Bigger and Bolder: The 2018 New Strands Festival

-
By Taylor Steinbeck

The Strand Theater is ready to rock. Next week brings the third annual New Strands Festival and with it comes pop music, Afrofuturist titans, and staged readings of fierce new plays. “The 2018 artists are new American voices with global visions and global appetites,” says A.C.T. Associate Artistic Director Andy Donald. “The festival is still going to be about San Francisco, but this year, it’ll be about bringing the world to our city.”

Tegan and Sara playing at the 2008 Treasure Island Music Festival.
Photo by Tyler Love. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
This year, A.C.T. is partnering with SPACE on Ryder Farm to develop presentations of two new works for the 2018 New Strands Residency. Located on a working farm in Brewster, New York, SPACE is a nonprofit artist residency program that has become “one of the leading curators of the next generation of new work,” says Donald. Representing SPACE is book writer Emily Kaczmarek, who will be bringing the Untitled Tegan & Sara Musical to The Rembe, and playwright Ngozi Anyanwu with her epic play Nike, or We Don’t Need Another Hero. Kaczmarek’s musical is a girl-meets-girl love story set to the pop-rock soundtrack of the Grammy Award–nominated duo Tegan and Sara. Nike fuses Greek drama with contemporary dialogue to create a bold new myth starring an all-Black cast.

Look out too for other exciting projects from the festival's line-up: Both Your Houses, a new play by Susan Soon He Stanton, follows a romance that blooms backstage during a production of Romeo and Juliet; a new translation of Friedrich Schiller’s passionate drama Don Carlos; the third workshop of Jeremy Cohen and Dipika Guha’s emotional LGBTQ+ tearjerker, Malicious Animal Magnetism; an autobiographical play with music from Thao Nguyen; and SeaChange, a social justice play written by Marisela Treviño Orta exploring the changing face of San Francisco.

Artwork for A.C.T.'s 2018 New Strands Festival.
Along with welcoming the Bay Area community to The Strand Theater for a third year, the 2018 New Strands Festival will feature master classes led by Stanton and Kaczmarek, stand-up comedy from Bay Area–based Irene Tu, and happy hours for theater lovers. The festival, sponsored by nonprofit tech company Mozilla, will run an extra day compared to past years, with each presentation receiving two readings instead of one, enabling theatergoers to provide more of their valuable input. “We don’t just want our audience to witness an artistic process, but to actually be a collaborator,” says Donald. “Wherever the works may go after the festival, San Francisco audiences can feel an attachment to these works, because they had a part in their creation.”

The 2018 New Strands Festival is free and open to the public and runs May 17 to 20. To reserve tickets and learn more, click here.

Popular posts from this blog

“To Be or Not to Be”: The Iconic Speech’s Origins, Interpretations, and Impact

-
Image
By A.C.T. Publications Staff The opening line of Hamlet ’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is theater’s most iconic, most referenced quote. What’s less known is the famous speech’s history, with Hamlet ’s earliest publications offering varying versions of its language. Also questioned is its meaning—is Hamlet contemplating suicide or is he weighing the consequences of murder? Though definitive answers are unlikely to arise, the questions “To be or not to be” asks have kept audiences, scholars, and actors engaged for centuries. Hamlet ’ s "To be or not to be" speech as it appears in the three original editions of the play. Photo by Georgelazenby. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The first edition, or First Quarto (Q1), of Hamlet was published in 1603. Because the text is much shorter than later editions and its language is less poetic, it is nicknamed the “Bad Quarto” by scholars. “To be or not to be” in Q1 reads as: To be, or not to be—ay, there’s the point. To die,
Read more

The American Sound: The Evolution of Jazz

-
Image
By Cecilia Padilla There is nothing so uniquely American as jazz music. In its simplest form, jazz embodies the essence of the American people: bold and inventive. The improvisation of the jazz ensemble can even be seen as a metaphor for the American democratic ideal: musicians playing solos have the liberty to express themselves as long as they adhere to the overall structure of the tune—individual freedom but with responsibility to the group. The evolution of jazz music also carries with it the social development of our nation from slavery to the swinging songs of World War II. Musically, jazz contributed immensely to the way contemporary musicians approach instrumentation, composition, and vocal arrangements. It is difficult to find a popular tune today that does not derive from such jazz icons as Joe Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk. Jazz is the great equalizer; for more than a hundred years, it has been the common ground between blacks and whites, me
Read more

A Hell of a Businessman: A Biography of Joe Glaser

-
By Simon Hodgson Born in 1897, Joe Glaser was the son of a successful Russian Jewish physician in Chicago. He originally intended to follow a similar career and entered medical school, but after passing out in the operating room, he realized he wasn’t cut out to be a doctor. He started off in business selling used cars, but found better luck managing prizefighters. In his biography of Al Capone, Laurence Bergreen notes, “Glaser’s power to fix fights earned him a reputation as a sage of boxing, especially among reporters.” With advanced word as to which fights were fixed, Glaser could predict the results—and even the number of rounds—of many bouts in Chicago. His connections with organized crime continued in his next career change, when he began running nightclubs and whorehouses in the South Side for the Chicago Outfit, the powerful underworld gang led by Capone. Glaser’s tendency toward illegal action nearly ended his career. In 1928, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for
Read more