Here’s the Freedom Theatre’s mission statement, from the company’s website.

Through its work, The Freedom Theatre aims to:
• Raise the quality of performing arts and cinema in the area.
• Offer a space in which children and youth can act, create and express themselves freely, imagining new realities and challenging existing social and cultural barriers.
• Empower the young generation to use the arts to promote positive change in their community.
• Break the cultural isolation that separates Jenin from the wider Palestinian and global communities.

In order to fulfill these aims, the following strategies are employed:
• Offering professional training in theatre and cinema for youth and young adults.
• Staging regular theatre productions which explore new and increasingly advanced artistic and technical trends.
• Raising awareness among its participants and audiences on important issues in the community and the role of arts in bringing about social change.
• Providing a wide range of drama and cinema activities for children and youth in Jenin Refugee Camp, Jenin City and surrounding villages.
• Hosting performances by theatre and performing arts groups from other parts of Palestine and abroad.
• Engaging its participants in international exchanges and building up a wide network of partners and supporters worldwide through effective advocacy and public relations work.
The Freedom Theatre has staged productions ranging from Waiting for Godot and the original devised work Sho Kman to adaptations of Animal Farm, Alice in Wonderland and Crime and Punishment.
At Yale, members of the Freedom Theatre company will present a “theatrical introduction to the theatre’s work,” screen a video of highlights from past productions, and discuss the life and work of Juliano Mer-Khamis. The New Haven stop is part of an extensive U.S. visit by the company, which recently has toured in Europe.
The 90-minute Yale presentation begins at 4:30 p.m. in the downstairs lounge of the Yale Repertory Theatre at the corner of Chapel and York streets. It’s a free event, open to the public. More info here.

An image from the Freedom Theatre's recent production of Waiting for Godot. The actor in the photo, Rami Hwayel, is one of several students from the Palestinean theater troupe to have allegedly been taken captive by the Israeli Army.

Mark Jacoby as The Wizard in the first North American tour of Wicked.

“The Wizard is not a big part, but it’s an interesting part. It’s more sinister than the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz. It’s political. Part of the success of it is the recognition of what power is. Good and evil. How do we define goodness?”

Jacoby’s not only continually intrigued by the intricacies of the role, he’s still staggered by the phenomenon that Wicked has become. “It plays like gangbusters everywhere. It’s beyond successful.” The tour returns to Hartford’s Bushnell Aug. 24-Sept. 11.

“There’s a generation of people now more familiar with Wicked than with The Wizard of Oz—the work on which it’s based, by way of Gregory Maguire’s audacious novelistic update, adapted for the stage by Stephen Schwartz.

“This has become the source,” Jacoby continues. “Though there are lots of tongue-in-cheek references to The Wizard of Oz for those who get them.”

With the show still packing huge venues, is it possible for its performers to sense how well some of Wicked’s well-crafted social satire goes over? “There are some political things, some social commentary things, that always get a reaction, but with theaters this size, it’s sometimes hard to gauge. That’s not to say that there’s never any variation. The Buffalo audience, you could say, was not as expressive as Florida’s. But it starts on this very high level; the show always gets this overwhelming reaction.”

When I mention how much I enjoyed Jacoby’s performance as another bumbling authority figure, the preening movie producer in a rare revival on the musical On the Twentieth Century at the Goodspeed Opera House over a decade ago, Jacoby launches into an astute analysis of why that show never caught on. “It’s too similar to Kiss Me Kate—the plot is similar, the design is similar… they even both have leading ladies named Lily.”

When asked if he has a list of dream roles he’d like to play, Jacoby says he generally doesn’t indulge in such wishful thinking, but that he would like to shed his musical-theater trappings sometime and do a production of the Yasmina Reza standard Art. He’s not even that picky who he plays in it, figuring he’s appropriate for two of the three roles in the chatty comedy.

