It’s Bird Day AND the first Tuesday of May, which means it’s time for a new episode of “10 Minutes to Curtain” !

This month, Charlie ends the “10 Minutes to Curtain” season on a high note with a rousing look ahead to next season’s productions. Join Artistic Director Kent Thompson, Associate Artistic Director Bruce Sevy, and members of The Denver Center’s acting company and staff for this not-to-be-missed musical finale.

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Tomorrow is the day we’ve all been waiting for – opening night of In the Heights in Denver!  This winner of four 2008 Tony Awards including Best Musical is a sensational new show about chasing your dreams and finding your true home. 

This first video features footage of the In the Heights touring cast in rehearsal. These are the folks we’ll see in Denver tomorrow night:

Next video, the title song performed on Broadway by the show’s creator and star, Lin Manuel-Miranda:

And finally, the sweet music video announcing the In the Heights tour:

In the Heights plays in The Buell Theatre April 28 through May 9.  Don’t miss it!

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Originally from Mililani, Hawaii, Colorado State,  University grad Christina Black has joined up with the national touring production of In The Heights, bound for Denver.  This innovative new musical that has met with endless critical and audience acclaim on Broadway and across the country, presents a unique opportunity for a modern dance pro like Black.  We caught up with Christina while she was in Boston recently, before the cast continued on to a stint in Florida.

Chrstine Black, Sandy Alvarez and company (In the Heights)

Tell us a bit about your dance and theatre training.

I found dance at the age of 12 and after that I couldn’t stop. I trained with 24-VII Danceforce under Marcelo Pacleb for about 5 years. I learned everything from ballet to contemporary to hip-hop. I continued my training in contemporary with The Schiff Dance Collective in Boulder, CO and I also joined a hip-hop company, True II Form (Kevin O’Keefe, Boulder, CO), which taught me the fundamentals of breaking, popping and locking.  Upon my arrival to New York I soaked up as much as I could. I took classes at Steps on Broadway, DNA, Peridance, Studio MMAC and I joined the Broadway Dance Center work-study program to earn discounted classes. I was taught to go to every audition and every class possible; you never know who will be there and it may open up opportunities for other jobs. I embraced that idea and was invited to join dre.dance (New York based contemporary company) after I took a class from the artistic director, Andrew Palermo.

I have no formal theatre training, but I took acting classes from Deborah Carlson (Word of Mouth Studios) where I learned the basics of acting. I loved her classes because they were small and personalized. Prior to the In The Heights final audition, I began taking voice lessons to prepare myself. Depending on which direction you want to take your career, being a versatile dancer is important, but being a versatile performer is equal if not more valuable.

How did you get cast in In The Heights?

The first time I auditioned was October 2008.  I have to admit that the only thing I knew about In The Heights was that it won 8 Tony Awards…I recommend doing a bit more homework before auditions. After learning the first piece of choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler (which was to the number “Benny’s Dispatch”), I knew that I wanted to be in this show. I went home and prepared myself for the callbacks. I looked at the website, found video clips on YouTube and desperately tried to prepare a song.

Unfortunately, I didn’t book anything from that open call, nor the next one in January 2009.  However, I made an impression on Andy, because he contacted me directly to do prep work for another project he was working on. Two months later my agent called me for a closed two-day In The Heights audition in May 2009. That audition ended up being one of the most intense auditions I’ve been on. The first day we learned all the big ensemble numbers of the show and danced full out from 10am to 6pm.

The second day we learned even more choreography, sang and read sides [scenes from the show]. I was so fried from the audition process that I could barely concentrate on prep work with Andy later that afternoon. Little did I know that he was hiding the big news from me…my agent called me that evening to tell me I booked the job!

What makes In The Heights so special and why people should see it?

In The Heights is a story about love, loss, hope, community, pride and most importantly, family. There is at least one situation or character that mirrors something or someone in your life. Audiences easily identify with the show because the lead character, Usnavi, who was raised by his grandmother, is your best friend. Nina, the girl who finally broke the mold and went off to college is your sister. And Daniela, the salon shop owner who loves to gossip, is your Aunt. Not only are the heartfelt music, the seamless choreography, and the intertwined storylines of the neighborhood amazing, but you can’t see this show without having the urge to dance and sing and call your mother all at the same time.

