A very short documentary of interviews and rehearsal footage from the SLJ Drama Club production of The Perfect Murder - their adaptation of the Leopold & Loeb story.

SLJ Drama Club - The Making of Perfect Murder from andrew g on Vimeo.

Susan Louise O’Connor (who along with Arthur Aulisi and Drew Cortese was one of the professional actors who performed with the SLJ Students in 2008’s Romeo & Juliet) is making her Broadway debut in Blithe Spirit along side Angela Lansbury, Christine Ebersole, Jayne Atkinson and Rupert Everett. 

Susan Louise OConnor, Susan Louise O'Connor, courtesy of Broadwayworld.com newsdesk. Photo Credit: Walter McBride/Retna Ltd. (www.retna.com)

We’re looking for a few talented and hard working interns. If you’re a college or graduate school student or recent grad, have a love of theater, an interest in making it a career, and a desire to work with an innovative new Off Broadway theater company in a custom made internship, then check out our intern page.

 Some famously successful interns through history:

Tommy Schrider stars in the New York premiere of GREEK HOLIDAY at the Abingdon Theatre Company. He plays a travel writer tormented by memories of a passionate romance with another woman in this fantastical black comedy. Tickets are available through SmartTix.

Barack Obama was Time’s 2008 Person of the Year this past year (which may not have seemed that special, since we all won the honor in their 2006 Issue), but our very own Arthur Aulisi was NYTheatre.com’s man of the year.  Actually, Arthur was noted as one of  NYTheatre.com People of the Year but really, who’s quibbling.  Martin Denton, patron saint of Indie Theater writes:

A stalwart of the indie theatre scene for the past 15 years, Arthur Aulisi delivered first-class performances this year in Inverse Theater’s Me, Rabbit Hole Ensemble’s Big Thick Rod, and AndHow! Theatre’s Linus & Alora.  Read the full article.

Congratulations, Arthur. You’ve come along way since you wore this:

Arthur Aulisi as Sly/Rosalind

Here’s a clip of students in The Robert Louis Stevenson School’s Shakespeare class rehearsing and presenting staged reading of scenes from Macbeth as part of the school’s Arts Week.   The students spent classes reading the play, unlocking the meaning of Shakespeare’s language and focusing on how to share it with an audience.  They cast their production, designed it, rehearsed it and then performed it in front of a school wide audience.

Through a partnership with Roundtable Ensemble, The Essentials had a teaching artist work closely with Stevenson School’s Shakespeare and English teacher over eight sessions to create and teach a curriculum for the Macbeth reading.

Stevenson seeks to prepare bright underachieving adolescents academically and developmentally for college. These are students who have been unable to negotiate the academic, social and emotional pressures of the typical high school environment. Stevenson students may have struggled with adjustment difficulties, problems with peers, mild depression or anxiety.  It’s amazing place, and worth learning more about their mission and successes.

Denver Center is a busy place; neighbors with the Colorado Ballet, Opera Colorado, Colorado Symphony, DTC is filled with Broadway tours,  Denver Center Theatre Academy, National Theatre Conservatory and Denver Center Theatre Company, a Tony Award-winning professional resident theatre, which produces classic and contemporary plays, revivals and world premieres.  Given all that, it’s not unsurprising that an essential artist might be out there, but three?  Nisi Sturgis (who starred as Kerry Taylor and Tobi McClintoch  in Perfect Harmony at Theatre Row last summer) and Drew Cortese (teaching artist for Romeo & Juliet at SLJ), are both in DTC’s production of Richard III, while Jeanine Serralles (co-creator of Perfect Harmony), stars in Dusty and the Big Bad World.

Richard III at Denver Theatre Center ((L-R)Drew Cortese, Philip Pleasants, Melissa Ortiz. Photo by Terry Shapiro. Courtesy of Denver Center Theatre Company))

Theater is truly a “it takes a village” activity. You can’t make theater without at least two people. And every person added to the mix brings something unique - each presence on stage, each staff member contributing off stage, each viewer. Any one audience member’s cough, laugh, gasp (or cellphone) can change the tenor of a moment (just ask Patti LuPone).

At some theaters, the supernumeraries (the spear carriers, messengers, and handmaidens with one or no lines of dialogue) are called the Essentials -because you couldn’t have a scene without them.

And, well, The Essentials just sounds cool. Don’t think a name is important, go ahead and ask the folks in The Elgins if they aren’t glad they decided to rename.

Ask any artist at the highest level how they got started and chances are good that you’ll hear a story about a teacher or mentor who helped them open the door to a world of creation. But teaching the arts isn’t just about creating the next generation of practitioners, it’s about creating citizens.

Take a sample educational theater program: a group of students are thrown together to work on a project with a challenging and unchangeable deadline. Forced to work with and rely on their peers, the students play different roles and perform different functions - all of which are required for their project to succeed. At the conclusion of the project they’ll face -together- a public, critical assessment of how well they’ve mastered and presented the subject matter.

It might sound like a Harvard Business School project, but the purpose isn’t just to create talented, collaborators who can succeed in a task oriented world. Theater also presents a chance to imagine a vision of a world different from the one we live in. For students in high school, this is a critical skill to learn at their stage of development. And doing so can help bridge the achievement gap across socio-economic boundaries

Not enough schools in our community have functional or even partial arts programs. Students have a need and theater artists possess a skill set that can help. We think it’s essential to put those two together

Theater is where society comes together to share imaginations, to share stories, and ultimately - both audience and artists - share ourselves with each other.

We need theater now more than ever because we’re growing apart as a culture. We live in niches, we consume, vote, love, in niches, we’re even marketed to in niches. We live less in the present - in crowds, during parties, even on dates, we stop engaging in the immediate so that we can text or email or answer our cell. And we’re growing desensitized - to violence, to love, to each other.

Theater combats these forces by bringing us together - theater makes us more imaginative, present and more emphatic. When else but theater, funerals and weddings do we turn off our phones and blackberries, sit next to strangers, be fully present, practice listening to other people and imagining with the person next to us?

But we’re losing our theater habit - skyrocketing ticket prices have walled off a generation of theatergoers, theater companies have stumbled in meeting our cultures changing needs, and theater and arts educationare disappearing from our communities and our schools. We’re losing generations of audiences and artists.

We think it’s essential to change that. We’re starting now and we hope you can join us.