A cerebral three-person play about a plain white painting would be a sea change from inhabiting the Emerald City. As popular as Reza’s Art has become, Jacoby notes that “when they first put Wicked in Chicago, they thought it would run four to six weeks. That became three years.” The first national tour of Wicked has been going for over six years now, and has stopped in Hartford several times.
Jacoby’s only been with the tour for eight months. “I haven’t toured like this in decades,” he says—it’s his first major national tour since Rupert Holmes’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood in the ‘80s. “I did a couple of productions which were technically ‘tours,’ but they were really just in one city. I did Phantom of the Opera in Chicago for nine months. Same with Show Boat”—the mid-‘90s revival of the Kern/Hammerstein classic, in which Jacoby played Gaylord Ravenal. (Show Boat is, of course, currently playing at the selfsame Goodspeed where Jacoby rode the Twentieth Century. The Cap’n Andy in that production is Lenny Wolpe, who played the Wicked Wizard himself on Broadway.)

Wicked producer David Stone has regularly recast the show in order to keep it fresh. “Wicked, having become the huge show that it is—a lot of people who’ve done come in and out of it. I think management likes to shake it up,” says Jacoby, who previously worked for producer Stone in the Brian Stokes Mitchell revival of Man of La Mancha.

“During one week of the show’s 10-week stand in Washington D.C. at the Kennedy Center, “we had 12 hours of rehearsals,” Jacoby explains.

“Quality control is a big thing in this company. And in the whole Wicked world.”

Jacoby's Wizard with Randy Danson as Madame Morrible.

Colin Quinn's Long Story Short shifts from New Haven to Chicago this week. Photo by Carol Rosegg from the New York production.

I did a phone interview with Quinn a few weeks ago. “I like to talk,” he said. “I like to provoke. The world is so politically correct. I want to bring out what’s undiscussed…. Though I wouldn’t say business has been clamoring for my point of view.” He means the TV business, which embraced him briefly as the anchorman on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update (his tag: “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it”), and as the host of Comedy Central’s Last Call With Colin Quinn.

Club dates could be frustrating for him too. “Stand-up audiences get drunk. The way they set the clubs was just bad. In clubs, people are facing each other.”

When I observe that’s his routines are smart, Quinn sighs “That doesn’t help either.”

But in the theater, his mannered, structured, longform common-sense commentary on current events (and eons-ago events) plays beautifully. Bolstered by Jerry Seinfeld’s active involvement as director (“This guy spent more time on this, for nothing”) and strong reviews from the original New York run, he’s found audiences reliably receptive everywhere he’s played. “Sure, I did it in the Hamptons, Philly and Montreal. The Hamptons, it was a more politically correct audience than the other places, but they were all pretty much the same.”

Describing the act as concerning “Richie Rich, Poory Poor” and international conflicts, Quinn’s working off a tight script but will add new current-events jokes as necessary. Some key material about the Arab Spring and the U.S. deficit near-default was jumped in since the New York run.

The rehearsed rhythms can actually be comforting. Or as Quinn puts it, “Spontaneous can be great, but it can also be smoke and mirrors.”

But he also clearly thinks well on his feet. He deflected a mic glitch at the Long Wharf deftly, even though technical problems could really skew the flow of his mock-irritable oration.

When I ask specific questions about the difference between his theater and club performance experiences, Colin Quinn quickly considers the question, then spits out a marvelously articulate thought-through response about how he felt trying to break through to stand-up audiences with his heavier concepts and material. He describes his frustration, how the set-up of the clubs was an obstacle, how it was an uphill battle. He ends with a metaphor drawn from the same militaristic vocabulary with which he smartly peppers Long Story Short: “I’m not gonna not do stand-up, but it got hard doing what I wanted to do.”

“ I was like an arrogant colonialist. I’m gonna civilize these people!”

Right after this bravura answer, so eloquent he could have been reading it off a page, he says “Congratulations. I’ve done a lot of these [interviews], but nobody’s ever asked me that before.”

I’m beaming, of course, but moreover I’m just impressed. This is the essence of Colin Quinn: fiery, unfiltered, concise, clear, to the point, in your face and unfailingly polite.