How would you describe the style of choreography in In The Heights?  Did your hip hop background prepare you for Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography?

The show is infused with hip-hop, salsa, a bit of contemporary, plus a tap step thrown into the mix. The great thing about Andy is that he himself has a versatile background in dance and theatre so his choreography embodies all of it. He is very specific about what he wants and he can give you a detailed story to embrace the feeling behind the movement. My dance background prepared me for Andy’s choreography, as well as helping me understand body placement and the meaning of the moment.

How is life on the road?

Life on the road is what the cast likes to call “not real life.” Moving from city to city – especially if we’re there only a week – makes it extremely difficult to get settled. I absolutely have to unpack the first day because I want to feel like I’m living out of my room not my suitcase. On the complete flip side, traveling can be absolutely amazing. We’re currently in Boston and although it’s cold, it’s gorgeous! I’ve always wanted to visit Chicago and Boston and now I’m getting paid to do so! I’m drawn to the bigger cities, cities that have a history to them and also cities with unique architecture. Also, some of my extended family members who have never seen me dance before will get a chance to see the show because I’m coming to their hometown, and that’s something that is priceless in itself.

What is your average schedule in a given week?

My schedule is not nearly as bad as those who are understudies; actually it’s pretty great. It’s a normal Broadway schedule (one show a day Tuesday-Friday and two shows on Saturday and Sunday), but it gives me the chance to explore every city during the day. It’s cold now but once we get to Florida, you will find me on the beach every single day!

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By Douglas Langworthy, Literary Manager, Denver Center Theatre Company

Robert Sicular and Yetta Gottesman in Mariela in the Desert. Photo by Terry Shapiro.

Our production of Karen Zacarias’ play Mariela in the Desert should have been a fairly straightforward mounting of an existing script. Since the play had been produced four times previously at theatres all across the country, our director, Bruce Sevy, had assumed the script was locked in and ready to go…until he called Karen to tell her we were going to do Mariela—and Karen asked if she could do some rewriting.

And so instantly, the play became a “new” play again, and the playwright became an integral part of the rehearsal process. Karen has a quote she loves to share: “Plays are never finished, they’re just abandoned.” This was just one of those projects that she had set aside to work on other plays. But she never felt she’d gotten it quite right. So with the theatre’s blessing, she dove right back into a play she had begun some eight years earlier.

She admits that, like one of the characters in her play, she had started the play seeing things from the outside, and now it was time to see things from the inside. While the plot remained virtually intact, she made significant adjustments to the characters, making them more human, more complex, more able to love. She deleted the first scene and wove the essential information into the next one. The tone of the play became warmer and more accessible. Up through the first preview actors were having to absorb the latest changes. The excitement that goes along with developing a new play and having the playwright in the room is palpable as this fifth production of Mariela heads toward opening.

Is the play finished now? Did Zacarias get it right this time? She says “yes,” this is the version of the play that will live on in future productions and hopefully in published form. Time to finally abandon this one and start the next play and the next.

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Dan Sullivan, a frequent contributor to the Denver Center’s Applause Magazine, has written a preview on just what makes In the Heights so special.  You can read the full article in our program, but here’s an excerpt:

Kyle Beltran in the National Tour of In the Heights. © Joan Marcus

[The phenomenal success of In the Heights] may be a little more than the show’s composer-lyricist, Lin-Manuel Miranda, had dared to hope for when he started writing the show in college. Neither, though, could he have imagined how labor-intensive the project would be. Being an actor, Miranda’s goal was to “write the kind of show I’d like to be in.” A natural setting would be the neighborhood where he grew up and still lived, Washington Heights. Eight years later In the Heights—starring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Usnavi (Kyle Beltran heads the national touring company)—finally reached Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

The real Washington Heights has traditionally been a “neighborhood in transition,” from Irish to Jewish to Hispanic to, in our day, gentrification. In the show, though, almost everyone’s Latino. Nina, home from Stanford for the summer, and maybe forever, is Puerto Rican. Usnavi was born in the Dominican Republic and longs to go back. Claudia, Usnavi’s surrogate abuela (grandma), remembers being a girl in Havana 50 years ago—not a happy memory, but it was nice to feel hope. Vanessa works at the beauty shop—for the moment. Next stop: downtown.

We get glimpses of everybody’s story, but Usnavi holds center stage, not out of arrogance (he’s too shy to date Vanessa), but because he’s the show’s caregiver as well as its caretaker, a big brother unconnected by blood to his pseudo-familia but responsible for everybody at considerable cost to his nerves.

It’s not just the show’s dance beat that he jumps to. He’s neurologically driven to help out his neighbors and to help the audience understand what’s going on. He does this in his native tongue: rap; the most elegant rap you’ve ever heard. Listen to his underthoughts as he makes change for the customers in his corner bodega:

You do rapid mathematics

Automatically

Selling maxipads and fuzzy

Dice for taxicabs and

Practically

Everybody’s stressed, yes, but

They press through the mess

Bounce checks and wonder

What’s next…

Print alone can’t register the exuberance of this. Wouldn’t it be funny if the American theatre’s long search for viable modern verse drama had finally discovered its proper metric base? And think of what it could do for opera! Visually and sonically then, In the Heights reflects the real Washington Heights or a slice of it. Miranda and his librettist, Quiara Alegria Hudes, show us the neighborhood as one might remember it ten or 15 years later, not as a TV camera would see it, but as it felt on a sizzling afternoon in July, with everyone out on the street and a radio blaring on every windowsill. It’s a moment in time and everybody knows it’s not going to last. Local businesses are going under, people are moving up and out. So, enjoy. It’s a carnaval under threat, but happily the show doesn’t overpaint the neighborhood’s dark side. The dialogue is salty enough, the dance moves tough enough to show that you have to be street smart to survive here. Having established that, the show foregoes the violence that we’ve unfortunately come to expect in barrio stories.

National Tour Company of In the Heights. © Joan Marcus

This was a deliberate choice. “People always ask, ‘Why aren’t there more drugs and crime in the show?’” Miranda told The Boston Globe as the musical went on the road last fall. “That’s because the only time they hear Washington Heights is on the radio. But that’s not specific to my neighborhood. And it wasn’t my experience. The only things I know about drug-dealing are from rap music. I’d be writing a fiction if I tried to make my show about that.

“I wanted to represent a side of life that’s largely unrepresented. Which is not the dude selling drugs or hanging out on the corner, but the guy who owns the small business on the corner. The dude on the street corner is still there. But we’re gonna tell this other guy’s story.” Miranda is paying tribute to the people he grew up with, not as they were at every moment, but at their best—loving, staunch, principled. That definitely includes the mothers and fathers. “What are my parents gonna say” is a serious question in this show; and the parents have plenty to say. If this contributes to our sense that we’re on a slight time-delay, it also reminds us of how little we know about immigrant families. Respectability is a major goal in this ’hood and it’s not linked with hypocrisy. Try dignity.

What it adds up to is the American musical at its best, a beautifully crafted show with a dozen influences (West Side Story, Rent, Hair, even, Fiddler on the Roof) that is never anything less than itself.

Watch IN THE HEIGHTS videos on the show’s YouTube Channel.

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By Robert Richmond, Director of Hamlet, National Theatre Conservatory

Hamlet: Prince of Darkness (cast). Photo by Eric Laurits.

As the ensemble and I began to explore Hamlet for NTC 2^nd Year Shakespeare Project we asked a question: What was in Shakespeare’s mind when writing Hamlet in 1601?

He was 37. His father was dying. His own son, Hamnet, had died five years earlier at the age of 11. The Shakespeare family name would vanish having no heir and there was national anxiety about Queen Elizabeth’s successor.

