Community Theater in Central New Jersey

Princeton may have lots of great venues to see shows, as well as many great programs for its students, but the one thing it lacks is a community theater group, or a place for amateurs to perform. However, only a fifteen-minute ride away is the Kelsey Theater. Located on the Mercer County Community College campus in West Windsor, the 383-seat stadium theater is home to twelve local and community theater groups, as well as MCCC’s own drama group, dance ensemble, and symphonic band. Nearly all the productions hold open auditions, and while many amateur performers receive chances to perform, seasoned professionals often appear in the productions as well. On their website, Kelsey states their “three-part mission” as a community college theater:

• To serve the COMMUNITY by offering a diverse series of arts events, suitable for the whole family, aimed at expanding young people’s awareness of the arts of many cultures, the accessibility of classic literature, and the many different forms of performing arts.
• To educate the COLLEGE students and staff by providing exposure to the many different genres of theatre and affording them the opportunity to produce theatre themselves; in addition to working with more experienced semi-professional and professional performers and directors.
• To support the THEATRE community by providing serious and meaningful performance opportunities necessary to their development as artists.

Kelsey Theater

In other words, Kelsey Theatre is accessible to all, for both performers and artists. Though I was involved with a variety of community theaters growing up, I had never seen anywhere like Kelsey. The numbers of different groups provides a variety of shows both to audition for, and to go see. Though the theater is part of a community college, it has the feel of a professional venue; both in the audience and backstage, all the technology is up-to-date.

I went to the Kelsey Theater on Saturday, March 16 to see the Pierrot Players’ production of Gypsy. Pierrot Productions is a theater group that has been around for the past few years. This year’s season includes Next to Normal, Gypsy, and Lovers and Others Strangers. The cast had a wide variety of experience as performers. There were those who had worked professionally, and those who had never been onstage before. Some actors were veteran performers with Pierrot Players or at Kelsey, and some were making their debut. What is interesting in general about Gypsy is that the characters themselves have a variety of ages and skill levels. There are the child performers, which include Baby June and Baby Louise, and then the young adult June and Louise, which require a different level of skill, particularly in acting. There are also the supporting young adult performers, such as Tulsa, Yonkers, L.A., the Hollywood Blondes, and those working at the burlesque theater. All of them must be strong dancers, and many of them skilled singers/actors as well. Among the adults, there are several smaller roles, but both Rose and Herbie must be very strong performers.

I found the overall production very enjoyable, particularly because there was such a wide variety in the cast. It was great to see seasoned professionals working alongside young kids, college students, and those doing it as a side hobby. It made the show that much more special when it all came together. There was quite a large variety in the audience. There were clearly many relatives/friends of the performers, but also many performers and theater students such as myself. There were also a variety of people who seemed to be just from the community. Kelsey offers many different ticket and season packages, which provide a great advantage to those who want to see theater regularly but at a smaller price than many other local venues, helping to make good theater accessible to all.

Inon Barnatan Recital: Final Event of the Woodrow Wilson Centennial

Igancy Jan Paderewski and Woodrow Wilson

Over the past year, the Princeton area has been celebrating the centennial of Princeton alum and president Woodrow Wilson’s election as President of the United States.  The final public event of this celebration is superb pianist Inon Barnatan’s recreation of a 1925 Princeton recital that Ignacy Paderewski gave in honor of his friend, Woodrow Wilson.

Paderewski was not only a great pianist, but also an important Polish politician.  He was that country’s Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1919, and worked with Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I.  He was one of the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, and became the Polish Ambassador to the League of Nations from December 1919 to October 1921.

The recital will take place tonight (Tuesday, April 9) at 7:30pm in Richardson Auditorium.  On the program are Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C Minor and Waldstein Sonata, Schumann’s Carnaval, and works by Chopin, Schelling and Stojowski.

For more information about the concert and tickets, please visit the Princeton University Concerts website.

More information about the Woodrow Wilson Centennial can be found here.

Mark J. Butler on DJ Practice at Princeton University this Thursday

This Thursday at 4:30pm, Mark J. Butler, Associate Professor and Coordinator of the program in Music Theory and Cognition at Northwestern University, will deliver a lecture entitled “Ringing the Changes: Sounding the Preexistent and the Novel within Improvised DJ Practice” at Princeton University’s Woolworth Center (Music Building), Room 106.  The lecture is open to the public, and admission is free.

