Last posts on theatre

Waiting for Godot and Existentialism

2010-10-27T14:28:00+02:00

Tree: attachment / society

Godot: meaning / God

Day: lifetime / generation

Vladimir: ego / leader

Vladimir’s hat: (vlasti: leader) identity

Estragon: (tarragon: vegetative) id / follower

Estragon’s boots: habits

Estragon’s wound: depression / crisis

Estragon’s carrot: distraction

Pozzo: (well: wishing well) superego / ruler

Pozzo’s blindness: delusion

Pozzo’s stool: conscience

Lucky: truth / philosopher.

Lucky’s kick: a hard lesson

Lucky’s bags: ideals

Lucky’s dumbness: oblivion / censorship

Lucky’s speech: experience / art

Child: next Vladimir

Child’s brother: next Estragon

First day: ideology

Second day: nihilism

National Endowment for the Arts Issues Research Note on Women Artists: 1990 to 2005

2008-12-03T11:25:48+01:00

National Endowment for the Arts Issues Research Note on Women Artists: 1990 to 2005

Gender pay gap persists among full-time working artists

For immediate release:
December 2, 2008

			Contact: Sally Gifford (NEA) 202-682-5606 giffords@arts.gov

Washington, D.C. -- A new National Endowment for the Arts research note shows that women are making gains in traditionally male artist occupations, but still earn less than male artists. Women Artists: 1990-2005 takes a closer look at female artist employment trends that were previously mentioned in the May 2008 NEA report Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005.

Totaling almost 919,000 artists in 2005, women represented 46 percent of the artist labor force, comparable to their percentage of all civilian workers. The note reveals significant patterns in pay disparity, demographic and educational trends, and women’s advancement in various art fields over the past 15 years. This note draws on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2003-2005 American Community Surveys (ACS), along with the 1990 and 2000 population censuses.

"This important new report provides a factual overview of the situation of women in the American arts, said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "Committed and entrepreneurial, women artists are making enormous progress, but still lag behind their male colleagues economically, especially in fields such as photography, design, and architecture.”

Among the key findings:

Female artists earn less than male artists. Women artists who work full-year, full-time earn $0.75 for every dollar made by men artists. Women workers in general earn $0.77 for every dollar earned by men.

Women’s pay disparity increases with age. In 2003-2005, women artists aged 18 to 24 earned $0.95 for every $1 made by young men artists. This ratio fell to $0.67 for 45-to-54 year-olds. Similar pay gaps by age are found in the overall labor market.
Pay gaps vary by occupation. Men and women had closer earnings parity in lower-paying performing arts occupations (such as musicians and dancers), where women earned an average of $0.92 for every dollar earned by men. The gap tended to be larger in non-performing art occupations (such as designers and art directors), where women earned 72 percent of what men earn.
Pay gaps vary by state. The pay disparity was smaller in ten states, such as New York and Arizona, where women made 80 percent or more of what men made. Women made less than 75 percent of what men made in 27 states, including Virginia, Michigan, and North Dakota.

Women make up just under half of all artists nationwide (46 percent), yet they are underrepresented in many artist professions. In 2003-2005, nearly 8 out of 10 announcers and architects were men.

Women have achieved a greater presence in some artist occupations. By 2003-2005, women made up 43 percent of all photographers and 22 percent of all architects – representing gains of 11 and 7 percent, respectively, since 1990.

Women artists are as likely to be married as female workers in general, but they are less likely to have children. In 2003-2005, more than half of all women artists and all women workers were married. Yet only 29 percent of women artists had children under 18, almost six percentage points lower than for women workers in general.

Female artists cluster in low-population states. Women made up more than 55 percent of the artist labor force in Iowa, Alaska, New Hampshire and Mississippi in 2003-2005. They represent well below half of all artists in New York (45.8 percent) and in California (42.6 percent).

"This important new report provides a factual overview of the situation of women in the American arts," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "Committed and entrepreneurial, women artists are making enormous progress, but still lag behind their male colleagues economically, especially in fields such as photography, design, and architecture."

The NEA research note Women Artists: 1990-2005 is available for download at www.arts.gov/research/ResearchNotes_chrono.html.

Resources

The NEA Office of Research & Analysis issues periodic research reports, brochures, and notes on significant topics affecting artists and arts organizations. The NEA research note Women Artists: 1990-2005, as well as a full report and executive summary brochure of Artists in the Workforce, are available in print and electronic form in the Research section of the NEA website, www.arts.gov.

