Join filmmaker Tori Paxon for the premiere screening of “Foolproof”, a ten-episode web series created and produced right here in Talbot County.

In the premiere episode, you’ll meet your new best friends—Clark, Reggie, and Tegan—as they navigate relationships, adulthood, and friendship over drinks at their local bar. Starring Marco Garcia, Erik Fair, and Manisha Camper, members of the supporting cast are Bella Hawkins, Erinne Lewis, Jess Newell, Brandon Hynson, and Richard Spearman.

Directed by Jasmynn George, “Foolproof” was created by Tori Paxon, a Black Queer woman writer living in Talbot County. The series’ twofold mission is to bring more awareness to local Black talent while highlighting LGBTQIA storylines. Each character is loosely based on people, situations, and conversations from Tori’s life.

Along with being filmed in the Stoltz Listening Room in partnership with the Avalon Foundation, the production was made in collaboration with local artists and small businesses on the Eastern Shore.

Follow along behind the scenes @foolproof_ws

“Foolproof – A Web Series”
Saturday, September 10, 2022
Doors: 6:30 p.m.; Show: 7 p.m.
Avalon Theatre

Tickets: $20

Zane Carter talks about his sculpture “Post-covid Renaissance” for the Chestertown RiverArts Imagine Street Fair celebrating the 10 year anniversary of RiverArts.  The Street Fair will be held in downtown Chestertown Sunday September 11 from 1 – 6PM.  

For more information visit:  ChestertownRiverArts.org

Connie Schroth, Shelley Minch, and Wendy Cronin get their hands wet creating a sculpture for the Chestertown RiverArts Imagine Street Fair celebrating the 10 year anniversary of RiverArts. The Street Fair will be held in downtown Chestertown Sunday September 11 from 1 – 6PM.  

For more information visit:  ChestertownRiverArts.org

“Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;
Like doth quit like, and MEASURE still for MEASURE.”

– Capitalized emphasis indicated by William Shakespeare

Tragedy and comedy are what the all-volunteer Shore Shakespeare company was about until personal tragedy – and a worldwide pandemic – shut it down for a year in 2020. The pandemic, of course, shut down almost every company staging live performances, from super-selling Broadway shows such as Hamilton to touring troupes like Boston-based Brown Box Theatre that brought Shakespeare in the park to towns all over the Delmarva Peninsula. After 11 years, Brown Box, established in 2010, folded. Shore Shakespeare, established in 2013, overcame both COVID and, more devastating to its survival, the death of its co-founder Christian Rogers.

Last summer, 2021, Shore Shakespeare rose from its twin setbacks to stage as a tribute to Rogers “A Little Touch of Shakespeare: On the Theme of Love,” It featured scenes from tragedies – Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice; as well as comedies – Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Beginning Labor Day weekend, Shore Shakespeare returns after three years with its first full production of a Bard play – Measure for Measure, starting at Adkins Arboretum near Ridgely, then playing the following two weekends at Oxford Community Center, and ending at Chestertown’s Wilmer Park.

Among the leading players is Avra Sullivan, cast in two roles not usually paired in Shakespeare’s so-called “problem play.” Sullivan gives credit to her director, Greg Minahan. (“It’s regarded as a problem play because it’s a problem for the director,” Minahan says, “whether to play it more as comedy or tragedy.”) “It was Greg’s idea,” Sullivan says of Minahan, who also directs himself in the lead as the Duke of Vienna and a disguised friar spying on the deputy standing in for him. Sullivan plays Mariana, betrothed (but for her lack of a dowry) to Angelo, the duke’s pompous deputy played by Will Robinson, as well as Escalus, Angelo’s attaché. “It works,” Sullivan says of her dual roles, adding that “to make them different adds to the challenge.” Playing Lady Macbeth, she says, was her favorite role with Shore Shakespeare. “It was kind of on my bucket list.”

