s Knuffle Bunny. Derrick Jaques, last seen at Virginia Rep in Mary Poppins, returns as Mr. Popper. Keaton Hillman (1776, Shakespeare in Love), Renee McGowan, Emma-Claire Polich, and Eva Marie Tuck round out the cast. Set design is by Chris Raintree, with lights by BJ Wilkinson, and costumes by Jeanie Nugent. Justin Janke is stage manager. The show will be the first production in our newly renovated Children’s Theatre home at Willow Lawn. With financial support from Federal Realty, we’ve added brighter lighting, new bathrooms, and fresh paint and carpet to make the theatre even more family friendly. 

Virginia Rep dusted off Theatre IV’s very first musical, We the People, for presentation last Saturday evening following the annual dinner of the Society of the Cincinnati at the Commonwealth Club. The Society is the nation’s oldest patriotic organization, founded in 1783 by officers of the Continental Army, and our nation's first hereditary organization. The founders of the Society assigned their descendants the task of preserving the memory of the patriotic sacrifices that made American liberty a reality. We the People is a musical revue written by Bruce Miller in 1975 in honor of the Bicentennial, featuring songs that were song before, during, and after the Revolutionary War. Tunes include the familiar (“Yankee Doodle,” “Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be,” “Simple Gifts”) and the forgotten (“How Stands the Glass Around,” “Come Shake Your Dull Noodle,” “Brave Wolfe”). Bruce and Phil provided historic narration, and Georgia Rogers Farmer, Grey Garrett, Will Hart, and Jeff Linquist sang, accompanied by Will and Jeff on guitar. Sue Griffin provided colonial costumes, and Derek Dumais set up and ran the sound. We the People toured extensively between 1975 and 1989—the 200th Anniversary of the Ratification of the Bill of Rights. Plans to revive the show in 2025 are now in full swing, just in time for the Semiquincentennial (go ahead, look it up).  

On Tuesday, the Virginia Rep Awards Committee announced the recipient of our 2019 Virginia Excellence in Theatre Award to be presented at the annual Anything Goes Gala on Sat, Jan 26. This year’s honoree, deVeaux Riddick, has been a cornerstone of RVA’s cultural community for 66 years. Along with his late partner, Robert Watkins, deVeaux founded, in 1952, DESIGN—one of RVA’s first interior design firms. He began his work with Virginia Rep in 1956 when he starred at the Tavern in Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell (pictured in RTD), working with Barksdale co-founders Tom Carlin, Stu Falconer, Perky and Pete Kilgore. DeVeaux and Robert co-founded The Richmond Ballet in 1957. That same year, they designed the first Bal du Bois, an assignment they would continue for more than a half century. In 1959, deVeaux and Robert designed Barksdale’s new stage house, installing seating platforms that surrounded the stage on three sides, and moving a load-bearing brick wall nine feet upstage. Later, they co-founded The Concert Ballet of Virginia and The Theatre at Bolling Haxall House. In 1980, they designed the scenery for The Philadelphia Story in Theatre IV’s first adult season. All the while, deVeaux also acted, brilliantly, in theatres all ‘round town. Richmond theatre would be far less than it is today without the irreplaceable talent of deVeaux Riddick. It is our privilege to honor him. 

“’Nobody likes cops, especially black ones,’ says the streetwise protagonist of Between Riverside and Crazy. ‘Black civilians think we Uncle Tom,’ intones Pops, himself a retired black NYPD officer. ‘White civilians think we’re uppity.’ This lovingly-drawn individual is one of a handful that populate Riverside, Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Pulitzer-winning play that’s strong on character. Every time you think you know where the show is going, Guirgis changes course.” Rich Griset, STYLE Weekly. “Cadence Theatre and Virginia Rep’s electric and multilayered co-production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama doesn’t hesitate to grab us by the lapels and bark more than one compelling tale in our faces. With a blunt, buzzy and electric script, Riverside slowly and expertly layers on questions that weigh on each character’s mind. Am I a man or just a cog inside an indifferent machine? Is there a limit—and ultimate purpose—to righteous indignation?” Tony Farrell, Richmond Times-Dispatch. “As the show’s fulcrum, David Emerson Toney lands a powerhouse performance as the outspoken, but emotionally-guarded Pops. The rest of the excellent cast create convincing characters with distinctive personalities and spot-on accents. Director Tawnya Pettiford-Wates has allowed the actors to shine, while keeping the interactions lively.” TV Jerry, 4 stars out of 5. 

He’s definitely a Nathaniel, not a Nat, but when the abbreviation for your name so closely matches the acronym of an organization you hold dear, well … c’est la vie. Our fearless leader ventured back to the Big Apple this week to attend the 30^th Annual Festival of New Musicals presented by the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) on Thurs and Fri. Forty-five minute cuts of eight brand new musicals were presented for an audience of about 700 industry professionals. Broadway successes including Thoroughly Modern Millie and The Drowsy Chaperone took their first bows at previous Festivals, and every year promises to introduce adventurous artistic directors nationwide to the Cole Porters, Rodgers and Hammersteins, and Paseks and Pauls of tomorrow. One contender that made it into this year’s cut was none other than Oliver Houser, the talented young actor who played the leading role of Melchior Gabor in our 2012 production of Spring Awakening. Oliver wrote the book, music, and lyrics for XY, which Nathaniel saw on Friday. XY tells the story of Chris, who can’t quite shake Christine. She’s with him everywhere he goes, staring back when Chris looks in the mirror. But when Chris falls in love, the divide between then and now begins to blur.  XY is a musical drama about accepting the past and coming home to the most unfamiliar of places: ourselves.

Following the publication of last week’s Good News Friday, we received our favorite type of correction, one that taught us something new! We wrote, “As we all know, the Good News is that after the storm had past, most of RVA escaped far less scathed than originally predicted.” This sloppiness prompted Steve Murden to write, “I'll take you up on the corrections challenge.  The storm had passed, not past.  ;-)” Thanks, Steve, for catching this homophonic error. Now I know, some of you may be saying, “Hold the phone, passed and past aren’t homophones, they’re homonyms.” At least that’s what I would have said before I looked it up to be sure. Turns out a homophone is a word that has the same sound as another word but is spelled differently AND has a different meaning. Examples of homophones are: to and two and too; pray and prey. A homonym, on the other hand, is a word that has the same sound AND the same spelling as another word, but a different meaning. Examples of homonyms are: the bank where you store your money and the bank that keeps the river in its place; the row that’s something you do in a boat and the row that’s made when you put things in a straight line. Speaking of rows, what kind of homos are the row (rō) that’s something you do in a boat and the row (rau̇) that is a noisy disturbance or quarrel? Those are homographs. Who knew?