About the National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the largest annual national funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.

http://www.arts.gov/news/news08/WomenArtists.html

English Theatre

2008-11-03T17:02:00+01:00

THE FLYING PIG THEATRE

This is a theatre company in Lyon which not only presents theatre productions in English but also runs theatre classes for children (in English).

For more information :

mobile: 06 78 67 86 49 or flyingpigtheatre@hotmail.com

The Flying Pig Theatre Company is proud to present "Dragonne" for a second season at the Maison du Peuple, 147 avenue de Général Frère Lyon 8è, on Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th November at 14h30 and 17h. The play lasts an hour, and tickets are 5 euros (children, students, groups etc) and 7 euros (full price).

This is a bilingual play, set in a kingdom where English has become the official language but where French is still spoken -to the annoyance of the King. There are indeed Dragons, and treasure, and there is magic as well. It's a fairy-tale for children, with a lot of humour for the whole family, special effects and action.

After presenting the play to enthusiastic audiences in April, (ranging from very young children to grandparents) the play has been partly rewritten to further balance the French and the English. The cast are Annelise Dorel, Keith Farquhar, Yannick Farquhar, Simone Fry, Ian Lamb, Alexander Laube/Director, Felix Laube, Alain Le Gourrierec, Esteban Perrin, and Paul Woodley.

For reservations, please contact us here at this email address flyingpigtheatre@hotmail.com or by ringing or sending an sms to 06 78 67 86 49.
Please pass this message on to anyone you think may be interested in this production.

Flying Pig Theatre Company

Another disembodied post

2008-06-25T14:00:00+02:00

I am waiting on line. Please keep your fingers crossed that I can get through five hours without needing to make use of restroom facilities. You know you've got issues when you're willing to sacrifice your bladder for Hamlet.

More Yiddish theater fun

2008-01-31T15:35:00+01:00

This came up on the Yugntruf email list the other day:

"The Essence" was created and is performed by Allen Lewis Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, and Steve Sterner, three of the younger veterans of Yiddish theater. "We tell the entire history of the Yiddish theater, kinda-sorta, in eighty minutes," said Rickman. "We tell stories in English and act and sing in Yiddish -- with supertitles -- and the audience laughs and cries and whatevers. And it's 99 44/100% nostalgia-free.""It's not just for alter kakers," explained Shmulenson.

I'd love to see this -- anything about the Yiddish theater that has the (chutzpah?) to advertise itself as being "99.44% nostalgia-free" has got to be good -- but because I teach on Long Island until 5pm on Mondays, there's no way I'd be able to make it to Manhattan by 7. In any case, the performance will take place at 325 E 6th Street, tvishn 1st and 2nd Avenues, on Monday, Feb 4th. So go do something Yiddish-y next week.

Shakespeare for a New Generation

2008-01-10T14:25:00+01:00

According to its own press releases, the NEA's Shakespeare for a New Generation program, part of the Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, serves to "introduce more students to the magic of live theater." Certainly (in my very humble opinion) more students should be introduced to this very real "magic." I'd like to pose a question to the readers of this blog (even those who show up here because of searches for "saturn in the eighth house" and "breast moles"): In your opinion, is "Shakespeare" an effective tool for sparking students' interest in live theater in general?

A Message of ”Tolerance”

2008-01-09T15:20:00+01:00

Next month, a stage musical based on Anne Frank's diary opens in Madrid. The Guardian reports:

"The Anne Frank Foundation, which jealously guards the rights to the diary - it once turned down Steven Spielberg when he wanted to make a film - has given its support. Jan Erik Dubbelman said: "This production respects the message of tolerance, within the tragedy, that we want to keep alive.""

Tolerance.The Anne Frank Foundation is promoting "tolerance" via performers who sing and dance a Holocaust story. The officemates who hid the Frank family -- and, of course, the thousands of Dutch citizens who hid and rescued Jews in the 1930s and 1940s -- seem to have done a bit more than simply tolerate their neighbors. It seems a bit off, therefore, to translate their acts into a feel-good message of tolerance for the twenty-first century.

”Swansong” in Seattle

2008-01-07T14:00:00+01:00

"Swansong," a play centered on a possible Shakespeare/Jonson rivalry and friendship, is currently on stage at the Seattle Shakespeare Company. The play was a part of the Summer Play Festival in New York City in July '06, and I'm hoping it comes back here soon. You certainly can't beat this (courtesy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):

"In their day, however (the early 17th century)-- these two were like Bruce Springsteen and Bono, pop poets and showbiz superstars."