An early Measure for Measure scene set in a brothel depicts the moral morass Vienna has fallen into. Angelo, determined to eradicate this wickedness, intends to make an example of Claudio, who has gotten his fiancée pregnant before their wedding date. The penalty Angelo imposes is beheading. “In his mind, he didn’t do anything wrong,” says Paul Briggs, who plays opposite Avalon Robuck as Juliet, Claudio’s intended. In much of the play, she clutches a baby doll in the “role” of their bastard child. Avalon’s mother, Heather, plays Claudio’s novitiate sister Isabella, who pleads with Angelo to spare her brother. The duke’s appointee offers to let Claudio live only if lovely Isabella surrenders her virginity to him. Angelo is spurned at first, but later a tryst is arranged with Mariana conspiringly disguised as Isabella. (Shakespeare characters, famously, are easily fooled, even by intimate partners.)

 

Meanwhile, the duke, undercover as a friar, sees what overreaching moral authority Angelo is up to. “I see him principally as a hypocrite,” says Robinson of the jerk he plays. “He’s legalistically minded but also power hungry. He thinks the duke has given him free rein.”

Heather Robuck interprets Isabella as a novitiate virgin with a guarded worldview. “She very much wants a strictly structured life so as not to be tempted. She’s smart and virtuous, but there’s a little sass in there when in defense of her brother.”

Minahan sees the play and the evolving judgment of his character as a contest between “mercy and justice. But he finds that there is a third choice – consequence for choices – which does not include beheading for fornication.

Hence, the title Measure for Measure and its explication in the final scene rehearsed on a lawn in Denton and a set that will move from site to site in September on the mid-Shore. By then, the cast will be fully costumed and rehearsed – no more asking for lines and just delivering them.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

Shore Shakespeare presents Measure for Measure
2 p.m. Sept. 3 and 4, Adkins Arboretum, 12610 Eveland Rd., Ridgely (free with $5-$15 arboretum admission)
6 p.m. Sept. 10, 3 p.m. Sept. 11, Oxford Community Center, 200 Oxford Rd. (free)
6 p.m. Sept. 17, 3 p.m. Sept. 18, Wilmer Park, 118 N. Cross St., Chestertown (free)

All performances are outdoors; bring lawn chairs or blankets; shoreshakespeare.org

 

The Avalon Jazz Experience makes its debut Labor Day weekend in Easton’s historic performing arts center. But actually, it’s been going on this time each year since 2009 – by a different name. And his name is Monty Alexander.

If you check out the 78-year-old Jamaican-born jazz pianist’s website, you’ll see a fond-farewell note headlined “All good things . . .” in which he thanks his fans “for a wonderful ten years of my festival’s namesake in Easton.” First launched and produced by Don Buxton and Chesapeake Music with a single concert, the Monty Alexander Festival continued uninterrupted in residency at the Avalon – “we had the 400 seats needed to draw that kind of talent,” Bond says – until the COVID-mandated virtual concert in 2020. Alexander completed his festival run last year.

Al Bond, president and CEO of the Avalon Foundation, says it was a mutually amicable decision. Alexander concurs and wrote as part of his farewell, “I am stepping aside and letting the festival take a new shape and a new name.”

“Monty Alexander was really important in establishing the jazz brand in Easton,” says Bond, adding, “We all decided it was time to move on and have a different featured performer from year to year.” That begins with the Marcus Roberts Modern Jazz Generation anchoring the new festival in a primetime Saturday performance on Sept. 3 at the Avalon Theatre.

In a 2014 “60 Minutes” telecast, famed trumpeter and Jazz at Lincoln Center director Wynton Marsalis asked, “Who’s the greatest American musician most people have never heard of? To me, it’s Marcus Roberts. I’m biased because Marcus worked in my band when he was just starting. But anybody who’s heard him at the piano usually agrees: He’s a fearsome and fearless player and a homegrown example of overcoming adversity with excellence.”

Marsalis may also be biased because his brother Jason is the drummer in Roberts’ trio, which also features bass player Rodney Jordan. The adversity Roberts faced was his blindness since the age of 5. He overcame it as a child, in part, by teaching himself to play the piano his parents bought him. Sightless, he bumped into it when he arrived home from school that day.