Your friend who fills you in on the tough facts: Things have been bad for a while. You have irrational rage problems; we all do. Life’s not fair. Hollywood gets it wrong. You should have paid attention in history class. Your country may be cheating on you. We need a few more drinks to get over this.

This is the guy I want to talk about the fall of civilization with. Long may he reign.

Nonie Newton Breen has carved out a sweet little career dolling up in a habit and berating theatergoers as the nameless “Sister,” the indomitable conductor of Late Nite Catechism classes.

She’s Sistered it up in New Haven in both summer and winter, for weeks at a stretch, four or five times all told.

Late Nite Catechism is most deeply associated with its creator, Maripat Donovan, who has co-written and debuted every show in the series, and who established the show as a franchise. It’s Donovan’s image which appears in the Late Nite Catechism posters and promo materials, including the posters and videos announcing Sister’s return to Long Wharf Stage II this week.

The Long Wharf’s hosted three separate Sisters since first introducing Late Nite Catechism to New Haven as part of the theater’s first summer season seven years ago. None of the three were Maripat Donovan. Breen is the one who endured,

In a phone interview a few weeks back, Breen describes herself as one of the “hardcore travelers” who tour LNC year-round. “There are four or five of us who do that. There are upwards of 15 girls doing the show at Christmastime,” when theatergoers behave just like churchgoers and attend more diligently. They are all allowed to put their own stamp on the role. “Some are jollier, some are tougher—there are no guidelines or handbook,” Breen says.

Late Nite Catechism gigs can range from weeks-long bookings at proper theaters like the Long Wharf to one-nighters in concert halls to business functions and private parties. Breen spent three and a half months last year playing Sister in Sacramento. Boredom never sets in because, thanks to Sister’s constant interaction with audience members, “it’s always different. Every single night.”

There are also five different shows in the Late Nite Catechism series. “I do all five,” says Breen. “They just opened the the fifth one, Sister’s Easter Catechism: Will My Bunny Go to Heaven?,” and I was the first to go out with that.” (After Maripat Donovan performed the premiere, of course.)

Long Wharf’s had the original Late Nite Catechism several times, as well as the third in the series, Till Death Do Us Part (about Catholic marriage rites) and the fourth, Sister’s Christmas Catechism. This summer the theater backtracks to bring in Late Nite Catechism 2: Sister Strikes Again for its first time in the city. “It’s about how to get to Heaven,” Breen explains, “with multi-media, a list of sins with a lot of new ones for today, prizes…”

Breen acts as both educator and interlocutor, juggling faithful Catholic factoids with impatient and impertinent discussions with audience members, most of whom have been called out for questionable behavior in class.

“The trick with this character is staying in the moment. The shows are scripted but you have to keep an open mind. You’re always filing away people’s names and their behaviors, to illustrate what you’re talking about.” It’s a skill Breen developed from being a part of the famed Second City improv troupe in the 1970s. A current Second City touring ensemble happened to play Long Wharf just last month, but methods have changed. This group was doing mostly “classic” sketches, set material from the vast Second City script archives. “In my generation,” Breen recalls, “you got suggestions from the audience, then ran back and had about ten minutes to create a sketch. Now they pre-write a lot of their stuff. But it’s still a good training ground. It’s like getting your master’s degree.”

Breen’s recently penned her own one-woman show, which she calls “a complete departure” from her Sister persona. Departure is right: I’d Rather Walk concerns “the oldest stewardess on the oldest plane in the sky.” The show was given a “test run” at the Lyric Theater in Stuart, Florida, where—as at the Long Wharf—Breen has performed regularly in the Late Nite Catechism shows.

She hopes to develop I’d Rather Walk into its own national touring gig, but for now Breen continues to don Sister’s habits for as much as 11 months a year. Connecticut remains one of her favorite stops. “New Haven’s right up there.” Other fave venues include “Stuart, Florida, and oddly enough, I love Houston and Denver.