Oh, analogies. [If you are able to catch this performance in Seattle, I'd recommend avoiding their Oxfordian POV program. However, the company otherwise seems to do some wonderful work in theater education, bringing Shakespeare, theatrics, and history into the classroom. Excellent nonpseudohistorical stuff, in other words.]

Shakespeare in NY 2008

2008-01-02T14:45:00+01:00

A few ways for New Yorkers to get their Shakespeare in early 2008:1/9 - 1/20: Othello at the Bank Street Theatre.2/12 - 3/22: Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.3/22 - 5/2: Antony and Cleopatra at Theatre for a New Audience.4/11 and 4/12: The Tempest at Queens Theatre in the Park/Claire Shulman Theatre.There was also supposed to be a musical adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor coming to Broadway later this year; it's called Lone Star Love and stars Randy Quaid (really), but seems to have been cancelled or postponed as of now.

Review Forthcoming

2007-12-07T17:35:00+01:00

Tonight I am going -- with two of my favorite people in the world -- to see Cymbeline at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Lincoln Center. I haven't been to that theater in almost a decade; the last play I saw there was The Little Foxes, with Stockard Channing, who was not Bette Davis, in the lead role. But the set was lovely, almost Chekhovian. I will post a review after I've seen Cymbeline, a play which, much like the film Shakespeare in Love, is an entertaining fairy tale if you're not intensely familiar with Shakespeare's works, and an entertaining fairy tale full of hilarious 'in-jokes' if you are.

Staging and subways

2007-11-27T20:10:00+01:00

I was going to add to Sunday's review of The Wooster Group's Hamlet a note that every ten minutes or so, there was a rumbling beneath our feet. But I need to check into that first, because it would be embarrassing to confuse A-effects with the 6 train.

The Wooster Group's Hamlet

2007-11-26T01:50:00+01:00

I should start with the observation that at intermission, several disappointed audience members in front of me talked about leaving. And 80% of the row did leave. I suspect that these theatregoers were expecting a performance of Hamlet, and what they saw was a performance about Hamlet.Throughout most of the play, a 1964 Broadway performance of Hamlet starring Richard Burton was projected onto the screen behind the actors on stage. The film had originally been intended to bring a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers; the Wooster Group's performance commented on the impossibility of bringing a genuine theatrical experience to moviegoers. The stage set was similar to the film's, as though the film was somehow projecting itself out on to the stage. The stage action followed the film's camera angles with the help of a table on wheels and the actors' movements. The actors moved, for the most part, exactly like the actors on film. This exposed how what would have looked "natural" (and perhaps even stagelike) on film was awkward and jerky on the actual stage.During several scenes, the screen went blank (blue), with only the word "UNRENDERED" digitally imposed on it. These were definitely the moments where this performance became a play about Hamlet, not just about the 1964 attempt to bring theater to movie houses. First, when Polonius speaks to Ophelia and warns Laertes "neither a borrower nor a lender be," we see an "unrendered" screen interrupted, just for a moment, by an interior shot of Polonius' house from Michael Almereyda's 2000 film. The "unrendered" screen appears again after a second, but Polonius delivers his borrower/lender speech in Bill Murray's voice (the audio from Almereyda's film). Later, the Player King concedes his speech to none other than Charlton Heston, whose melodramatic Trojan War tale from Branagh's 1996 film appears on the screen in Windows Media Player (hmm ... possibly a comment on the word "player" in the digital age?) as a file named "C_Heston.mov." The characters onstage watch, engrossed at first, but then start to get bored, turning away, laying down, chatting with each other. There was a microphone placed downstage left, where Hamlet delivers (all, I believe) his more "famous" speeches. I wasn't sure whether this was meant to suggest a hackneyed Hamlet, a self-absorbed Hamlet, or perhaps a rockstar Hamlet. The only decision that didn't work for me was having Gertrude and Ophelia played by the same actor, who made sure to leave parts of Gertrude's dress hanging out beneath Ophelia's following her purposefully hasty costume changes. The Gertrude/Ophelia conflation has been done before, and it is, in fact, the subject of (too) many psychoanalytic "Hamlet loves Mom/Hamlet's a misogynist" readings. The Wooster Group's production did, however, rather amusingly call attention to the fact that Gertrude and Ophelia couldn't be on stage at the same time -- at "The Murder of Gonzago," after Hamlet left his mother's side for "mettle more attractive," he noted to himself, "well, we'll have to skip over all this Ophelia stuff, won't we?"Ultimately, I believe that what made this Hamlet "new" (something not easy to do with Hamlet) was the fact that it was neither a straightforward staging of Hamlet nor a straightforward "quoting" of Hamlet, but rather a play about quoting Hamlet.

