Past Season Schedule 

Spring 2002

Poster Design by John Buckingham

The Tempest

Directed by Ed Isser

Shakespeare’s romance about the redemptive power of forgiveness in the face of evil. Worlds collide when a group of European nobles are marooned on a mystic island and confront magical forces beyond their understanding. The Fenwick production is set on a South Sea isle and features original music and choreography by Luce Scholar Desak Made Suarti Laksmi. 

Fenwick Theatre
April 11, 12, 13, 18, 19 and 20, 2002 
8:00 p.m. 
April 20, 2:00 p.m.

Reservations (508) 793-2496 

Fall 2001

Our fall mainstage production will be a new play by Brian Dykstra based on his experience teaching playwriting to at-risk teenagers in North Dakota. The students’ expressions of their own journeys through adolescence were censored by the school adminstration. 

Luce Scholar Desak Made Suarti Laksmi directs the fall concert of dance, music and mask. Be sure to arrive early for this spectacular event ~ last spring’s gamelan concert played to a standing-room-only crowd. 

The acerbic, hard-bitten 1926 comedy, out of circulation far too long, was the source of the celebrated Broadway musical. Roxie Hart shoots her lover dead when he tries to run out on her. But in the wild, corrupt Chicago of the Roaring Twenties, beautiful jazz-baby murderesses don't get the chair ~ especially when they hire a shyster like Billy Flynn to defend them. 

Traditional costumes and masks from the island of Bali provide an enchanting visual backdrop for Gita Sari's spring concert. The finale of Desak Made Suarti Laksmi's inaugural year, featuring new repertoire in music and dance. 

This annual event is always eagerly anticipated. Students from Daniel McCusker's and Kathleen Ridlon's classes perform a collection of repertory and original pieces, drawing from a wide range of classical and modern influences. 

      Italian Nobel Laureate Luigi Pirandello examines the country of his birth in a sexy, comic romp about a young man who lives for wine, women and song. Set in a land of golden light where trees are laden with almonds and the scent of wildflowers permeates the air, Liolà is the last of the Sicilian pastorals recalling a simpler life and a purer spirit. 

Gita Sari is "essence of song." This first concert under the direction of our new Luce Scholar, the internationally renowned artist Desak Made Suarti Laksmi, combines Balinese music and dance in a lavish spectacle. 

Chitra, daughter of the King of Manipur, has been brought up as a boy; she is proud of her manly prowess until she falls in love with the demi-god Arjuna. Composer Shirish Korde and director/librettist Lynn Kremer base their fusion opera on an episode from the Hindu epic, The Mahabharata, as interpreted by the great Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore. Boston-based dancer Tara Ahmed will be joined by Balinese dancer I Nyoman Catra, virtuoso singer Elizabeth Keusch, tabla player Samir Chatterjee, and Boston Musica Viva in this richly textured musical fantasy. 

Also performs at the Tsai Center, Boston, April 29, 8:00 p.m. 
(Call Boston Music Viva for tickets ~ 617-354-6910) 

This highly varied program of dance consists of faculty and student choreography and reconstructions of repertory pieces. Always an eagerly anticipated event. 

San Francisco's shadowlight Productions presents a Balinese Wayang Kulit ~ a Shadow puppet performance featuring live music. shadowmaster Larry Reed is certain to enthrall audiences with a traditional story based on a Hindu epic, interwining adventure, humor and philosophy. A unique event. 

A rare revival of the 1923 classsic, a savagely funny nightmare vision of American Life. Mr. Zero kills his boss when he's replaced by a machine. Rice's perspective on the beaucratization of modern living has never seemed so timely. 

Shakespeare's bittersweet, magical tale of love and coming of age. Helena, a young woman from a modest background, falls madly in love with Bertram, a handsome nobleman. She risks her life, sacrifices her pride, and undertakes a perilous journey to win the object of her affection. This lyrical tragicomedy examines the redemptive and transformative power of love and asks us to reconsider our own notions of beauty and status. 

Ruth Birnberg Dance is a vibrant company with a unique commitment to live music. "Small's Tale" is danced to the strains of a toy piano, "Soliloquy" to the full sound of Debussy's pieces for two pianos. Birnberg's work has been performed in New York and Washington, throughout the Midwest and New England. She is the co-founder and managing director of Green Street Studios ~ and, to quote Christine Temin of The Boston Globe, "one of the most gifted voices in New England dance." 

A remounting of Lynn Kremer and Shirish Korde's extraordinary music-theatre piece, first produced here in 1991. RASA is a large-scale multi-media production yet, as the American Record Guide has written, it is "remarkable in its beauty and subtlety . . . of considerable musical richness." A young woman escapes her native India for America after her fiancee is killed, relocated first in Manhattan, then in the heartland, and each time reinventing her identity. A story of startling metamorphoses and unexpected resurrections. RASA has been selected to be performed at the Sonic Boom Festival at Columbia University this fall.