What also seemed important to remember is that as Shakespeare put quill to parchment, over 400 years ago, he was trying to write a new play. A play that when performed had to survive in the biggest of commercial theatres of its time, the Globe. If the play was not favorably received it would pass for nothing and most likely never be performed again. So despite the fact that he had gained a well-earned reputation and great success, he was writing under considerable pressure – add to this a renewed appetite for Revenge Tragedies that had taken London theatre scene by storm.

Hamlet, above all of his plays, is a play in which we are constantly made aware that a stage is just a stage, upon which the artifice of acting, or playing a role, is frequently acknowledged. It is the meta-theatrical art that makes the central characters so completely audience aware. This allows us to feel complicit in the continuity of the drama, and responsible for the outcome of the tragedy as it unfolds. It is one of the finest testaments to what it feels like to be human.

Our aim was to produce this remarkable story in a way that you will find just as compelling as Shakespeare’s audiences did in 1601. So, we set about to find a concept that would serve the complexity of this great play, and yet make it come alive in a vibrant and relevant way for our audience.

Dawn Scott as Ophelia. Photo by Eric Laurits.

It was while I was walking through a Denver bookshop one evening that I stumbled upon the graphic novel section. There where several be-hooded young men perusing the new publication of Watchmen. Two questions came to mind: how could you ever get young people like this to come a see a Shakespeare tragedy, and could you stage Hamlet like a graphic novel? The next morning we discussed the nature and structure of the art form and what the resources were at our disposal. The result at the end of that rehearsal process was a fast moving nightmare of stimulating images within a very dark room. It provoked the audience’s imagination and forced them to engage in the images, and connect with those that the words conjured. It told a spooky ghost story of murder, revenge, and betrayal. The project was wryly renamed Hamlet: Prince of Darkness.

The graphic novel conceit allows great freedom in changing perspective. Often we would turn a scene completely on its head and view it from the point of view of looking at it from the ceiling. In this production there are times when the focus is not the actors face but something else: their hands, or perhaps an object that is in the room. The new design elements will help us upgrade and fully realize this production bringing clarity to location, period and status.

I believe that all of us that have taken this journey have learned a great deal and created a unique experience to view a classical play in a brand new way. Students, faculty, and designers have all shared a passion to tell the story of Hamlet in what has proved to be a truly collaborative experience.

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Featured this week for “YouTube Tuesday” is Mariela in the Desert, a beautiful story of a family of Mexican Artists living in the desert north of Mexico City, playing now through May 15 in The Ricketson Theatre.  Here are scenes from the play:

In this segment from the latest “10 Minute to Curtain” episode, Playwright Karen Zacarías and director Bruce Sevy talk about the process of revisiting, revising, and “re-premiering” Mariela in the Desert:

Catch more Mariela in the Desert videos on YouTube.

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By Suzanne Blandon, Publicist for the National Theatre Conservatory

Scott McLean as Tartuffe and Rebecca Martin as Elmire (Photo by Eric Laurits)

Generally, as a publicist, my job is to get other people in the spotlight. But sometimes they are just a little busy. Case in point — our National Theatre Conservatory Class of 2010. So, I thought I’d take a moment to share why they are so great as well as why you should see them on stage.

Our National Theatre Conservatory is a three-year graduate acting program here at The Denver Center. Each class performs alongside our professional Denver Center Theatre Company. You likely have seen some of this year’s graduating class in productions including The Voysey Inheritance, A Raisin in the Sun, Well, A Christmas Carol, Eventide and When Tang Met Laika.

Their “final exam,” if you will, is a public performance of not one but TWO plays performed in repertory. And, when rehearsals started up for these two plays, they were actually performing in two more plays — Eventide and When Tang Met Laika. And did I mention that they still have a class or two going on at the same time?

So, they basically knew four plays — that’s roughly 80,000 words of text — and rehearsed and/or performed a minimum of 10 hours a day six days a week. I’m tired just thinking about it!

But here’s the payoff. The first of their two public performances — Hamlet — is sold out. The second performance is Tartuffe. Sure there are still tickets available, but for how long? Hard to say.