Shakespeare comes to town

2007-11-04T18:35:00+01:00

Some days, I forget I'm back in New York City.The Wooster Group's Hamlet is currently on stage at the Public Theater this month, and Newsday's review has me excited about this production, which projects a film of a 1964 stage production on a screen behind the actors. And,

"The synchronization of stage to film is maniacally precise: The stage actors move themselves, and some free-wheeling set pieces, in tandem not only with the film actors' blocking but with camera movements, cuts and snags in the film.Some of these visual blips have been added. The film of Burton's "Hamlet," already a low-quality live recording of a starkly casual production, has been sliced and diced to a jerky, idiosyncratic rhythm. Actors' bodies have been digitally erased, or half-erased, from many shots. And a few other "Hamlet" films - Kenneth Branagh's, Michael Almereyda's - make cameo appearances."

Employing film to produce "jerky, idiosyncratic rhythm" on stage -- characters from Hamlet shouting "fast forward!" -- Hamlet speaking "like an obsessive who's replayed the same scene over and over again on his VCR" ... I'm definitely going to have to go see this one by myself, because no one wants to sit with the woman taking notes in the theater.I will blog a review of this and Lincoln Center's Cymbeline, which I will be seeing with people (thus, not taking notes) in late November or early December.

An American masque at City College (1916)

2007-10-08T21:40:00+02:00

Masques, in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, were court performances that typically celebrated the royal family and the ideology behind the monarchy. Their "audiences" and "performers" were usually conflated -- the masques were designed to entertain or celebrate the people who performed them (usually, nobles or members of the royal family itself). Masques also tended to involve elaborate scenery, sometimes designed by Early Modern architects. Not that I spend my weekends searching for 90-year-old Shakespeare-related performances on NYtimes.com, but ... A 1916 article on a City College stadium performance of "Caliban by the Yellow Sands," a Shakespeare-inspired masque (performed, unlike the masques of Shakespeare's day, for a large public), employed what the Times called "the most elaborate system of lighting ever used in a dramatic performance in America." What I found especially interesting here was how the director thought it was crucial that the audience not see the stage before the performance; he chose to "blind" the audience using additional lights set up on towers around the stage. And it seems, according to the article, that a stadium was thought to be one of the most unnatural / difficult places to perform Shakespeare, especially in terms of acoustics.

Yiddish Theater: A Love Story

2007-09-25T01:40:00+02:00

There's a documentary titled Yiddish Theater: A Love Story coming to New York and LA this November. Dan Katzir, the documentary's director, posted news of the screenings to the Yugntruf mailing list last week, noting that the film tries to get across a "message about the importance of keeping Yiddish theater alive to a larger community."

"Enter the funny, larger-than-life world of Yiddish Theater today through this documentary film about the amazing woman who has kept the oldest running Yiddish Theater in America alive. Zypora Spaisman is a Holocaust survivor who conquers all hearts in her passion for art, life and Yiddish.This heartwarming story of one unique woman's struggle portrays the fight of both an old art form to stay relevant and an old actress to find meaning and a stage in a society that worships youth. Shot in real time in one of the coldest winters in NEW YORK over the eight days of Hanukkah, Zypora's theater has one week to raise funding to keep their show going. Many miracles occur during this week. But will they be enough to save this critically acclaimed Yiddish show?"

Passion, miracles, melodrama, larger-than-lifedness: sounds like Yiddish theater all right! I'm not much for "miracles," but I'm definitely looking forward to seeing this.