“New Haven is so much fun. I have old friends there now. I wander all around Yale. I go to one of my favorite pizza places, Pepe’s and get the best soul food at Mama Mary’s.”

The city treats her well, and so does the theater. “The Long Wharf always does an incredible job with the set. I travel with my own costume, but each theater has to provide the set. The show takes place in the present time, but the schoolroom and the furniture have to look like they’re pretty old.” She also thanks the Long Wharf for helping safekeep the money she raises at the end of each performance for retired nuns. “I’m a bagman for the nuns,” Breen laughs. Locally, the donations benefit the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

Such softer touches—empathizing with the plights of nuns, ribbing them for having to be such tough disciplinarians, humanizing them as fallible and vulnerable—helps balance Late Nite Catechism’s Catholic cattiness. “I feel that I am not a cruel person,” Breen says. “This character is not a cruel person.” Has she ever gone too far? “I’ve had bricks fall out of my mouth on occasion, sure.” On the other hand, audience members frequently forget that she’s an actress and not a nun herself.

“I’m often mistaken for a nun. People forget. As they’re going out, they’ll say ‘Thank you sister,’ and start telling me things about themselves. I get to hear way too much sometimes.”

PROMO VIDEO FOR DAVID T. LITTLE’S SOLDIER SONGS

The songs, I like. The soldier part I’m still wrestling with.

Since both shows have classical elements and war themes, it’s hard not to compare David T. Little’s Soldier Songs (which I saw in its final Arts & Ideas performance, 5 p.m. June 25) with Bill T. Jones’ luminous meditation on the American Civil War, Serenade/The Proposition (which I saw just 21 hours earlier, at its A&I debut).
Where Serenade/The Proposition is sprightly and purposefully sparse, Soldier Songs was heavy-handed and laden with overblown special effects. Where S/P avoids most of the clichés associated with war shows, SS embraces seemingly all of them.
Granted, the difference is inherent in the show’s very titles: one’s a serenade, the other’s a soldier song. But I felt deeply moved by Jones’ work while Little’s (as directed by Yuval Sharon and performed by David Adam Moore) was coarse and crass and obvious. In this multi-styled song cycle, war is depicted with blinding lights, splashes of blood, and loud, chaotic noises. Maybe this would be an effective technique if we hadn’t become immune to that sort of overkill through a century of garish war movies and video games.
Soldier Songs makes that exact point—that people join the army with false hopes of heroism and adventure, when the reality can be much different. At one point Moore screams “Someone yell ‘Cut’! Someone yell ‘Cut!” But Soldier Songs’ own staging isn’t far removed from Hollywood extremism, more sensationalistic than sensitive.

DAVID ADAM MOORE, NAKED AND BLOODSOAKED IN SOLDIER SONGS.

The other actor/singer in the show besides Moore is Sam Poon as “boy”—a child whose initial experience of war is imaginative playground games. Soldier Songs gets pretty imaginative itself—a seesaw, behind a shadow screen, looks like a cannon, and Moore undergoes some quick costume changes under cover of darkness—but these moments start to come off as gimmicky. Amid all the blood and craziness, attempts at satire (a veteran’s memorial wall which reads “What’sHisName, What’sHerName, What’sHisName, What’sHerName”) fall flat.

This small-seeming show has operatic ambitions, but that doesn’t excuse its overwrought imagery. Little’s score is propulsive and unsettling, veering from minimalism to a bass-heavy hard rock vibe to, well, vibes. It’s bracing to hear this complex composition played live by the adventurous eight-piece band Newspeak rather than pre-recorded. Stylistic changes are achieved through clever repurposing of instruments—violins are plucked, xylophones pinged, keyboards banged. I’d love to hear the score on its own. Its subtleties are washed out by the visual bombast of Moore’s unrestrained theatrics. Rather than a deep rumble of anti-war anguish, Soldier Songs is a simplistic shocker.

Soldier Songs had its final performance at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas on June 25. The piece was reorchestrated for this festival. No future performances are currently listed on David T. Little’s website.