They perform both plays back to back in the intimate Conservatory Theatre (just 185 seats) through April 24, which also is GRADUATION! So what’s next for these MFA students? Well, they rehearse a “Showcase” performance that they take to the Big Apple and perform in front of agents, directors, casting directors, alumni, etc. Then they are off — living large, enjoying life, landing that dream job.

My hint? Grab a ticket to Tartuffe so you can say “I knew them when…”

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It’s Merle Haggard’s 73^rd Birthday AND the first Tuesday of April, which means it’s time for a new episode of “10 Minutes to Curtain”!

This month, go behind-the-scenes with playwright Karen Zacarías to learn about the “re-premiere” of Mariela in the Desert, learn from actor John Hutton about the challenges of playing Iago in Othello, find out what everyone backstage at Mama Hated Diesels is talking about, and get a preview of the Theatre Company’s 2010-2011 Season with Artistic Director Kent Thompson.

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By Joseph Yeargain, 3rd year National Theatre Conservatory student

Tartuffe (cast)

Well, it’s my birthday and I’m heading into Showcase class at 10am; heading to the gym from 10:30-Noon; from Noon to 4pm, I’m in dress rehearsal for Tartuffe; from 4pm to about 5pm, we’re changing sets from Tartuffe to Hamlet; and from 6:30pm to 10:30pm we’ll be rehearsing Hamlet.

Not that I’m complaining. I most certainly am not. I recall the first time I came to Denver for callback weekend, watching the first off-book rehearsal of Elephant Man and saying to myself I want to be doing this in three years. (Luckily, I was accepted to this top-five program, and my dream is now a reality.) 

This has been a great, fulfilling rehearsal process for me, being able to work with such visionary directors and being able to work with the extraordinary ensemble that is the NTC Class of 2010 one final time. With each pass, a new layer is added to each of the shows, and the news that they are close to being sold-out (i.e. get your tickets NOW, if you haven’t purchased them already) is a testament to the thorough direction we’re receiving and the thorough teaching that the NTC has given us over the past three years. And I cannot wait to share our work with all of you!

It’s been rough-going since we received notice that the NTC will close its doors after the Class of 2012 completes its training. After much deliberation, I still cannot see the logic in closing a top-five graduate acting program. To be honest, I think that with the team that’s assembled here, in short time, we would be at least in the top three.

I was watching Etoiles, a documentary on the Parisian Ballet Company, and one of the dancers was asked why hisw company was the most renowned in the world. He responded that it was because of the school attached to the company. Without it, the standard of work would not be as high, and the unique challenges that each choreographer brought about would not be achieved with such ease.

By closing the NTC, the DCTC will lose a vital organ. And we alums will lose an ever-expanding family with a common language and experience that strengthens American theatre and film.

I understand that board members look at the bottom line. But at 2 percent of their budget, closure of the NTC seems like an extremely ineffectual move. There is a desire to get the next generation of theatre-goers into the theatre. By severing the very body that develops the next generation of theatre artists, how do they expect to achieve this goal?

With Hamlet we are appealing to the very generation that they desire to woo. Done as a living graphic novel, I need only describe a few events of the play to peak a potential audience member’s interest. And if they love Hamlet, they will want to go to the theatre the next time they have the option: play or movie (especially if they can say to their friends that they know that actor, a highly doubtful scenario with film).

With Tartuffe, I think it sad that a play written in the 1600s is still so timely with the recent revelations of problem priests and preachers and false gurus, using their influence for personal gain. Nonetheless, it is a great play, and with nontraditional casting, we are pushing boundaries that need to toppled, while expanding our abilities as actors.

In short, if you’ve already purchased your tickets for these two shows, you’re in for a treat. If not, get them today as we are close to sold out. And after you see the shows write to the Denver Center or your local paper and spread the word. The NTC should not be closed. It is a vital organ, not only to the DCTC, but to the American theatre in general.

But now for sleep, I have a big day tomorrow!

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