Contrary to Popular Belief/Opinion, I Have Never Had a Schoolgirl Crush on Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

2007-08-22T18:50:00+02:00

Hamlet's no prince. When the country he's supposed to inherit is in trouble, he goes away to school. After his father is murdered, he reads books and stages performances (his own "antic disposition" and The Mousetrap) instead of bravely avenging the murder, addressing Claudius' crime and perhaps even Gertrude's complicity. His "performance," unlike Hieronomo's in The Spanish Tragedy, doesn't do anything. (I fear that my blog is often more empiricist than I am.)In his asking "should I kill myself?" instead of "should I face Claudius and take my place on the throne?," Hamlet's rather ... annoying. Michael Almereyda's Hamlet is one of my favorite adaptations because Almereyda and Ethan Hawke play this annoyingness well: Hamlet's a film student who should stand up for his father, but all he can do is make films about his own life, his own situation.The translation from stage to film -- on both levels -- captures the total failure of "The Mousetrap." The "to be or not to be" soliloquy is recited in the action section of a Blockbuster store; instead of drawing from these films the inspiration to act, Hamlet thinks about his own life and death. Courtney Lehmann's Shakespeare Remains, which supplies a (fairly) good model for working media theory on Shakespeare without overlooking the historical conditions of Early Modern play and book production, calls the Almereyda/Hawke Hamlet's filmmaking a "search for a new technology of representation" (95). For those interested in a psychoanalytic/"hauntological" reading of the film, Lehmann's chapter on this film is worth a read. I won't get into my specific critiques of her reading, though, because that's dissertation/article material, which will not appear here. This is more of a venue for arguments like "damn, Hamlet's annoying." Remember!

They would have named the baby Sigmund Freud.

2007-08-21T00:00:00+02:00

A review of a production of Hamlet at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre takes issue with the director's choice to show Ophelia as visibly pregnant. Reviewer Jeff Smith writes:

More disturbing, Ophelia, it turns out, is pregnant. Previous stagings, wanting an explicit motivation for her madness/suicide, have done this. But it goes against the text and her protestations of virtue. Worse, that she's pregnant makes her (and Hamlet) a liar. Ophelia's one of the few characters in Hamlet who isn't two-faced, who isn't given to "ambiguous giving out." (Actor Michael Pennington says, "She isn't so much mad as unacceptably sane.") If we can't trust Ophelia's words, then something's really rotten in the state of Denmark.

My question: is there really anything in the text of Hamlet that indicates that we must trust Ophelia and Hamlet? Isn't the idea that we have to be able to trust even a deeply flawed "protagonist" specific to psychological realism? There actually is a droplet of textual support for Ophelia's pregnancy, too: see Painter and Parker's essay in Notes and Queries [41 (1994): 42-44] for a discussion of the possibility that Shakespeare's audiences would have recognized that the flowers Ophelia distributes were believed to be abortifacients. Alas, Mark Anderson has mobilized this theory for the Oxfordian "argument." Referencing a different review of the same production, Anderson writes:

Slightly glossed over in this review (and we're always grateful for ink, of course) is the fact that this interpretation of the Danish tragedy didn't just come out of nowhere. It was wholly biographically motivated. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the reason the author of Hamlet inserted those references to Ophelia's pregnancy and flirtation with abortion is that is exactly what happened in his troubled first marriage. When Edward de Vere was traveling on the Continent in 1575, we now know that his wife, in her second trimester, asked Queen Elizabeth's physician to terminate her pregnancy.

It's difficult for me to argue that biographical criticism just doesn't hold water without opening myself up to the "that's just the traditional point of view" criticism leveled against "Stratfordians." Irvin Matus explains the circularity of the Oxfordians' use of biographical evidence in his essay on The Oxfordian Hamlet:

For instance, we are told that when de Vere was 12, his father "died under mysterious circumstances." The real mystery here is what his source is for this claim. The only one I can think of is Hamlet -- the prince's father died of foul play, Hamlet is Oxford, ergo: Oxford's father must have died of foul play too. But John de Vere made a will on July 28, 1562, and died six days later, which suggests that the cause of death was illness, and I can find no contemporary evidence that suggests otherwise.

There's much more discussion of this type of circular logic in the essay, and Matus also wisely reminds readers that while Shakespeare may have complicated the Hamlet story, he certainly did not invent it. While plays (and novels!) can and do point to cultural phenomena, and can tell us a lot about the social and political anxieties prevalent in the period in which they were produced, they are not detective stories that ask us to decode characters' -- or worse, authors' -- motivations. Perhaps people are sometimes uncomfortable with how shockingly uncomplicated literature can be.

சலுகை ரஜினிக்காகவா?