STEVEN DEROSA CENTER STAGE IN THE NATIONAL TOUR OF WEST SIDE STORY—FOR ABOUT ONE MINUTE, UNTIL ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. THE NATIONAL TOUR OF THE ARTHUR LAURENTS-DIRECTED REVIVAL IS AT THE BUSHNELL IN HARTFORD THROUGH SUNDAY MAY 29.

I’ve been a Stephen DeRosa fan for over 15 years, and rejoice whenever I see his name come up in something cool. I first glommed on to his endearing eyebrow waggles and jittery voice when he was at the Yale School of Drama in the mid-1990s. I must have seen him in over a dozen things: opposite Paul Giamatti in a Yale Cabaret production of Chekhov’s The Bear directed by the then-head of the YSD directing program Earle Gister; as the Troll King in Jean Randich’s expansive production of Peer Gynt. He did a recitation of a then-newly discovered poem thought to be Shakespeare’s (“Shall I Die? Shall I Fly?”) which was tacked on to the beginning of Mark Rucker’s awesome Yale Rep production of Twelfth Night.

“Ahh, Yale! My salad days! A highlight of my quarter century in this business we call show! I did more Cabaret shows than anyone else in my class,” DeRosa recalled with thespianic aplomb in a phone interview a few weeks ago from  West Side Story tour stop in Cleveland, Ohio. The tour hit Hartford’s Bushnell on Tuesday for eight performances, ending Sunday May 29.

DeRosa’s classmates at Yale included not just Giamatti but Sanaa Lathan, Suzanne Cryer, Tom McCarthy and Mercedes Herrero, but DeRosa could upstage them all if he felt like it. After graduating, he co-starred in a revival of Charles Ludlams’ The Mystery of Irma Vep with Ludlam’s late partner Everett Quinton. The production went to Broadway and turned the script into a standard that has since been done by regional and community theaters nationwide. DeRosa’s since been a Broadway regular, from the Nathan Lane-starring The Man Who Came to Dinner, the 2002 revival of Into the Woods and Hairspray.

He’s also done dozens of readings of new works, “with more famous people than you can believe, in things nobody ever saw.” One of them was a new musical made out of Gershwin tunes, with a script by Wendy Wasserstein. Another was a Harry Connick Jr. project. It was in a reading that New Haven last got to see Stephen DeRosa, at the Long Wharf Theatre in the Stephen Drukman comedy Going Native. The Long Wharf later did a full Stage II production of the play, but DeRosa was unable to do it.

His career has had a lot of twists and turns, enough that he’s given up on predictions, let alone listing “dream roles.” “You get less attached after a while. You become kind of a fatalist. Like, I really wanted to be Louis in Angels in America on tour. I didn’t get that, but because of dear, wonderful James Bundy”—who was in the Yale School of Drama directing program while DeRosa was in the acting program, and who now is Dean of the whole school—“I got to do a one-act play of Tony Kushner’s instead, creating a role.

“And I never dreamed I’d be playing Eddie Cantor.” Last year DeRosa got to impersonate the whoopee-making Follies superstar in Martin Scorsese’s HBO series Boardwalk Empire, set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City.

“I’ve been blessed to work with people who are really artists—Kushner, Scorsese… geniuses, who are gifted in a spiritual way.” Which brings us to West Side Story. Two of the show’s original creators—lyricist Stephen Sondheim and librettist Arthur Laurents—were deeply involved with this revival. Laurents, who died earlier this month at the age of 93, directed this revival, and was the main motivator behind having some of the Puerto Rican characters’ songs and dialogue done in Spanish.

When DeRosa worked with Sondheim previously for the 2002 Broadway revival of Into the Woods, the role of the Baker was reshaped for the actor. He’s been granted that sort of attention again for West Side Story, even though he wasn’t with the show in New York and joined up for the tour. “There are two or three new lines for Tony,” he says, but his character is the only one that’s been actually enhanced.