Besides his trio partners, Roberts will introduce 11 young musicians he mentors to bring jazz to a new generation. “It’ll be a crowded Avalon stage,” Bond predicts.

Dominick Farinacci, who’s played the Avalon before, returns with his new band Triad along with guest vocalist Shenel Johns on the opening night of the Jazz Experience. Trumpeter Farinacci just completed a residency with Triad at the legendary Manhattan jazz club, Birdland.

Also returning to the Avalon is Jon Thomas, a recent graduate of the Juilliard School and winner of the ASCAP Foundation Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award. Pianist Thomas will lead his band Firm Roots and vocalist Imani Rousselle in the matinee festival finale Sunday, Sept. 4.

“We have vocalists bookending the festival with a mid-career trumpeter and just the kind of up-and-coming musician we’re trying to give exposure to,” Bond says of Farinacci and Thomas. “In between, we have the elder statesman [Roberts] bringing his trio and a lineup of hot-shot young players as his way of introducing the next generation in jazz to this community.”

It figures to be a memorable Experience.

Avalon Jazz Experience concerts, 8 p.m. Sept. 2 and 3, 4 p.m. Sept. 4, Avalon Theatre, 2 E. Dover St., Easton; avalonfoundation.org

***

If you’re out of town over Labor Day weekend – maybe at the beach – you can make up for missing the Avalon Experience at the next major jazz celebration in the area – the Rehoboth Beach Jazz Festival, Oct. 13-16. Among the headliners for the four-day-and-night fest are the John Pizzarelli Trio, Peabo Bryson, and Sheila E. Regarded as the top female drummer on the jazz and pop circuit, Sheila Escovedo was a protege of Prince before his death in 2016.
Festival locations: Cape Henlopen Performing Arts Theatre, Rehoboth Beach Convention Center, Bally’s Dover Casino Resort, Lewes Farmers Market, Epworth United Methodist Church, and the Rusty Rudder; rehobothjazz.com

***

Fifteen months after Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster Founding Fathers musical was to make its Baltimore debut, “Hamilton” opens for a three-week run at the Hippodrome Performing Arts Center downtown. COVID postponed or canceled all shows at the Hippodrome and most Maryland indoor concert and theatrical sites in 2020 and into the summer of 2021. But don’t wait until Columbus Day, or even Labor Day, to get your tickets for this rescheduled tour of Broadway’s hit historical drama set to a hip-hop beat. Although some shows are nearly sold out, as of this writing, you can still find seats for “Hamilton” from Oct. 11 through the night before Halloween. Tickets range from a $75 bargain (don’t count on seeing the whole stage), while premium seats go for up to $1,500. “Hamilton” still sells, even without Miranda impersonating him. So if you want to see it live this side of Broadway, where tickets may cost you many more $$$$, step up sooner than later.

Hippodrome Performing Arts Center, 12 N. Eutaw St., Baltimore; ticketsales.com/hamilton-tickets

***

The Maryland State Fair holds forth the next three extended weekends through Sept. 11 at the Timonium fairgrounds with everything from thoroughbred horse racing to the “Paul Bunyan Lumberjack Show,” from ax-throwing to swine swimming races and, of course, the carnival midway, farm-fresh food pavilions, and assorted live entertainment.

Open this week through Aug. 28, also Sept. 1-5 and Sept. 8-11, 2200 York Rd., Timonium; marylandstatefair.com

***

Meanwhile, the Maryland Renaissance Festival, an end-of-summer/early fall tradition for decades, opens Aug. 27-28 and runs through Labor Day, Columbus Day, and weekends through Oct. 23 between Annapolis and Crownsville. My first acquaintance with the faux 14th-to-17th century arts-and-entertainment “faire” was in Columbia in the 1970s – yes, way back in the last millennium – where I discovered the juggling-and-jokester Flying Karamazov Brothers, who were neither Russian nor siblings. Nor could they fly. But they sure could get a laugh, as they did later on Broadway. Show up, and you may discover the next Renaissance-to-Broadway act.
10 a.m.-7 p.m. on festival dates, 1821 Crownsville Rd., west of Annapolis; rennfest.com

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.