2007-01-02T06:30:00+01:00

சிறு தயாரிப்பாளர்களின் கோரிக்கையை ஏற்று பொதுமக்களின் வசதிக்காக சினிமா டிக்கெட் கட்டணங்களை தமிழக அரசு குறைத்தது. ஒரு வார காலத்திலேயே அதை மாற்றி கட்டணத்தை இருமடங்காக உயர்த்திக்கொள்ள வகை செய்திருக்கிறது. இடையில் என்ன நடந்தது?தென்னிந்தியாவின் ஒரே டிரைவ் இன் திரையரங்கம் என்பதற்காக சென்னையில் உள்ள பிரார்த்தனா திரையரங்கின் சிறப்புக் கட்டணமுறை தொடரும் என்று அறிவிக்கப் பட்டுள்ளது. அது சாதாரண ரசிகர்களை பெரிதாக பாதிக்கப்போவதில்லை என்பதால் ஏற்கலாம். மற்ற திரையரங்குகளுக்கு வழங்கப்பட்டுள்ள சலுகைகளும் விதிகளும் சாதாரண, நடுத்தர ரசிகர்களைப் பாதிக்கும் வித்த்திலேயே இருக்கிறது.ரஜினியின் சிவாஜி உள்ளிட்ட பெரிய பட்ஜெட் படங்கள் கட்டணக் குறைப்பால் நஷ்டமடையும் என்பதாலேயே அவர்கள் கொடுத்த அழுத்தத்திற்கு பணிந்து அரசு கட்டணத்தை உயர்த்தியுள்ளது என்று கூறுகிறார்கள்.காசைக் கரியாக்கும் பெரிய பட்ஜெட் படங்களை ஆதரிப்பதா அரசின் கடமை? என்ன வளம் இல்லை இந்த திருநாட்டில்? சும்மா மூன்று நிமிட பாடல் காட்சிக்கு 4 கோடி செலவில் வெளிநாட்டில் சூட்டிங். ஒரு நிமிட மாறுவேடத்திற்கு 1 கோடி செலவில் வெளிநாட்டு மேக்கப், கார்களை உடைக்க காயலான் கடைக் கார்களைக் கூட வெளிநாட்டில் தேடும் பெரிய பட்ஜெட் சினிமாக்காரர்களை ஊக்குவிக்க வேண்டுமா? அல்லது நல்ல கதையம்சத்தோடு குறைந்த செலவில் தரமான படமெடுத்தும், பிரம்மாண்ட தயாரிப்புகளுக்கு மத்தியில் விளம்பரச் செலவுக்கு பணமில்லாமல் காணாமல் போகும் குறைந்த பட்ஜெட் படங்களை ஊக்குவிக்க வேண்டுமா?

My Daughter in the Paper!

2006-11-17T19:56:02+01:00

My daughter was in the paper!

Gift breathes life into arts

The Royal Theater program will go "beyond hip- hop.''

By JON WILSON, Times Staff Writer
Published November 15, 2006

The Royal Theater rocked Monday night - and laughed and cried and praised.

Celebrating a $250,000 gift from the Hough Family Foundation to the theater's Arts Academy, young performers showcased a varied and energetic repertoire ranging from country music to classical piano, light opera to original poetry.

When she finished piano renditions of Swan on the Lake and Run Away River, Shachaamah Brown, 7, delighted an audience of about 75 with a delicate curtsy.

"Can we see that again?" coaxed Herbert Murphy, director of the Boys and Girls Club at the Royal Theater.

Part of the 22nd Street S renaissance, the revamped Royal opened two years ago as a performing arts venue for young people, thanks to private contributions and city sponsorship.

The Hough gift is the largest the theater has received, said Carl Lavender, executive director of Boys and Girls Clubs of the Suncoast.

The Hough family had front-row seats.

"Fantastic," a beaming Susan Hough Henry said of the show. "We're so happy to be a part of this." She is president of the Hough Family Foundation.

The money, to be disbursed at $50,000 for the next five years, will pay for an arts program director, lessons for young performers and building improvements.

"We are going beyond hip-hop to hip art," Lavender said. "We will have a holistic arts schedule for the community."

An elaborate production studio already allows young apprentices to learn professional-caliber musical engineering techniques.

The redone theater, at 1011 22nd St. S, opened as a segregated movie house in 1948. Its new stage holds the spot of the old one, where community talent shows took place.

Past met present in another way Monday night when Rodrick and Ryan Williams performed a mime routine. When 22nd Street S was the African-American community's liveliest district, Sidney Harden operated a grocery store two blocks north of the Royal.

The Williams brothers are his great-great-grandsons.

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/11/15/Neighborhoodtimes/Gift_breathes_life_in.shtml