“It was the same with Into the Woods—the original creators there to revisit what they’d created. It was not necessarily tailored to [the actors], but changes were made, and I was there to see that happening. Sondheim was still putting changes into Into the Woods three months after we opened.

“That’s the reason why I took the job. I knew Arthur Laurents was creating a new version.” DeRosa was specifically brought into the tour by Associate Director David Saint, who offered him the role and, as DeRosa puts it, “tailored it to my work on the character.”

It’s a bit funny to hear all this fuss being made over that poor shlub Glad Hand.

In weaker hands, he’s one of those roles which could be could be reduced to a mere plot point: as one of very few adults in this saga of teen gangs, he is required to announce and clumsily referee the sexually charged “Dance at the Gym” sequence where Tony (of the Jets gang) and Maria (whose brother and boyfriend are both Sharks) first fall in love. Laurents had high standards, however (his autobiography Original Story By is full of quarrels related to him defending the integrity of his work), and didn’t consider any of the roles he wrote minor. “He told me he wanted the character always to be funny,” DeRosa says. West Side Story’s choreographer/director Harold Robbins —whose original dances are preserved in this production, and are in fact legally required to be maintained in all revivals of the show—worked so intently on his choreography that he had a tendency to overlook issues with the book. When he had a chance to revisit Glad Hand’s character a half century after he first invented it, “Arthur rewrote it,” DeRosa continues. “To get all those testosterone-fueled adolescents at a party.

“Glad Hand is a fool, essentially, and I love fools. His heart is in the right place. He’s all about “Abstinence! Abstinence!” He’s trying to get the kids not be sexual, and of course it doesn’t work. But he’s trying. This is from a time when there weren’t guidance counselors yet in schools.

“It’s this tiny little moment to get us to the dance at the gym—which, of course, becomes one of the most thrilling things you’ll ever experience on the American stage.”

DeRosa really pushes the glories of seeing West Side Story live. “Most people only know the movie. When you hear the score, it’s just fabulous. One thing that’s true—and certainly has been bitched about by Arthur, and echoed by those from the original production—is that, back then, the triple-threat actor/singer/dancer was very rare. Someone like Chita Rivera, or Rita Moreno, who could do it all, was unusual. Nowadays, with the training programs and the American Idol, performance challenges have risen in the American musical theater and the performers are rising to the occasion. It’s exciting for this show to be done again with people who are all acting and singing and dancing at this level.

“It’s a younger cast. Not jaded. They want to do the job. It’s not their fifth tour, or their fifth West Side Story. It’s so thrilling to see it live. I’ve been doing it for seven months, and I’m not tired of it. I’m very grateful. I have have this brief contact with the audience, and just enjoy the benefits of aging.”

Besides playing Glad Hand, DeRosa’s billed as the understudy for the other adult males in the show—Officer Krupke, Detective Shrank and the pharmacist Doc—but he hasn’t yet had to go on in any of those other roles. “These are great old character men, who would probably go on in an iron lung if they had to. There’s no understudy envy, not an Eve Harrington in the wings.”

The current cast of West Side Story tour will be with the show at least through September. The tour itself is booked well into 2012.

“Shakespeare and Sondheim,” Stephen DeRosa confesses giddily, “are probably the reasons I went into theater—to be an idiot, and not got to Georgetown for law. Sondheim is too hard on himself about it, but I think West Side Story is a milestone for the four of them—Laurents, Sondheim, Robbins and Bernstein. Four of the greatest American theater artists, challenging each other to do their best work.”

Can’t wait for Fela! to trickle down to the provinces—on tour (apparently this fall) then into regional and community theaters, where some local talents can really put their stamp on its rich score. Currently the show’s in Nigeria, and hitting some European festivals.

Why bring this up now? (It was a year ago that Memphis won the Best Musical Tony!) Applause Books is poised to publish DiPietro’s Memphis libretto this months, replete with color photos, as a 160-page paperback fro $16.99. The show continues to scratch itch, stand when all else fails, say a prayer and steal your rock & roll at the Shubert Theater on Broadway.