by David Dower
We are about to announce the remaining projects of the Arena Restaged Festival and I suddenly realized much has already happened around this whole event. For those of you new to the conversation, this Festival spans the full two years of our 'diaspora'-- the period in which we are out of our own home and spread across five locations in the District of Columbia and Commonwealth of Virginia while we finish this. (I was going to write, 'five locations in two states', but that wouldn't be true and that's a story for another blog entirely...)
We started the Festival with the world premiere of Daniel Beaty's Resurrection. Since it left us it has already had a lovely run at Hartford Stage and is opening this week at Philadelphia Theatre Company. At each of these subsequent stops, the community conversations that accompanied the powerful play have continued. If you follow the discussions on those theaters' websites you'll get the picture of the impact of this work in the season of change.
The next event launched the second Festival venue, the Lincoln Theatre, and sent the Festival giddily into the stratosphere. Carrie Fisher had that honor, and her riotous Wishful Drinking wound up on the "Going Out Guru's Top Ten List" at WashingtonPost.com. It also landed on the bestseller lists when it later came out in the form of a novel. Audiences loved both the show and the beautiful theater, which we're currently packing every night with fans of Irving Berlin. A small merry band of walkers also took advantage of our walking tours of the area, which we'll repeat during the run of Crowns if you want to get a sense of the vibrant history of U Street during the Harlem Renaissance.
Then Josh Kornbluth encouraged us all to participate in the democratic process that swamped all other entertainnments this year. "Citizen Josh" Kornbluth is off to a huge start on his next piece: "Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?" With any luck we'll be seeing him back in DC with this piece when it's complete.
Then, Next to Normal, which has just left us. It, too, landed in a Top Ten list over at the Washington Post (and several others as well). What comes next here is still a subject of discussion, but we see signs that the cast album is being recorded this month. We'll keep an eye on these developments for all the N2N groupies this show collected during its great run here.
Now we've got the Berlin revue in performance, A Delicate Balance in tech, Legacy of Light and A Long and Winding Road in development, and we're on the verge of announcing six more titles to round out the Restaged Festival's rousing tour of the American theater. Yes, the times are dire and the challenges steep, but as our friends at Next to Normal showed us "we go on. We still go on." I'm betting that the next round-up like this there will be just as much outcome to show for our activities, and 33 Variations just might have some other Arena Stage alums to keep it company in the Big Apple...
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