For Dr. Butler’s abstract and bio, please click here

Interesting Musicians in Princeton Series #5: Joseph N. Straus, scholar of Music and Disability

I always read the Acknowledgements and Introduction to scholarly books.  In them, you are privy to the authors’ intent and motivation in writing the book.  In Princeton-resident Joseph N. Straus’ Extraordinary Measures, you find not only a scholar and professor, but also a parent. In a few weeks, Professor Straus (Professor of Music and Director of Doctoral Studies in Music at the Graduate Center, CUNY) will convey the keynote address following student presentations at the 6th Annual Celebration of Westminster Student Research.

Here, in an online interview, Prof. Straus answered a few questions as a preview.

The Scholar:

1. When most people think about disability in relation to music, they think either about pedagogy (accommodating students with disabilities in the classroom) or therapy (using music to assist people with disabilities), but your approach seems to be much more theoretical.
In your view, what do disability and music have to do with each other?

My thinking about disability in music is grounded in the new, interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies.  Like what feminist theorists do for gender and queer theorists do for sexuality, disability scholars are trying to do for music.  For musical scholars like me, that means studying the ways that music both reflects and assists in the cultural construction of disability. Disability is understood not as a medical pathology (something that resides inside your body and needs to be cured by a doctor) but as a product of social interaction. Disability, as both a concept and a lived experience, is different in different times and places.  It has a history and a culture, and I’m thinking about how that plays out in relation to the history and culture of music.

2.  In your introduction, you acknowledge the boundaries that you had made in choosing composers (Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartók, Copland, and others).  Can you reveal more about your choices?  Which composers were clear to include, which did not make the cut at this time, and which might have been a surprise to you?

If you start thinking about major classical composers with disabilities, I think anyone would think first of Beethoven.  The one thing that absolutely everyone knows about him, including people who’ve never heard a note of classical music, is that he was deaf, and in fact his deafness does have a major impact on the music he wrote and the way that people have responded to it.  Then you realize that lots of composers had disabilities: Schubert dealt with the disabling effects of syphilis, Copland had dementia in his later years, and so on.  And then, if you take a sufficiently broad view of disability, and start thinking about the sorts of stories music can tell–of impairments heroically overcome, of extreme, seemingly pathological emotional states–you start realizing that disability is absolutely everywhere.

The Professor: 
3. Are there other musical scholars working in the area of music and disability.

Yes! This work has been going on within musicology for about ten years, and during that time we’ve seen an explosion (well, maybe a modest but rapid expansion) of activity.  I’m co-editing a book right now for Oxford University Press called the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies.  My three co-editors are younger scholars in the area and two of them were actually students of mine.  The volume will include 45 essays and an amazing variety of musical topics!

The Parent:
4. Is it true that your interest in this field of study grows out of your own personal experiences.

Yes, like many people in this field (and like many feminist and queer theorists), my interest grew out of my own life experience, in my case the experience of raising and living with my autistic son, now age 21. Initially, I thought of him as having a sort of medical defect, and I hoped for a cure.  Now, partly through my engagement with disability studies and disability political activism, I understand him as having a distinctive way of being in the world–he’s not a medical patient with a disease but a somewhat unusual but thoroughly engaging and loveable young man. So he has helped me to think about music differently, and this new way of thinking about music has changed my relationship to him.  The fact that he and I play piano four-hands together is an added bonus!

6th Annual Celebration of Westminster Student Research

Where: Williamson Hall, Westminster Choir College.
When: Tuesday, April 23 at 6:30pm.

For more information on Music and Disability:

1. The official website for Music and Disability: Society for Music Theory Interest Group & American Musicological Society Study Group.
   http://smt.esm.rochester.edu/dismus/
2. On Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/groups/musicanddisability/
3. The official blog for the Music and Disability Studies at the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory. http://musicdisabilitystudies.wordpress.com/
4. Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus. Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (New York: Routledge, 2006).
   

Also a Princeton-area resident, Jennifer C.H.J. Wilson is a Ph.D. Candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY.